 My name is Sam and I am from Sydney, Australia, and I work for Commonwealth Bank. This is my third trip to India and I love coming to India. I love the food, I love the energy that you guys have when you're, especially when you're in teams and at work and learning through play, you guys are awesome. So thank you for having me. I was here last year presenting on a different topic, so it's fabulous that you've invited me back. So my day job is Agile Practice Lead for Commonwealth Bank. So that means I've got a bunch of Agile Coaches, about 25 Agile Coaches who work for me, and they are out doing amazing things across Commonwealth Bank. But also we have about 10 Agile Coaches in India. So I'm having an extended visit to do some work with the guys in India, both in Bangalore and Chennai. Enough about me. Let's talk about you. Who has left their job in the last month? You left your job. Hands up. Anyone left their job in the last month? Beautiful. What's your name? Mateo. Mateo, hello. How are you? So you left your job. When you left, did they do a little card for you and they wrote nice things about you? Yeah. Yeah, what did they say? Nothing spectacular. That was what you were hoping for. So what we're going to do now is I'm going to get you, on your seat you will find a farewell card. So I believe in India you did this as well when somebody leaves. All the team write nice things about you. And what I want you to think about, imagine you are leaving, yeah? So the bad news is for all of you, this is your last day. You're leaving your job. On the left-hand side, if you need a pen, the guys will give you a pen if you haven't got a pen. So raise your hand if you need a pen because you can't write without one. On the left-hand side, you are a leader. If you're not a leader, that's fine. Think about your colleagues. What do you want them to say about you? So imagine you're leaving. What do you want them to say about you in the leaving card? Everyone clear on the instructions. I'm going to give you 60 seconds. Find a pen and write it on the left-hand side of the card. And I'll figure out what's happened to my beautiful present. What do you want people to say about you? Do you want another pen, guys? If you need a pen, raise your hand. Okay. So my talk today is about leadership. This is a talk about leadership. If you're a leader, this is useful for you. If you are not a leader, I'm hoping that the leaders that you have will do some of the things that you hear about in this talk. And it's specifically about how the leaders create an inclusive culture. And I will explain later what I mean by inclusive. I have a slightly different definition to the standard one. So I have to find inclusive leadership and I will tell you what that means. But why is it important to be an inclusive leader? Why is this topic important? I have a view that every leader has their own thing that they over-index on. There are some leaders they over-index on outcomes and some leaders really want to focus on process. And I have always focused on people. Because I'm a strong believer that if you can create a culture where everyone in the team wants to come into work and you give them a space where they can be their best and do their best, our teams can hit really good high performance, true high performance if you can have that motivation that they all want to come in and do their best every day. How the talk will work, I'm going to cover three things. So I will talk about the evolution of my leadership. I didn't start as an inclusive leader. So I'll talk about my leadership journey. I've been a leader for 25 years and I will talk about the evolution of my leadership to become an inclusive leader. I'm then going to talk about what is this inclusive leadership. And I'm going to use the actual entries from my leaving card. So I left an agile project two years ago. It was my last one, I hope, because I've done 10 years of big projects. I hope I've done enough. So this leaving card, I had a look at all the things people said. I did some analysis. And I looked at the themes and the words that people used. And that is the basis of this talk and the basis of my inclusive leadership. The last thing we will do, you guys are going to do some reflection. So I'm going to get you to think about your leadership and about this concept of inclusive leadership and get you to self-reflect and see what are the things you might need to work on. So by the end of the talk, my hope is that you've enjoyed some good stories but also got some practical tips as to how to be an inclusive leader and maybe taken one or two actions that you want to take to improve your leadership. Sound good? Let's get on with the show. So the first thing, let's talk about my leadership journey. When I first got into leadership, I was what I would call an ambitious leader. And if you look at this, this is about everyone used to say to me, what are you going to do to get to the next level? The whole concept of leadership was about if you do a good job, you will get promoted. It's development planning time. We have an annual development planning cycle. And my boss says to me, what are you going to do this year to get to the next level? And we make a plan and we get to the end of the year and I'm still at the same level. So we do it again. What are you going to do this year, Sam? To get to the next level. This is becoming like Groundhog Day. Why are we having this conversation? So I decided to change. You can see I have climbed a few steps of the ladder. But I have then changed my focus to say, how can I become a learning leader? And by learning leader, instead of focused on how do I go up and up and