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I thought I was really good at personal
communication and understanding and
dealing with people. But when I got into
that environment, the way the Indigenous
leaders deal with people and the
relationships they build—that’s next-level
stuff. I learnt an awful lot from them.
RICHIE HADFIELD,
COMMONWEALTH BANK AUSTRALIA,
CENTRAL COAST 2013
Empathy
and
emotional sensitivity
were
highlighted as strong areas of development for
secondees. Maria Niedzwiecka was working for
KPMG when she was seconded to Djarragun
College in Cape York. She said the experience
developed her ‘ability to connect to others and
truly listen to them and understand their point
of view.’ Jaimes Adlington said his secondment
similarly taught him ‘to think more about, “Where
does that person come from? Why are they acting
that way? Why are they making those decisions
and communicating that way?”’
Chadi Khalifeh was working for KPMG when he was
seconded to Bungree Aboriginal Association on the
Central Coast. He reflected that his secondment:
‘allowed me to genuinely put my empathy to the
test. No matter how much you put yourself in
someone else’s shoes, it’s a different experience to
step out of a corporate environment and consider
the history of Indigenous Australians.’
Phillip Chan said his ability to empathise was
similarly tested on secondment. ‘You learn to
understand where a person in community, like an
Elder, has come from and why they might be saying
certain things—because, for example, in 1954 the
Queen came down and these hessian sheets were
pulled across certain areas where the Queen was
touring to hide Aboriginal people.’ Melanie Evans
saw the value of increased empathy in the
work environment:
One of the benefits of these community
secondments is about needing to share your
vulnerability—a soft side, an emotional side—
to be successful. Caring about people is a
fundamentally human thing. I don’t think we
encourage people enough to bring that care and
the softer, more vulnerable side to the workplace.
‘Resilience’
has been defined as ‘the ability to
recover from setbacks, adapt well to change, and
keep going in the face of adversity’.
13
A study of
business leaders in the United Kingdom found
that resilience matters because ‘resilient people
and companies face reality with staunchness,
make meaning of hardship instead of crying out
in despair, and improvise solutions from thin air.
Others do not.’
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Secondees commonly used the
word ‘resilience’ to describe how they had to
draw on their internal resources to work through
challenges and setbacks on secondment.
As Rachel Yang explained:
You tackle so many challenges while working
in Indigenous communities: community issues,
complexities with different clans and relationships
between people. Any one day you might be
trying to deliver a project and something totally
unrelated—something community-based or
another issue—could arise and you need to adapt.
The takeaway for me was the need to build
resilience and flexibility to adapt to anything
that comes your way.
Sara McDonald from Westpac also found her
secondment enhanced her resilience: ‘On your
secondment you can sometimes feel like you’re
not making headway, but you’ve got to have the
resilience to say, “Well, I’m not going to sit here
and do nothing, I’ll find something else to do to
be of value in the meantime.” It definitely taught
me that resilience.’
Learnings are applied in the workplace
Secondees who reflected on their personal and
professional development goals during their
secondment experience were able to clearly
articulate their growth and how they later applied
their learnings back in the workplace.
Interviews for this report showed that the
immersive nature of the program stretched
secondees in ways that led them to perform more
effectively afterwards, and to progress in ways they
had not necessarily considered pre-secondment.
The unique learning ground of a Jawun secondment
is key to this development. Experiential learning
immerses participants in an active and shared
learning environment, ‘integrating shared
contextual exploration with reflective thought
processes—a dynamic combination that amplifies
individual and group comprehension. The learning
experience challenges people to move beyond
established work routines into a learning zone.’
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CREATING VALUE FOR CORPORATE AND GOVERNMENT PARTNERS 19