Podcast transcript: EY Change Happens Podcast – John Brogden

Intro: This episode of the Change Happens podcast covers a discussion on the affects of mental illness and suicide. If you or someone you know needs support or help with mental health or suicide please talk to a GP, a health professional or if in Australia contact Lifeline 24 hours a day on 13 11 14. That’s 13 11 14 or at Lifeline www.lifeline.org.au – that is lifeline www.lifeline.org.au

Change happens – how we respond to change can make or break us and our careers. Join us for an intimate insight into how senior business leaders face change – the good, the bad and everything in between because whether we like it or not change happens.

Jenelle McMaster: Hi, my name is Jenelle McMaster and I am the managing partner of Markets at EY Oceania. This podcast series Change Happens is a conversation with senior business leaders on leading through change and the lessons learned along the way. When we set out creating a podcast about how we cope, deal and work through change we didn’t expect it to be amid the biggest world-wide change in modern history COVID-19. During COVID-19, isolation is something that all of us are facing in one form or another as people undergo personal crisis and adjust to the new reality of life in lockdown, including personal and economic implications. There is the grim reality of a likely increase in mental health needs and a very real threat of an increase in the number of suicides. Our guest today is John Brogden, CEO of Landcom, focusing on providing social and economic benefits to the people of New South Wales, and also a chairman of Lifeline Australia, a national charity providing all Australians experiencing a personal crisis with access to 24-hour crisis support. John has walked a very public journey of success, failure and redemption – from being the youngest ever leader of a major political party in Australia at 33 to a very public suicide attempt which marked the end of his political career to a clear recognition of success as a chairman and CEO, John has truly embodied the highs and lows of a very public life. Welcome to Change Happens, how are you going during this time, you know, think about all the things that are happening now, it’s got to be an extraordinary time to be the chair of an organisation like Lifeline.

John Brogden: Well I guess my life divided into three categories at the moment: family would be the first one. My wife Lucy and I have three children 16, 14 and 12 and we are all in the house almost fulltime so that is a change and I know lots of people are wondering when they are going to strangle their children but from our perspective with a bit of tension from time to time it’s actually been a lovely time to spend this close time with our children. Of course, the other role is the Chief Executive Officer of Landcom. We are a land developer in New South Wales. We are a New South Wales government state owned corporation and for us we are 180 staff, thankfully we had tested just the week before the move to working from home. Our emergency system, our crisis team and that worked well so we have been relatively calm and simple in transferring our staff to working from home and we have been surveying our staff regularly and they are very positive about the systems and how they are working and interacting with other staff, so that is a very good start to this what could be a six month period; and then Lifeline is probably the most interesting and intellectually challenging area of work at the moment. Our volunteers, we have two and half thousand volunteers on the phones across the country and paid staff as well. Our model is that they go into the office and do their work so of course most of our staff over 70 and more well particularly volunteers over 70 have just stopped coming in. We have had some pressure on our volunteers as a consequence of that but the flip side of the coin is that we are finding because people are at home, because they have more time, we have actually seen an increase in volunteer hours and we have also put more paid staff on. So, at Lifeline, we are receiving the greatest number of calls in our 57-year history.

Jenelle McMaster: That is a bit of a Segway into next question I was going to ask you around that demand because the background to this podcast and you being a guest on this podcast was - it came about actually after I attended the launch of your Bushfire 1-3 Helpline at Lifeline which was in mid-February and I remember at that event you talked about the devastation on communities with the fires, the demands on mental health workers, the need for establishing that 24 by 7 healthline, and that at time we really saw the country coming together around that; certainly none of us in the room that day would have predicted that a month later much of the world would find itself in lockdown the way it has – so what I was actually wondering about this surge in demand, like it was already high around the bushfires, what are you seeing now with the pandemic and what that has meant for the nature of support that is being called up for Lifeline?