up in the organization, how do I learn and get new experiences? So I changed my focus to going for new challenges and new experiences instead of chasing the hierarchy, instead of chasing the title. It took me a little while actually mentally to adjust because you're so ingrained that you have to be promoted to be good. So when I went and did these different roles, these represent like a learning cycle. So in a role, I would stay in the role while I was learning and then when I'm not learning anymore, I will change. And probably every two years, I would say those hops are kind of like every two years. Then one year in my development planning, so it's annual development planning time again. And this time, I'm thinking, where can I go next? I've worked in different parts of the bank and I decided to go on a tour of the organization. I decided to meet as many leaders as I could and get them to tell me what they do. Tell me about your business unit. Tell me what you do. So I went around meeting leaders and asking them what they did. And one of the leaders was Nicole. She looked something like that. And Nicole I can remember having coffee with Nicole in Sydney in Darling Harbor. And I'm sat opposite Nicole. And she says to me, Sam, you know, what's your thing? What's your value as a leader? What is the thing that we get when we get Sam? And I thought about it. And I said, Nicole, I just come to work to help others. That's what I do. And she said, she goes, you can't get the next leadership job if you just say that. She goes, you're supposed to be transforming. Maybe not if Alex has anything to do with it. You're supposed to be transforming. You're supposed to create outcomes. You need to tell us how great you are at delivery and this and that. And I stepped back. And I thought, is she right? Or maybe she's not. And I actually reflected, this is a light bulb moment for me in my career. And I actually decided that work and coming to work is no longer about me. I come to work for others and for my team. And it's a genuine kind of, I can remember that moment. And now I'm able, and whether Nicole liked it or whether the rest of the org likes it, I don't care. This is my thing. I come to work to help others. But even when you're a learning leader, so I'm a learning leader, I'm still ambitious. I still want to do good things at work. But still when you're a learning leader, still you are going to make mistakes and you need to keep learning. I'm running a large program. The team are going well. We are delivering lots of good things. I'm feeling great about this program. One of the team gave me some feedback. They said, Sam, you are at the front. You are leading, you are passionate. You have energy. But they said, look behind you. And if you look over your shoulder, the team are not there. The team are a few steps behind. They are not following you. And there was something I was doing and not connecting. I really just wasn't connecting enough with those people. So even though you know the right thing to do, it takes a lot of practice. It takes years of practice as a leader to learn these little things you can do to be more connected with your team. And I'm going to share some of the things that are in my inclusive leader kit bag now. So inclusive leadership, what's different about this picture to the previous two when I was an ambitious leader and a learning leader? What's different? Ah, very good. So the first ones I was in it, yeah? So where am I? Now I am in the picture. Which one am I? Yeah, so I'm the one holding the umbrella. But there's more of them than me. The previous pictures, it was just me. Let me tell you more about this inclusive leadership. Here is Sam's definition of inclusive leadership. The key part here is that I want to include every one of you. Let's imagine you guys are my team, yeah? And we are the team delivering something. Whatever we do. Every single one of you will get from me genuinely caring about your well-being. Just how are you in yourself? About your engagement. How engaged are you? And about your growth. What do you want to do in the future? Not just what do you want to do here and now when you're in this team. And it's regardless of who you work for. I don't care if you're a contractor. I don't care whether you come from this consultancy. Whether you work for a vendor or an outsourced partner. I don't care. You're in the team. And you should all feel the inclusion. You're going to get a handout in a set, guys. So you will get the key messages in a handout. So let's go back to this leaving card. So that's the end of my kind of first bit, which was Sam's leadership evolution. So from ambitious to learning and now inclusive and the light bulb moment, it's no longer about me, it's about them. So this is the leaving card and these are the beautiful people in my team. Now what's different about this org chart to many that you see? There's no hierarchy. What else? It has people. It has photos. When you lead a team as many of the people in this room, how do you know who they all are? How do you connect with them as humans if you don't know their name? So actually this is Sam's cheat sheet. So he knows the name of the 80 people who work for him. Because I can't remember. Because there's so many people and every month people come and go. So this is the team. This team were delivering a project that was going to create some amazing new technology for our bank that predicts using decisioning technology what to say to our customers across all channels. So we were working on a very cool agile project with eight scrum teams. We were looking at how do we predict what to say to our clients. I won't go into