Podcast transcript: EY Change Happens Podcast – Josephine Sukkar

Intro: Change happens. How we respond to change can make or break us and our careers. Join us for an intimate insight into how influential and authentic people lead through change. The good, the bad and everything in between because whether we like it or not, change happens.

Jenelle: Hi, my name is Jenelle McMaster and you’re listening to Season 2 of the Change Happens podcast. Conversations with influential leaders on leading through change and the lessons learnt along the way. Today I’m joined by Josephine Sukkar, a member of the Order of Australia who recently became the first female Chairperson of the Australian Sports Commission. She’s also the co-founder and principal of construction company, Buildcorp, which she established with her husband, Tony, three decades ago. In 2019, Josephine was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s 50 most influential women in Australian sport for her leadership positions at the Australian Women’s Rugby and Australian Rugby Foundation. Josephine serves on several private/public/government and not-for-profit boards including Growth Point Properties Australia, Opera Australia, Centenary Institute of Medical Research and Melbourne University Infrastructure Advisory Board. She’s also an active member of Chief Executive Women. Now with so many areas to cover, let’s just jump into it. Hi Josephine and thanks for coming onto the podcast.

Josephine: It’s a real pleasure Jenelle.

Jenelle: At the risk of asking a magician to reveal their secrets, Josephine, how does someone start out pursuing a career in medical research and then end up co-founding one of Australia’s most successful construction companies and also becoming Chairperson of the Australian Sports Commission.

Josephine: Look I think I might be one of those products of what we now know is a stem education. I feel like I probably have some transferable skills that I didn’t recognise then that I’ve brought into different parts of my life. It has help structure the way I think. I am quite analytical in the way I approach issues and a bit technical but for me, I think I’m a product of a stem education.

Jenelle: If I think about the timeframes, that’s over 30 years ago, that was carving out a space that most weren’t in, most women weren’t in at that stage, even more so than today which is still a struggle.

Josephine: Yeah and I do serve on the board of Medical Research Institute at the moment, Turner Institute and we do struggle to keep women researchers but more broadly, that talent pool within Australia, it’s not something we’ve quite got our head around yet in this country.

Jenelle: So if I think about the major chunks or aspects in your working life, whether it’s been an exec in the building game or a serious philanthropist or the area of sports, is there a common purpose that you have, Josephine, that sits above all of that and that you’ve applied to all those worlds.

Josephine: Yes. I am the product of a very good public school education. My father was a public servant and Mum was a stay at home mum. I saw them work really hard with, not an awful lot of money but we never wanted for anything but I was extremely grateful for the opportunities that came my way when I entered construction and, you know, found myself or even today, in a home that I would have never been inside of when I was growing up and opportunities that I never saw. We sent our children to private schools. We remain very grateful. My husband and I have been married for 35 years and I am just perpetually grateful and cannot believe our good fortune that we have ended up in this country with amazing opportunities for your family if you work hard and that drives a genuine desire to kind of share that opportunity and understand what we can do to help release and open that for other people and even though we might be born in Australia, not everybody has had the same opportunities, the same upbringing. If you’ve never seen parents get up and go to work every day, if you, you know, if you’re … the cycle that you happen to be in and we see cycles of sort of intergenerational disadvantage, if you’ve been fortunate enough to skip that, what can you do to make a bit of a difference there and once you’ve been exposed to opportunities and ways you can help or you’ve heard or seen things that you can unhear or unsee, it’s a bit difficult to step back when we have to do something and that’s driven what my husband and I have both tried to do.

Jenelle: Well let’s talk about what your husband and you have both tried to do. Let’s talk about Buildcorp. As you say, you’ve been together 35 years, the company has been founded well over 30 years. What led you both to start your own company together.

Josephine: When I met Tony, he was a couple of years out of a, they called it a Bachelor of Building degree in those days, I think it’s the construction management degree today and he had … he was the first builder employed by Civil and Civic. I understand up until Tony they were all civil engineers and he was at Civil and Civic [00.04.57] and I was at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research completing an honours degree there and we met and I finished my degree and I was on three months holiday and they needed somebody onsite to help with accounts and I took a job there onsite for three months and that, you know, have remained in construction from, gosh that was 1985, how many years ago, I’m scared to do the numbers [laugh].

Jenelle: It’s a lot.

