CASE STUDY
Meeting leadership needs in a fast moving and highly contemporary context
Background
When the work you do changes even faster than cutting edge computing, your organisation needs a leadership team that is highly adaptive. If you combine this speed with a social purpose that sees you spanning disciplines as diverse as biology, pharmaceuticals, genomics, AI and data security, you need a whole organisation designed to thrive amidst complexity.
Such is the case of our client, the Centre for Population Genomics (CPG), a not-for-profit research organisation that is a joint initiative of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and the Murdoch Children’s Research Centre. The Centre is a remote-first, geographically distributed hub for innovation in genomics, data science, and clinical translation, with over 40 team members located across Australia and New Zealand. The talented and high-achieving team is working on developing a set of resources that will improve the prediction, diagnosis and treatment of genomic diseases. Their CEO, Daniel MacArthur, was head-hunted as a global leader in the field and his move to Australia is an exciting development for genomic medicine in this country.
Our journey together
Our work with CPG has been a fantastic example of what a deep partnership in a fast-moving context can deliver. Whilst at Leadership Space we pride ourselves on being able to walk alongside leaders, guiding and supporting them to navigate whatever comes their way, some organisations require a particularly nimble and responsive blend of creativity, contemporary insight and practicality.
The complexity of CPG is multi-faceted. Whilst being a remote-first team has allowed the Centre to hire talent it would otherwise not be able to access, not having everyone co-located and working across different time zones has made communication more challenging, especially when the organisation is growing rapidly, onboarding the equivalent of whole teams of people at a time.
Another complexity of the operating environment comes from the Centre being a collaboration of two leading research bodies. While that is a huge advantage in terms of research, administratively it is complex, with people employed by both institutions and therefore managers needing to work across two HR systems, two finance systems, two legal systems etc.
The Centre launched in mid-2020 - amidst COVID - working fully remotely, with only occasional in-person chats. As most of us will recall, it was a challenging time in every workplace and many people were feeling significant pressures, from many directions. For the CPG team, it was a time of high-stress, with some close to burnout. It was against this backdrop that Daniel engaged Leadership Space in 2021, first to undertake a diagnostic and to then to begin to facilitate a series of workshops with the leadership team.
Daniel describes one of these early sessions that Leadership Space facilitated as truly transformative. “While we’d planned to work on a different topic, Elise sensed there was something else that needed to be discussed. She seamlessly transitioned the session into a structured, compassionate and thoughtful conversation about where the team was, as a whole and individually. It was cathartic. After that, we made a number of changes to our strategy and redistributed the workload, which over the coming months led to a healthier, better-functioning organisation,” Daniel explained.
Alongside that, relationships within the team strengthened and it’s now normal for people to raise situations where they’re under stress or struggling.
“It was a period of substantial change and growth but there were also strategic changes, with the Centre refining its areas of focus and slimming down the portfolio. The early discussions were a chance to re-form, stabilise and sharpen the leadership team’s vision for the Centre.”
Leadership Space’s Elise Sernik and Sarit Vandegraaff have continued to work with CPG in several ways and at multiple levels in the organisation. One of the early components was the leadership profiling tool, Lumina Spark.
“While I’d tried to select for cognitive diversity, there were a few areas where we were concentrated, so it definitely helped me as a leader to know where people sat and deliberately bring in diverse people to round us out,” explains Daniel.
“We have team leader workshops two or three times a year and Leadership Space is involved in most of them. They have been part of many key decisions, helping to guide the conversations, challenging us along the way,” Daniel said.
Daniel and his leadership team also have individual coaching. “We meet once or twice a month, either in one to one coaching or with my Associate Director. Our coaching conversations are free ranging from strategy, structure and culture, through to engagement with external stakeholders.
There is a blurry boundary between strategy conversations and executive coaching, as so often they bleed into each other. It’s hard to provide effective coaching, especially to the organisation’s leaders, without having an understanding of strategic goals. Behaviour and strategy are intrinsically linked and one of the reasons Elise is so effective, is that she gets both.”
Visible, sustainable impact
For Daniel, being able to talk about complex challenges with someone not in the team but who knows all the players and the issues is helpful.
“Elise and Sarit have facilitated conversations between us, and worked intensively at various levels of the organisation, so when they are one to one, they have the context of multiple years of conversations. They know who we each are, understand the stresses in the various teams, and the different ways that we think. The more ways they are involved, the more effective that relationship becomes.”
Daniel’s advice for anyone thinking about engaging Leadership Space is that openness is key.
“It’s scary to open up and show the inner workings of your organisation. But the fact is that every organisation is broken in some way or has different levels of dysfunction. Elise and her team are deft at understanding those inner workings, but they need to be given the information to make an informed assessment. So I’d say the single most important thing, from leadership down, is to really emphasise the importance of openness and transparency. It’s easy to trust Elise and Sarit, they are so confident and competent at what they do.”
“As a result of my interaction with Elise, I am a more confident and competent leader by a significant margin. More than anything, the dynamic of the Leadership Team and the organisations has meaningfully transformed and has been maintained. It has been extremely helpful. I can’t emphasise enough how important it is to have this external support, so we can focus on the things we are experts in but not drift out of strategic or cultural alignment. It has really transformed our organisation.”
Leadership Space will soon be working alongside CPG to develop their next strategy.