the detail of that technology, but it's called Next Best Conversation Decisioning. Decisioning Technology. So when I read the leaving card, and this is the card, right? And the words you can see in here, scribble, this is the actual card that it comes from. So when I looked at all the words, these three things came out. So what is it that within inclusive leadership, what do people see? They see energy. They see caring and they see fun. And I'm going to talk about those three things and tell you some stories from the people who left notes in my leaving card. So let's start with energy. So energy is the first one. This is the definition of energy. What I want you to do with energy, it's about a few lenses. One is your mind. I'm going to talk a little bit about what do I do to get an energised mind? And your body. How do you have the energy to be physically feeling energised and able to do great things at work? So mind and body. And then I'm going to talk a little bit about action and how you can have action. People want the energy and see a leader who's actually acting and not just waiting. So to talk through these, I'm going to give you a quick concept on body, mind, language and action. And I will tell you how I do these things. How does Sam get his energy? Let's start with body. So I exercise regularly. This is me, Kaya King on Sydney Harbour. In the winter with my beanie on. So all year round I go once a week on a Friday and that's me running. I go running a couple of times a week. Whatever your thing is, guys, whether it's walking or whatever your sport is, you need something to get your body energised. Whether you do it at lunchtime, morning, evening, doesn't matter. The other thing that's important is to create a routine. As humans, we need a routine for exercise and whatever we want to do and also to reflect. So build it in to your calendar and put it at a time where no one can block it out. You can also see I'm blocking out time for my mind. So this is a meditation hour. Blocking an hour during the day to go and meditate and to just switch off. Because I exercise in the morning or you can exercise at lunchtime, but get out of the office, get yourself re-energised. Let's talk about the mind. So this is where I meditate on the bottom left. That is the Chinese gardens in Darling Harbour in Sydney. So I sit in there, shut my eyes, and people must walk around going, what's that bloke sitting there again for another day? But the staff know who I am and they're awesome. On the bottom right is diaries. I've written a diary since 1989. So I've got those little black books going back to 1989. And I reflect. I do it once a week. It's not like a daily thing today. I went to a jail in India and I spoke in front of these people. I don't write like that. I just reflect once a week. I will fill those pages with some reflections. Now, I'm not suggesting that you should all start writing a diary. But what I will suggest from a work perspective, we all talk about the importance of learning and if we mess up, we should learn. I now have a daily thing in my calendar called a Daily Self Reflection Workout. It's a survey monkey survey and it just goes to myself. And I keep adding to the same survey. And the question said, what did you do yesterday? Think about yesterday. What might you do differently if you could have the day again? The second thing says, what did you learn? I now have a survey monkey thing with about 80 from the last six months, about 80 entries. And every few months I step back and go, have I learned from that thing I said I wanted to learn from? Because we all say we want to learn from the things we want to do better. How do you know how to? The top right, top left is, sorry, top right is learning beyond what you love. I love football. I love Chelsea. If I just listen to stuff about Chelsea or if you love cricket and all you do is learn about cricket, you're not really exercising your mind. So down the top of the things I kind of love and I learn about because they're my passions. But down the bottom are three podcasts that have completely different topics. The things that those three give are completely random, whoever they're interviewing, most of them are interviews. That's the stuff where you're just going to get things that you would never think about. This morning I was running in the gym and I was listening to Conversations, which is an ABC podcast, and I was talking about a guy, a doctor in Iraq and his story about how he saves amputees. And just how would you ever read about that? Because you're not looking, yeah? So that is the mind. Let's talk about action. Let's start with the language. So Ant, how are you? You're good. How are you, Mia? Bit tired, yeah? Most people, what do they say when you say how are you? What do you say? Fine. Or what else? What's the worst one? Begins with B. Busy. I'm busy. Ants are busy, yeah? Please. So as a leader, when your team asks you how you are, how do you think they feel or react when you say busy? It's like, so please, be something else. If you're feeling awesome, say that. I'm feeling great. Or if you're not having a great time, okay, but there's a few things going on, but I'll be all right. So just be a bit more authentic. Now, don't spend five minutes giving them the whole sob story, yeah? So if you're not in a good place, you don't need to share all of that. But please just give something more and try and make it positive, because positivity is infectious. If you're always positive, it's going to have a real impact on your team. And for the guys who work with me regularly, you guys know, yeah, you're positive. Yeah, why not? Why shouldn't you be positive? If