In honour of International Women’s Day (IWD) this week, Excelsia will be championing and celebrating our female leaders across the month of March; we will be interviewing hardworking, resilient women who have kicked in the glass ceiling and continue to inspire us to do the same.
Our first interview is with three exceptional women currently on the Board of Directors at Excelsia: Amanda Rose, Sophie York, and Rosemary Johnston. These three creative, clever, and inspiring women have risen through the ranks and changed people’s lives through their work. In these interviews, each woman speaks to Excelsia about the women that inspired them, how they break down barriers and why women need to continue to push forward.
Amanda Rose – Corporate Advisor and Founding Director of Western Sydney Women
What woman inspires you and why?
My mum. A strong, dedicated, loyal, loving and encouraging Christian woman. I wouldn’t be who I am or where I am without my mum.
As a female leader, what are your core values, and how have those values come through in your professional career?
Treating everyone with respect whilst also being a voice for the voiceless. This allows me to climb the ladder whilst also advocating for those who don’t have the same opportunities as I do.
Over the month of March, Excelsia will be celebrating all things innovation. What are your top cutting-edge ideas about leadership and how do you approach the need to be innovative in an era of disruption?
Focus on empathy and ideas. Having an environment of understanding, whilst also encouraging people to speak up without fear of embarrassment or judgement, is a powerful cultural environment to have. Also, educating people on not fearing the word ‘no’, and to not take rejecting or constructive criticism personally.
How have you managed to break down barriers of unconscious bias to achieve greater business success?
By ignoring the bias altogether. By pushing forward and asking for what I want. It’s amazing how people will treat you based on how you see yourself and how you position yourself in a meeting or a room opportunity.
If you don’t ask, you don’t get. Women need to step up and ask and keep asking until they get what they want.
www.amandarose.com.au
Emeritus Professor Rosemary Johnston AM – formerly Professor of Education and Culture at UTS
What woman inspires you and why?
I have been inspired by many wonderful women during my life. As a young person I was drawn to the poet Dame Mary Gilmore and her succinct expression of complex philosophical nuance (as in the poem ‘Nationality’), and a little later to Judith Wright and her aching love, which I share, for Australian landscape (‘bony slopes wincing under the winter’). Both women were generous in encouraging other women; indeed, Mary Gilmore wrote to an eleven-year-old me saying nice things about one of my poems she had seen.
Many women have found, in words, the power to create change; think of anti-slavery writer Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And recently we have seen a woman who spoke the simplest of words to heal a country – to express compassion and love and most of all a sense of ‘one-ness’ to a shattered community in danger of being seen as ‘other’. With these words, New Zealand leader Jacinda Ardern not only spoke, but reached out and embraced, profoundly: ‘They are us.’
As a female leader, what are your core values, and how have those values come through in your professional career?
My Christian faith is at my core and informs my values and I hope everything I do. I think we have to work within ourselves to construct and refine and grow that ethical core, and an ethical mind, and an ethical heart. How we are in our inner world, in our thinking, shows. In my new book, Growing Young Minds: Shifting Horizons of Thinking, Possibility and Aspiration, I outline new interdisciplinary research, such as that of neuroscientist Eric Kandel, which shows how thoughts and imaginings can actually change the structure and function of the brain. Reading all this I am reminded of ‘…whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy – meditate on these things.’
Over the month of March, Excelsia will be celebrating all things innovation. What are your top cutting-edge ideas about leadership and how do you approach the need to be innovative in an era of disruption?
I believe in the mission of Excelsia to grow leaders – but maybe we need to rethink our concepts of leadership. What do we define as a leader? Popularly, it tends to mean people who are successful in a worldly sense, who are at the top of their game. Over recent years it has become common to speak of ‘thought leaders’ – people who can guide and inspire, through their thinking, new ways of thinking in others. Jesus was surely a thought leader. I think perhaps Excelsia could expand and develop and hone this idea, particularly in the light of recent research. How can and does true leadership go beyond ‘being in charge’, to charging and inspiring the beingness of others?
Let us teach and model subjunctive thinking about the rights and truths of others, which in turn breeds and informs a sense of human equity, rightness, and civility. As President Obama said in his Power Africa speech, ‘I am because you are’ (that is, my beingness is intricately linked to yours). This Ubuntu idea is another expression of the Christian concept which should be a fundamental premise of leadership: ‘We are many parts of one body, and we all belong to each other.’