John Brogden: So Lifeline usually receives 2.5 thousand calls a day; now just to reflect on that they are from Australians in crisis and at high risk of suicide – about 30% of those are suicidal calls and 10-15 in numbers not percentage 10-15 of those calls every day our crisis support up makes an assessment that the person on the other end of the line is at such high risk of suicide that we keep them on the line and tag the line to the police and ambulance who send a police car and ambulance to where that person is, so that’s our day to day if you like. What we have seen from December 2019 with the bush fires is an increase of 300-400 a day let’s say 2900 a day and we are now reaching numbers as high as 3200 a day during the coronavirus pandemic. So, we have seen a massive increase year on year an extraordinary increase March to March, April to April if you like. Thankfully we have been able to not only answer those calls but increase our call answer rate because of more paid services and more volunteers but the overwhelmingly majority of people talking to us are talking about corona in one way or another and talking about the stress and pressure that it is putting on them.

Jenelle McMaster: It feels like a bit of a double edge sward as I listen to those staggering numbers. On the one hand, I feel incredibly gratified that people do reach out and lean on the support of an organisation like Lifeline. On the other hand, I feel terribly saddened by this increased need, how do you view that? I mean what is the critical success factors I guess of Lifeline, do you see that as a positive thing that it has gone up or a negative thing?

John Brogden: I like to say I would like to be the chairman of an organisation I can shut down one day because we don’t need it anymore; and wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t need Lifeline but we have needed Lifeline since we started in 1963 and our demand has only grown year on year. Yes, you are right it is a double edged sword – it’s fantastic people are reaching out, people shouldn’t suffer in silence but they shouldn’t feel that their problem is too big or too small to talk to somebody about but at the same time it does demonstrate the levels of stress. What we are finding probably at two themes: the first thing is whilst it is important for us to socially distance at the moment and to self isolate and to lock ourselves down, whilst that is good for our physical health it is not good at all for many people’s mental health. So if you already have a very small social circle maybe not many people in your family, you live alone, and you are already suspectable to loneliness this would exasperate that situation if you can’t leave your home or you can’t leave it very often – you may obviously be worried about your health and other sorts of things so we have seen an increase in loneliness and the second thing we have seen is an increase in anxiety and it’s not just from people who are already anxious, who already have clinical anxiety, it’s also from people who have never had an issue before in their life and what I have noticed with my friends and family in the like is people who usually sail through tough times and you would never think would be affected by a tough situation – many of those people have found this incredibly stressful, they are worried about their health, their families health, they are worried about you know yes there is money to keep people going but it may not be as much as you used to earn, your mortgage is under stress, on and on the list goes, there is only one salary in the house now where it used to be two whatever it might be; so people are becoming quite anxious and we are seeing a lot of that anxiety come through. The other thing is and we are talking in April at the beginning of all of this so we are a month in if this does last six months or longer then we think the longer this lasts the more calls we will get because the worse this will become. I mean the novelty is well and truly over but as we move into winter, and as we move into the days are shorter, I think we will find people finding more stress and pressure come upon them.

Jenelle McMaster: I mean look I think what you have outlined is very real and certainly very disheartening but I think we’ve got to face and so some of those realities that may be upon us and I guess I am interested in that comment that you made around the increase in anxiety and it is brand new for some and they would have never had these feelings before and I know John when you have talked about your own history with mental health and mental illness that you have said one of the saving graces that you have had is your heightened sense of self awareness, that strong sense of self awareness and I am wondering particularly for those who this is a new space for them, what you learnt in developing self-awareness that others might be able to be hyper attuned to?

John Brogden: Well, if you had asked me John are you self-aware about 20 years ago before I had a suicidal attempt I would have said to you what is all that Buddhist bullshit you are talking about; for me I would have thought what do you mean self-awareness, I don’t understand what that is and of course I am in control of myself and of course I am under control would probably have been mine interpretation of what she was saying but for me it took a suicide attempt and it took many years of understanding my mental health to come to terms with my self-awareness and for me it means any number of things. In particular, with dealing with my depression, I have depression and I have suicidal ideation that means I have clinical depression, probably a mild to medium form of it and I have suicidal ideation which means if things go badly for me I run a high risk of catastrophising those things and then thinking very quickly about suicide as a way of dealing with the situation I am in – so that is what I live with every day. So, I have learnt to do a number of things. I have learnt not to go into situations that I find too stressful that includes family situations, personal situations, not to talk to people I know who will make me distressed or upset and that was hard because we are taught from a young age to be nice to people, to socialise, most of us are taught you have got to do that, you have to go to this person’s party, you got to go to this event, you got to go to this person’s home and it becomes very much engrained with us; and of course we have also got to be nice to people so I find that the best way for me to deal with stressful situations is to not engage with them – literally not to do them anymore. And we are very used to doing things because we think we have to, that is the culture and the familial arrangements I grew up in and I have had to learn not to do those things. I also manage my stress better with more sleep, with exercise and they are very important to me. I happen to also be on medication. I am on a mood stabiliser and an antidepressant. I take medication every day of my life and I have done for the last 14 years or so and lastly, I see a psychiatrist on a regular basis. So, there are a number of things that make me self-aware – I am self-aware enough to know that if I go to a certain environment it will make me too stressed and too distressed. That took a long time and I had a relapse of my mental health, mental illness should I say just a couple of years ago when I had to effectively go back into hospital for a week or two so I know the other thing I have to do is not get too busy; not say yes to too many things, so learning to say no was very important for me.