not, go and get another job. If you don't love what you do. And be curious. So have conversations with your teams beyond the outcomes, beyond the work, work, work. Ask, do you know the names of the kids of the people you work with? Do you know where they live? Stuff like that. I'm not talking about real, deeper meaning for us, but at least know something about them as human beings. This concept is about, as the leader, creating a vision for your team to do great things, but then to step back. So concept called opening space. As a leader, if you're the one with the pen on the whiteboard, so are you having a session with your team? If you have the pen, you've got the pen. So give up the pen and open this space. You need to tell them why and motivate them with something cool to do. An example for my team. I said, why don't we have an internal agile conference at CBA? And then I stepped back and they organized it and the conference was awesome. I didn't have to do anything other than open up this space. And then the last one here is on action. I want you as a leader to do stuff. Inspire people by the things you do. And then open spaces for other people to do stuff as well. So you have to role model this doing stuff. Very important. And just get on with it and do stuff. Don't wait too long. Take a few risks and just get out there and do stuff. My weakness is doing too much. And I've just had some recent reflections that say saying you do too much and your team can actually suffer if as a leader you do too much. So reflect on your energy. Some of you with energy will need to amplify. You will need to figure out how to get a bit more energy as a leader. And some of you if you're high energy like me I sometimes have to tone it down. I can be too much. A leader who's got too much energy can be a bit wool. So think about the impact. So that was energy. We're now going to go on to caring. So the definition here is similar to what I gave you in the bigger definition about inclusive leadership. So this is the genuinely caring and the well-being engagement and growth. And I'm going to cover this through these three. It's about being in relationship. Being present and available and being grateful. So I'll go through these three with some stories from the leaving card. So this is Eldo. Eldo says thank you for your great support care energy guidance. We will miss you badly. Best wishes Eldo. For Eldo's job we were running as an agile project so we were in production and we were having incidents and Eldo was the one who fixed all of them because we were only small then our footprint was small and his job was to fix incidents. When Eldo started and I do this with every single member of the team I go for a walk with them. So I go for a new start at walk and I go for a walk for about half an hour we have a walk around and we chat. And I learn a few things about Eldo where is he living what is he like doing so every person who started on this project I go for a walk. Now when you're running a team of 80 if all I did was go for walks with the 80 people would that be good leadership? Probably not. So I do a new start at walk but I don't regularly I don't go for a walk every week with every one of them that would be 40 hours yeah. Hey Sam what did you do last week? Well I went for a walk with every one of my stuff. Well done. So what we did is create opportunities to build a relationship because half an hour walk isn't a relationship yeah. So what we did was to create fun activities where we can build relationships. So the one that Eldo remembers is the cricket we set up a weekly cricket game on the field just by the office. What happens on the way to cricket? We chat. What happens during cricket? We chat. What happens on the way back from cricket? We chat. So we build the relationship through having some of these fun things. That's how it works with because you can't be in relationship with everyone and you can't build 80 relationships at once. The third thing with Eldo was we talk about this caring and about growth. We had a self-organizing teams day and the team had three avatars each and they could kind of look at we had visually all the different teams and they could take that avatar and say so it wasn't one of those self-organizing teams where we then moved to the team but a future kind of looking where would you want to go? And Eldo wanted to be a developer. So he was the guy who did the incidents and he said I want to be a developer and now Eldo is a developer. So he achieved his dream which is awesome. This one is about being present and available. This is Samia. So Samia's message is similar. He actually, he says I enjoyed the energy and care that you brought to the project. Samia led a team of data scientists. Does anyone know a data scientist? These guys are Brainiacs and often introverts and his team were not located near ours. They were on the same floor but they were in a different area. I made an effort every morning and night to walk past that area and say hi to those guys. So as a leader you have a choice when you come into the office. You can walk the kind of straightest line to your desk, say hello to nobody, sit down and get on with your work. Or you can take the longest walk possible and you can walk past everybody and as you walk to your desk you can say hello and you can just make some eye contact and connect with your people. Rather than walking straight to your desk. The other thing I did with Samia and his team of data scientists was to a few daily stand-ups they'd show me their sprint planning and I got to learn more about them as humans and just being that kind of present oh yeah Sam's interested, Sam