How have you managed to break down barriers of unconscious bias to achieve greater business success
When I committed to postgraduate study, I knew I wanted to meld my career somehow to my Christian faith. My masters thesis was called ‘Reaching Beyond the Word: Religious Values in the Anne Books of LM Montgomery’. I wanted to honour these stories that had had such a strong influence on me (and millions of others) in our growing-up years. Then, as I was fortunate enough to achieve considerable public and private funding for research, I gathered a team and we set about working in places where young people were struggling against circumstances beyond their control – Muslim and Islander communities in south-western Sydney, Indigenous communities in the remote Pilbara, in the Yorke Peninsula, in Galiwin’ku (Elcho Island), in the Territory and in Far North Queensland (Lockhart River). The university at first was perhaps dubious about our hands-on approach, taking out the kids from the Sydney schools and exposing them to those ‘shifting horizons’ of possibility, but they became incredibly supportive, not so much because we saw amazing results – we both did and didn’t – but because of the deep commitment of our team, and because of the lived-out passion of our own beliefs. I have learned that success cannot always be measured by visible results, especially when we are dealing with that most private and personal – and precious – part of young people (and of ourselves): minds, and indeed souls.
Sophie York – Barrister and Legal Philosopher
What woman inspires you and why?
There are so many women who inspire me! How to choose, when there are women in our Australian heritage like Mary McKillop – who started more than a hundred schools and educated poor Australians – and internationally brave women like Ayaan Hirsi Ali who spoke up, at great personal risk, against the horrors of dangerous Islamist fanaticism?
One heroine from fairly modern history whom I find inspiring and enduringly relevant is Sophie Scholl. She was a young German university student who founded a secret society called The White Rose, which resisted the activities of the German Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party (known as the Nazi Party). She, her brother Hans and a handful of other students mailed galvanising leaflets to key people in society. They created graffiti alerting people to the problem of Hitler, and they dropped leaflets at the University of Munich. She and her society sought to warn people of the loss of freedoms of the citizenry, the atrocities being committed by the Nazis, and the unjust war being waged. Sophie was arrested, convicted of high treason (after an unfair trial) and barbarically guillotined, at age 22, in 1943.
As a female leader, what are your core values, and how have those values come through in your professional career?
I am most grateful to have had the benefit of wise and loving parents who instilled in me that courage and integrity matter – and so does hard work! Going the extra mile for others – or for the cause – is simply what you do. A number of leadership influences along my way in life have taught me that being authentic is simply the best way to be. Being true to yourself is maintainable, less exhausting and more satisfying. So even if people don’t agree with me on everything, at least they can be confident that they are dealing with a person who is genuine – her own person – and who believes in what she says. I have also had the good fortune of wise mentors (some of whom found me, others I sought out). I try to pass this benefit forward to younger people going along their paths.
Over the month of March, Excelsia will be celebrating all things innovation. What are your top cutting-edge ideas about leadership and how do you approach the need to be innovative in an era of disruption?
In my respectful view, leadership is about character, influence and service. Integrity is a must. Gaining the confidence and respect of others relies on this.
In trying times, being flexible, kind and patient seems to be the best approach. Offering ideas, and being open to ideas from others, is hopefully a way to ameliorate tensions that can be created when routine is disrupted. Brainstorming the positives, but also frankly discussing and bravely dealing with the downsides. Some people crave novelty, whereas others find abrupt change stressful. The goal is to not discard the underlying strengths in a system, when merely finding a new way of doing things.
How have you managed to break down barriers of unconscious bias to achieve greater business success?
I must confess, I do not subscribe to the notion of ‘unconscious bias’. This notion was propounded in its essence by the American Realists and later, the Critical Legal Scholars. In particular, the American Judge Jerome Frank thought that there was not such a thing as impartial justice and that judges brought all manner of prejudices to the bench. The argument of unconscious bias is essentially that people, individually and collectively, automatically commit thought-crime. This is an incorrect assumption to make about people. It presumes a lack of professionalism, and it also puts interpersonal relationships at a disadvantage from the outset.
People are not categories, and they do not gain their identities from being in a group. Each person is an individual, who has a separate mind and has individual accountability. That is the basis of our justice system. It is also implied in our electoral system – one person, one vote.
The Christian faith holds that each person has a separate soul, too.
Each person has a unique outlook and life experience, too. People sometimes change the groups they join and may change religion, too. Categorising people by sex or gender, by race or colour, by religion or creed, by able-bodied or disabled, by age, by habit, or through identity politics, may be helpful for political planning and funding purposes, but it is not appropriate for other settings. People are not simply units in a collective. That is quite dehumanising, in fact.
www.sophieyork.com.au/