Jenelle McMaster: I think what I am hearing in that John is what you have done is given yourself a lot of permission, permission to say no to things, permission to not engage in those things that you have identified maybe triggers for you and the other part of what I am hearing in there as well is that I know that you are being quite a public advocate for not allowing shame to creep in, so I guess de-shaming isn’t a word but I am going to use it right now – de-shaming and giving yourself permission in order to help yourself survive and thrive it seems to be paramount in the

John Brogden: I’m very very much of the view that you don’t ask for mental illness, you don’t go looking for it, it usually visits upon you and in most cases it will visit upon you through circumstances over which you had no control, particularly in areas like childhood. And you should not be ashamed to have a mental illness. There is no shame in having mental illness and I talk about it openly and I must say I find it interestingly not mentally draining but quite physically draining to tell my story in great detail but I think it’s important because we hear a lot about people with bipolar syndrome, we hear a lot of people on high profile sporting figures and the like who have depression but we don’t hear from a lot of people who talk about the journey I have walked which is right down into suicide and coming out the other end. So, I thank God every day that I did not complete my suicide. The things we hear we mostly hear that somebody has taken their own life and that is the end of the story and we mourn that but what people need to understand is that there is light, you can come through this, and there are people who love you and there are systems that will help you to get you through this very difficult time; so we need to hear more talk about people who get to that darkest point of their life which is suicide and how they are able to bring themselves back out the other end. And that was a hard journey for me, I’m not trying to make it sound easy, but it is important that people hear that journey. It’s also very important and this is particularly in a business setting, I think the last stand for bad attitudes towards mental illness are in the workplace and you think of it you think of your own workplace where people have a physical illness well you know we let them take a month’s off, we support them through their cancer, we bring them back to work, we know what to do without blinking; sure we have a HR manual that tells us what to do but we don’t even have to open that up because we want to help that person get through their cancer whatever their physical illness may be. Mental illness - it takes we still have a negative view, we still have a ignorant view to be honest and we still worry a lot about whether that person could ever come back to the workplace and do the job they used to do. So, I think one of the best things along with all of the wellbeing programs that many people are adopting is for somebody senior in a workplace to talk about their mental health, to talk about how they may have had mental illness and how they have come through the other side because that affectively says to people in that organisation if he or she, a senior partner, a manager, or general manger in this organisation or the CEO can have a mental illness and live with it and work here that means I can work here and that means I have nothing to embarrassed or ashamed about. 

Jenelle McMaster: That’s great and that is small thanks to people like yourselves who have been so publicly a strong advocate for raising awareness and telling difficult, sharing personal experiences like yours. Are there also other things that employers and leaders can do particularly now which is a really new environment we find ourselves in where people might not even be identifying that they have an issue; employers might not be aware of it because it’s never been one before, so I guess what I am trying to understand is as well is what leaders can do now in a changed environment where some of the cases might not be the ones that were apparent to them and there are some hypervigilant that is going to required in this environment, what is your advice to leaders now with these new conditions we are facing?