Josephine: A lot, yeah. So look I found an industry that I really enjoyed. I studied while I was there actually, I did a post graduate diploma in education because I enjoyed studying and I thought that might be a handy thing to do if you’ve got children but it was while we were there that we said, we understood the industry, it was fast moving, we’re quite fast moving, Tony and I. The energy of the industry was fun, the people were great. It was very highly unionised at the time. The Builders Labourers Federation were still active and running around. I was there when they locked up Norm Gallagher and they deregistered the BLF and then the BWI. It was exciting and energy and like Wow and we did decide, a young couple, that one day we would really love to have our own construction company and I said to Tony “you could build the thing, I could, you know, help in the back office” and I just liked the energy of construction. I didn’t think I would. I’d never been exposed to it. I didn’t … and I ended up finding myself on sites, I think I was on about three or four sites in my time, I really enjoyed it.

Jenelle: What were some of the memorable first lessons that you learnt in those early days of Buildcorp.

Josephine: Well Tony came home [laugh] without a job one day. He had moved from Civil and Civic to go to Van Corporation and was project managing a very large commercial development in [00.06.50] and … the Verband Corporation and [00.6.53] were placed into receivership and the job was half finished. We had one day set up a construction company but not in the middle of a downturn, it was 1990, and I was seven months pregnant with our first child. So the timing just wasn’t what we planned but interestingly, in our heads, we had sort of taken ourselves there that one day we would and we had a conversation and Tony said “look I reckon I could probably take this over and run this” because he was half way through the job, there were typical floor cycles. I knew I was in no position to help him with anything there but there were a couple of really good men who were on the project with him, three or two. It ended up becoming two and we brought them into a partnership with us and they had a small shareholding, which over the years we eventually bought out and that was the beginning of Buildcorp. So that was Tony having to run with that because of just the nature of the stage of life we were at and more, we weren’t prepared, its that whole thing about luck – right. When preparation meets opportunity, we were probably mentally prepared. Tony was technically prepared. The opportunity was there but there was, you know, kind of lots of other things that weren’t ideal. Interest rate saving and half a percent and economic downturn, partner not with you through that but so … but a little bit of courage that comes, more often with youth and inexperience, would we do the same thing again today, we would probably think a bit harder cos we know [overtalking] …

Jenelle: The naivety, there’s something about that, isn’t there [laugh] at the time.

Josephine: Yeah, we were really prepared, had a focus on excellence. Tony and that particular project had been awarded an Australian Quality Award. Tony was a student of Total Quality Management and [00.08.35] and we both sort of bought into this whole principle of quality and he ended up becoming a judge for the Australian Quality Awards so quality was in his hardwiring in delivering quality projects in an industry when you have non-replicable projects. So you’re not in a production line where we need to make sure we get the tolerances of this, I don’t know, this ball bearing right for this industry and yet they write … every single construction project is totally different and how do you apply principles to a very different, you know, job every single time you do it. So there was a, you know, a hardwiring for excellence. We were really young and aspirational and very hard working. I worked three jobs. Tony worked two right up until we had, you know, had … about to have a family. So by the time we’d landed there, we had our little bubba, a house which we paid off, we’d, you know, set ourselves up financially, we were just hard working and its, you know, hard to go wrong when you’re that hard working in a country like Australia and we tried to work smart at the same time.

Jenelle: I’ve always had a bit of funny reaction or an unclear reaction to the word “luck” but I really love your definition of “its when preparation meets opportunity”. I think you summed that up beautifully. I have to say …

Josephine: I don’t think that’s mine. I think its something I’ve heard [overtalking] …

Jenelle: Take all the credit. Now I have to say, regardless of how loving our relationships are and I love my husband dearly but the idea of living and working with them might not be something that all of us jump at the thought of [laugh]. Did that initially cause you some hesitation. How was the dynamic of the working relationship between you and Tony changed and progressed over multiple decades.

Josephine: I think its that old, and we talk about it [00.10.14] sport, you know, if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together and when you start there and we both had common goals, because we set them together – right and we set goals as a couple and as a family. Not here are my goals, here are his goals and let’s move along and when you start there, as a family we one day wanted to have a family, we wanted to live in a house like this, we would love to one day be able to afford to educate our kids this way, to have an overseas trip every now and then. So we sat down and set goals together and when you do that together and you’re on the same page, you don’t get in the way of those goals by, you know, your behaviours. You make sure that whatever you do, you moderate to ensure that it doesn’t interfere with being what ultimately, you know, bring satisfaction at the end of the working life and we worked pretty hard to set those goals and I remember we used to listen to a speaker by the name Brian Tracey and he was a Canadian thought leader, I suppose, and back in the days of, you know, audio cassettes – tapes [overtalking] …

Jenelle: I like to say I don’t know what you’re talking about but I still have a stack!