cares. He's a project director, he's running this gig but he cares. The third one on caring so with Samia he was a scrum master and he wanted to be an architect so I spent a lot of time helping him mentoring him and just spending time even though I knew that he would leave my team I wanted him to grow. I knew he would be happy right now if he gets the opportunity to grow. The last one is being grateful. This is Mike. So Mike was a young scrum master and every time we did the sprint review we had a monthly sprint review every two sprints we did a sprint review and showed the work we had done to our stakeholders and I wanted the team to be the ones standing up doing the presentations but Mike was pretty nervous about presenting. It wasn't his thing, he didn't want to do it. So what we did we ran some training for the team on how do you become a great presenter so I ran some sessions on how do you present how do you stand up here and not make a fool of yourself so I ran some training and then Mike presented and when he presented I gave him feedback and I just really thanked him to present. So being grateful for things that the team do for you is hugely important but it's not just about those kind of specific times to be grateful you can be grateful in say your sprint comms you send your sprint comms out every single part of your sprint comms you can thank people as an opportunity every time you communicate the outcomes of the sprint to say thank you in writing if you send the stuff out so any scrum event is an opportunity to be grateful you can start every scrum event with hey thanks for that thing you did or encourage the team to say thank you so be grateful for the work people do so that's caring so we've done energy we've done caring this is my favourite one and interestingly when I was thinking about this talk the first thing that came to mind was this one but interestingly when I stepped back and thought through the actual things I do whilst this is the one everyone remembers it probably is not the most important thing so what does fun mean here's my definition connect beyond the office release the pressure through humour I'm going to talk about three things humour, off-sites and some of you might be some of you that are doctors but guess what most of us in the work we do with our teams we are not doctors no one is going to die again apart from the agile coach in Alex's story this morning so let's start with humour this is IMA IMA is Irish and of course Irish people love to have fun we had a we were part of a bigger program and they wanted to have like an all hands where everybody came in and shared what they were doing so most of the teams did powerpoint presentations and boring stuff like that we did first design we did a cricket skit so we remember this technology I said it connects customers digitally so we did a cricket skit showing that when the customer comes into the cricket what happened on their phone and how they interacted with the bank as they went through a night at the cricket and we had a fun role play this is Amy Amy is a tester and Amy is an introvert now introverts traditionally hate you want me to do what you want me to go and talk to people and they're not comfortable with it they like it once they're in but traditionally they tend to be a little bit hesitant and that all Amy had to say to me I was working with Amy for two years is this all she had to say thank you for doing so much fun activities to the project that was it awesome why not and here is Amy at one of our off-sites and she is the lady at the top does she look like she's struggling with this off-site this was a a selfie challenge around Sydney you have eight people one selfie stick and you have to go to them clues and they go around Sydney taking pictures of themselves and of course the last destination is a pub in fact a few of them were a pub there was a couple of pubs on the way but we don't just do that this was the first ever cricket game this cricket game was India against the rest of the world guess who won of course of course and that's Eldo Bowling and we had all the little chairs out and that's my son on the left so he came into work that day and was enjoying the cricket but we also did things like community work so you can have fun in the community we went out to a farm where the farm employees were looking to get back into the workplace so people with disabilities, long-term unemployed and we went into the farm we were helping them with stuff and we were hand in hand with the guys who were looking to get back into the workplace and a really deep experience for the team this one is Oz Harvest which was the topic of my talk last year we took 65 people we cooked food for a couple of hours and all this food went to the homeless so the things you can do to connect and have fun with your teams with off-sites are huge and sometimes we have to do some fun for us so this is a kayaking trip where we went off on Sydney Harbour kayaking and I've repeated this since with another group where I had a lot more Indians what do you think went wrong we can't swim so I said guys who can swim five of you can't swim so we got some big boats the guys who couldn't swim big boats can't fall in then we got there and there was two of them who just couldn't make their kayaks I said what's wrong with you we can't swim I said there's only five no there's two more anyway we won't go any deeper into what happened next but one of them one of the guys who couldn't swim he actually made it and dug deep and actually went the whole way and I'm like fair play mate fair play we also had picnics in the park so I think some of the most memorable ones were