John Brogden: Indeed, many people are no longer able to just wonder down the hallway and see how someone is going because everybody is working from home. It really is a case of staying in touch with your people and training your managers to understand what some of the triggers are – so for instance, if you look at something like depression – depression is something of a sustained change in behaviour over a full week or longer period so if somebody goes from – we all have bad days – so sometimes you get in late, you have a bad day, your boss gives you a grilling and you know you sort of fall back into your usual pattern but as a manager if you are noticing a significant shift in somebodies behaviour that is a real sign that something is changing – you need to be more vigilant now than before because you don’t have that many people aren’t having that physical interaction; and obviously people will be under different sorts of pressure. I mean four people around a kitchen table, two working and two doing schoolwork you know there is only so long that is fun and that becomes very stressful

Jenelle McMaster: That’s right, the novelty wears off pretty quickly!

John Brogden: Very quickly. So, I think it is hypervigilance. I think it is looking for changes in behaviour, and frankly I think it’s asking this is a time where every manager should be asking their reports “how are you going?”, and the next step “is everything ok?”, “how are you finding the workload?”, “is everything alright at home?”. Now some people will find those hard questions to ask, the personal questions because it is just not in their nature to ask them but it is about as you said hypervigilance and it’s about going the extra mile to ask people how they are going and drill down and ask those questions. Many will obviously feel uncomfortable and won’t see the truth, it could be some cultural barriers to that as well, but others will let you know and then you are in a position where you can help.

Jenelle McMaster: So, John this podcast you might have noticed is called Change Happens so it is a podcast around change rather than crisis, you know we have talked a lot about mental health crisis, bush fire crisis, pandemic crisis, they are obviously related crisis and change but the latter well crisis certainly has a more negative and detrimental overtone to it – maybe if I bring us back up to a change topic, what is your attitude and approach to change and maybe if you could share some of the lessons that you have learnt in dealing with and leading through change that you have picked up over the course of your work and life situations?

John Brogden: Well its bloody hard, trust me. To be honest I have had more bad experiences trying to make change that good experiences. The older I get the wiser I get, the more mistakes I make I think I get better at it but and having you know been a politician you would think I get this but we used to have an old rule in politics “ the minute you are sick of saying it, is the minute the public are hearing it for the first time”. So you cannot communicate enough, you cannot communicate enough, it’s not possible to communicate enough and you have to resist – what often happens is people come to you and say “look we have already said that three times, why are you saying that again?”, and the answer is because about a third of that group weren’t listening. So, we need you know they have something happening at home or they have a deadline they need to meet or they have got to pick up their kids from school – they are not listening, you have to keep on banging away at those messages; And you also have got to create the reason you need something, and hopefully therefore the change makes sense and I think you have to be honest and the hardest part about honesty is if particularly if you are doing a restructure that may involve people losing their jobs or having significant changes to their roles which can be very distressing for people particularly if they are very set in their ways, and they are at a point in their lives where they want to be left alone to do their job and they don’t live to work, they work to live – you know it’s a very different arrangement. So, I think you really have to be able to tie it all together – they are my lessons with change and I guess the other great lesson is some people move on very quickly so a week after you have made the change some people have just literally changed gears and they are fine but a lot of people find it quite traumatic and you have to be very empathetic and sympathetic to that. Now it can’t last forever, you can’t have somebody a year later still moping around that they are not happy, but you do have to keep working through the change. Change can be unifying times.

Jenelle McMaster: And that is the reason why people will say the phrase “don’t waste a crisis” because if there is something that I have seen, that is happening right now, as unfortunate as the situation is there is massive amounts of change in areas that we did not think that it was possible – If you think about consultants who rely on travel as a key part of the way that we work, you think about the boundaries that have evaporated between unions and governments and employees, you think about all sorts of things that people would never able to drive before but because of the crisis they are all being changed. I think this is an opportunity for us to reflect on what is happening now in this crisis, how we are responding to change and what does that mean about the way we change moving forward so our approach to change moving forward that we can capture

John Brogden: We had a very informal flexible working policy in my organisation. We formalised it last year, people thought isn’t flexibility all about flexibility wise, is there a policy about flexibility, so it was interesting! We did have to put it

Jenelle McMaster: That’s very ironic

John Brogden: Yes, it’s very ironic but we had a lot of and they were older people who just didn’t like the fact that people weren’t at their desk every day. Now those people have no choice and I am teleconferences and video conferences several times a day and they have switched seamlessly.

