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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’.

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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