the cheapest we took 60 people to a park for the day some people said where's the agenda there isn't one the agenda is you talk to everybody else and have fun but what are we going to do whatever you want some people brought board games some people brought cricket some people just sat there and drank alcohol Australians some people cooked so there's Mike and me cooking on the BBQ so we are chefs but we are not doctors with all of these things that you see and in yourself chill out as a leader stop being busy relax we're not saving lives don't take yourself so seriously so I've covered my leadership evolution and I've covered a bit about energy caring and fun and now it's time for you guys to reflect we're just going to do a quick this is individual activity so the introverts don't need to run this is individual activity you need a pen can you guys hand out grab the handouts please they're at the back so grab a hand out and we are going to reflect on energy caring and fun so come and grab a who needs a pen well actually I'm really good at not taking myself too seriously so I'll also like to share you're telling us you could do all of them body yeah okay anyone else feel safe to share you don't have to yeah what have you got so good at relationship and mind and what are you going to work on humor awesome alright thanks for sharing so what we're going to do next is I'm going to get you to do a little self-reflection so turn it over think about the one or two things you've done in your practice improved the thing you wanted to improve on the right hand side of the farewell card can you write a new message this is a message from your team or your colleagues to you on the right hand side of the grid because some of you might be thinking Sam this is just all soft stuff yeah all this nice stuff we're going to be lovely to our humans we care about them but what about the outcomes yeah so let me tell you about the outcomes from this project we have connected the whole of the Commonwealth Bank digitally all of our channels in real time are talking to each other through this one when we first put this stuff and people say this is the brain this is the engine or the brain of the company that connects everything together and one example of how it does that if you are online applying for a home loan you can do that online and some of you know you might drop out or you might struggle if you drop out of that process our technology this brain will link up we get an alert that says yep you've tried to do this you've dropped out that then will get filtered through to our call centre team within 5 minutes they can call you hey I believe you've had some trouble with the internet or you seem to have dropped out do you need any help I actually had I went on my mobile phone yesterday to kind of check my bank balance because I was getting money that's exactly it so these are alerts across all of our channel so that's what the technology is doing we are generating with this technology 21 million suggestions of how to help customers per day 21 million suggestions per day we have about 8 million active customers so that's about 3 suggestions of what what customers can do per day some of those go digitally and some of them go to our staff and our staff feel smart now so our staff feel smarter because rather than saying well I wonder what you want next they will get a prompt that says well maybe talk about this or talk about that and some of these prompts are at service and loyalty obviously there are some about sales that's a mixture so guys it's not just the soft stuff this stuff works thank you namaste we've got time for a couple of quick questions challenges well I guess I talked about 25 years of challenges with leadership there I think with any leadership role I think probably being present and available so if I look at all of these things I've talked about being available and present for your team is probably of all these for me if I'm saying what's the one that I always have to remind myself my calendar is full I fill it up because I've got energy and action for calendar and that's probably the one I want to be more available rather than just being oh yes see me in three weeks but I tell them if you need me I will make the time but I'd like it to be less formal than that thank you for questioning we're always working on something yeah it has a massive impact if you can lead like this the team just there's obviously challenges I'm not saying it solves all of the challenges of working in teams but if they see their leader working in these ways it makes a massive difference if you work for someone you know what it's like when did you have a leader who cared you think about the leader you work for who genuinely cared how was that absolutely absolutely but especially caring if you know that your leader really cares about you as a human not just cares about your outcomes but care about you as a human being that's a huge difference to coming into work and how you feel every day alright one more last one person with bad attitude saw that I'm going to put that back for you how would you guys deal with it I'm going to ask you guys how do you do it someone with a bad attitude talk to them I actually coach them often I do a lot of coaching and I've spent more time as a leadership coach but I actually coach them often it's that they don't get on with each other and often I'm coaching this person and this person they don't know I'm coaching both of them as to how to change their mindset so I think coaching is probably the main thing making them aware of their behaviour what's the impact and then coaching them guys we need to wrap thank you very much