Jenelle McMaster: Amazing

John Brogden: The one thing as good as video and all the ad conference is the one thing, I think we have to work out how we replace in this world is the chat you have bumping into someone in the hallway

Jenelle McMaster: The incidentals

John Brogden: It’s gone

Jenelle McMaster: that’s right

John Brogden: One of the real rules of leadership that I believe in is being present – is being seen. Being there. And that may only be 10 minutes out of an eight or nine hours you are in the office but it’s a 10 very valuable minutes. How do you that?

Jenelle McMaster: That visibly accessibility, isn’t it?

John Brogden: Correct. How do I do that in this environment? You know do I just ring staff out of the blue and say, “how is it all going?” – you know maybe I do but we need to work out how to do that. I think the real thing we need in change and I think this is part of leadership as well is its good to have a bit of humour along the way.

Jenelle McMaster: Well I do think there is no shortage of means that are going around and have been for the last couple of months that people – I do think it brings levity to a situation that it can be incredibly tough and I think there is something about laughing about shared experiences, shared adversity does make a situation infinitely better. So John, in you role as CEO of Landcom since you mentioned it, obviously affordable housing and urban planning is very much at the core of why Landcome exists and if you think about the loss of housing through fires, the displacement that has been caused and now we have got the financial pressures in housing, in home loans, in renting, tell me how that is affecting Landcom, your role as CEO and the kinds of conversations that you’re having around how Landcom can support in this environment?

John Brogden: Well I am 51 and I have lived in Sydney all my life and the thing I am least proud about Sydney is we are the second most expensive place in the world to buy a home behind Hong Kong or I think its Vancouver depending on which time and which poll you are looking at. So, that is extraordinary, that means we are an inextensible city to so many people as a consequence. So we need more affordable housing in Sydney. So, there is and in Australia, there are two things you can have proper designated affordable housing or housing can be more affordable through any number of things. During that same period, I mentioned over the last 40-50 years we have also changed radically in the way we live. I mean the people I am thinking of I always like to try and provide people with a picture in their mind of who we need to look after – we need to look after people who work in retail, who don’t earn high incomes. We need to look after people who work in restaurants, who often don’t get high incomes particularly if they are casual workers and part time. We need to look after the people who push trollies in hospitals and push mops in hospitals. They need places to live and what’s happening now by in large is one of three things: they are living an hour and half or two hours from where they work, that is one way, so three and four hours that they travelling; they are paying an enormous amount of their income on private rent much more than they should; or lastly they are renting over crowded houses. And this is not well known I think in our major cities. You can rent half a room in major cities in Australia in a three-bedroom apartment for an enormous amount of money; I mean there is no quality of life in any of that. So, one of the many areas we see a growing disparity in wealth in Australia is in people’s housing situation and we are very passionate about looking at the capacity to do more affordable housing. It is extraordinary isn’t it when you think that a city like Sydney is more expensive to live in than places like New York which had billionaires to boot

Jenelle McMaster: Absolutely

John Brogden: And London and other places

Jenelle McMaster: it sounds unfathomable to me

John Brogden: it is and its not too late to try and turn it but I tell you what it is a major issue and how does it manifest itself? Well, how are you going to employ people to pore coffees in the middle of the CBD if they’ve got to travel 3 hours every day to do that job. So, there is an enormous amount of work going on in planning. Other countries get it right – a lot of it is mandated to be honest – if you got to a city like London there is a lot of mandated affordable housing in big developments, so they do mandate it. Maybe that is part of the challenge we have to embrace here to make sure people have somewhere decent to live. But at the moment we have too many people who are just never going to get off the treadmill of high rent, or crowded living, or massive commutes every day and that is not good for people’s longer-term mental health.

Jenelle McMaster: Do you think again sort of this whole not wanting to waste a crisis, I guess do you think that there maybe changes that might impact urban planning and housing in the longer term that will come about as a result of what we find ourselves in now?

John Brogden: Possibly possibly. I think

Jenelle McMaster: Maybe that is me projecting some wishful thinking

John Brogden: No, its interesting – we develop property and mostly we develop land and sell that to people as a generalisation of what we do. So we are obviously working out what our future looks like during and post this pandemic but the one thing we are coming to realise through all of the international economic organisations that are making commentary right at the moment is we are heavily likely to head into a recession and come out the other of this – that will rebalance the country enormously and put more housing stress yet again on people. When this all ends, there won’t be a switch that flicks, everybody won’t go the next day back to the job they had six months ago it just won’t happen in a way. So, people will lose their houses during a recession, people will lose their jobs, they will lose their houses so the pressure to do affordability will increase not just because the pandemic but of the recession that will follow.

Jenelle McMaster: John, so none of us know what is going to happen in the future. I think none of us really know what is going to happen tomorrow, so the stage is a game. With your experience as a leader in many platforms dealing with the unexpected, what sort of predictions do you have for society and business for the next five years?

John Brogden: Well, the first thing I confidently predict there will be a number of people confidently predicting the future over the next six months.

Jenelle McMaster: Fair enough

John Brogden: I think there will be an industry in people saying, “things will never be the same”, “things will never be the same”. So, look I think you are right I mean you would be a brave person to guess what it is going to look like. I just think things are going to be tougher where we are going to have a reality check. They make movies about what we are living about at the moment

Jenelle McMaster: Correct

John Brogden: I mean the extraordinary runs have zombies and the like but put that aside, they make horror movies about pandemics – wiping out cities, wiping out populations and all that sort of stuff. Australia is probably one of the world leaders right now in how we are dealing with the finances and the health issues related to this pandemic. I think future proofing and flexibility will be really important so will this see people change their spending habits, you know we have a whole economy that needs people to spend to grow, will people say no “I’m saving more money now”. If this happens again, I need to have tens of thousands of dollars in the bank to get through it because the government won’t be able to pay my wage next time. So, I think people will be more cautious and people will save more money and the economy will not grow in the way it has grown in the past. I think the other thing is there will be a massive debate about more manufacturing gin Australia, and I think we will see different forms of economic growth and a greater level of caution particularly individual caution – businesses may not be as cautious but people will be very cautious into their future.

Jenelle McMaster: Thank you John. I absolutely agree.

Jenelle McMaster: The last three – three fast questions on change to finish the podcast 

Jenelle McMaster: So last three for you – what is a misconception that most people have about you?

John Brogden: Wow. That I am a liberal as opposed to a progressive liberal.

Jenelle McMaster: OK

John Brogden: People will just put me in a box as a liberal rather than a progressive liberal

Jenelle McMaster: OK, there you go. People are going to hear it here first, maybe. One guilty pleasure, do you like to keep it PG please?

John Brogden: Chocolate

Jenelle McMaster: And what is one thing that you’re absolutely hopeless at?

John Brogden: Wow, cricket.

Jenelle McMaster: Cricket, ok well I can share that with you.

John Brogden: Shocking

Jenelle McMaster: I don’t have an interest in it, so it doesn’t bother me too much but I’m sorry that you do

John Brogden: Maybe that’s why I was never successful in politics. That I wasn’t able to be a cricket person.

Jenelle McMaster: Well, look thanks for your time John. I really appreciate how candid you are. I think anyone listening to this podcast would agree that you have been incredibly candid, incredibly passionate, that you have talked about massive changes to the way we live, to the way work and a few take away for me is there is a difference between mental health and physical health but we should be treating them with as much if not more awareness and importance particularly in the times that we find ourselves in now. I have taken away the criticality of self awareness in this and the role that we as individuals have in being aware of our own triggers and circumstances that may not be good for us as individuals. And then thirdly the role of leaders here to stay hyper vigilant and to stay engaged with people particularly when we move into remote working situations where ease of walking down the corridor as you say might not be as available to us as it might have been in the past, so look for changes in behaviour, ask the questions and go the extra mile. So, they have been some of my key takeaways John and I really want to thank you for your time and your openness with me today.

John Brogden: That’s so nice and thank you for the opportunity

The Change Happens podcast from EY – a conversation on leading through Change. Discover more where you get your podcasts.

This episode of the Change Happens podcast covered a discussion on the effects of mental illness and suicide. If you or someone you know needs support or help with mental health or suicide, please talk to a GP, a health professional or if in Australia contact Lifeline 24 hours a day, on 13 11 14. That’s 13 11 14. Or at www.lifeline.org.au that’s www.lifeline.org.au

END OF TAPE RECORDING