Josephine: Yeah Tony has a car, his car at the moment still has a cassette deck in it …

Jenelle: Oh wow [laugh].

Josephine: … what if we get rid of that car, how are we going to play our cassettes. We used to listen to this fellow every time we were in the car together and he spoke about goal setting and leadership and because we were very young, trying to learn how to lead a business and … but one of the really great things. Sit down and write a business plan and sit down and write a life plan and keep in mind that the business is there to serve your life goals, not the other way around. You know, you work hard to have a better quality of life but don’t work so hard you forget about quality of life and so we did and we used to every sort of five years, blue sky, you know, put that away and if you don’t regret it in five years time I bet you come back to it in ten years time and you’ve probably achieved them just by the action of writing them down. So we made that a habit and interestingly, exactly what he said transpired.

Jenelle: Really!

Josephine: We had come to move house and pulled out that list and go “look at that, it sort of happened” so that there’s apparently something in the action of writing a business plan, writing a life plan, writing that gets your subconscious moving into making those goals realisable but we set them together. I think that sort of keeps you focused on the end goal and end game and we do that now because as transferred in our business, we set our business plans together with our leaders, told us that you need to bring your people along a journey with you if you are aligned and set those goals together.

Jenelle: I see a trending hashtag after this chat, #couplegoals [laugh]. Now the environment for women in construction has got to a change quite dramatically over the years since you began in 85. But I know that in previous interviews I’ve heard you on, you’ve mentioned that you never really saw that as a disadvantage for you. Can you say more about, you know, how you approached your career as a woman in construction.

Josephine: Well I think its back to where did we want to be as a couple, you know, and we knew where we wanted to be and work was the, I guess, the enabler to get us to where that needed to be and so I … in construction at the time and now, is paying a lot more than medical research which I loved and for us, it was going to allow us to achieve those goals that we really did want to get ourselves into a position where, which would be so hard for young couples today, every time I say this I think about, you know, my own adult children but we were able to pay our house off. We worked seven days a week and most nights and I was driven to do that. I wanted to be able to stay at home with my children, which I did for 16 years but I didn’t want to not be in control. I’m clearly a bit “A type” and lack of control would have been not being able to provide them with what we needed to as parents. I just wanted to be able to relax and enjoy that particular time in their and my life and I was able to do that. So when the, you know, the unthinkable happened, with Tony coming home without a job at the wrong time, at least I didn’t have to worry about [00.14.02]. It brought me security and surety and being in construction at that time and yet there weren’t a lot of women, I wasn’t there to look around and go “where are all the women”. I was there to do a job but I never saw and it never came to me, you know, terrible behaviours and I still don’t see a lot of that now in construction, although I know a lot of people have different experiences. Now why didn’t I see that? Well I was the only woman there so it would have had to happen to me but also I didn’t see any other women on site. So … but people were … look, in all of my career I have to say, I was dragged up and put onto boards and put onto, you know, into roles by men because men were in positions of power but it was men who mentored me and called me up and every now and then when I couldn’t see in myself what they could see, they’d hold a mirror up and say “now why would you say” [laugh]. So you know, I have to be … to me I’m particularly grateful to the men and women who have done that for me and it’s been [00.14.57] in my career.

Jenelle: Buildcorp has certainly survived several economic downturns, very difficult twists and turns along the way but as you say, long tenured employees, employer of choice. What is it that’s made your organisation so resilient, is it that mutually respectful environment. Are there other things that you’ve put in place that you think, is it your Lebanese heritage, is there other things there that you think, this is what has made us be able to be so resilient in the face of so many different circumstances.

Josephine: I think our people are clear on what the business stands for and what we stand for and who we are and some of them are a business thing, some are actions. The consequences when our leaders are making decisions on behalf of the business, they are very clear on the values of the organisation and always begin their decision making … when an issue comes up to you to solve, that’s a problem that your people can’t solve and that means its never going to be black and white and so what do you need to bring to your thinking when you look to resolve an issue or a decision and so long as they’re underpinned by, you know, a solid set of values, you know, with integrity, with, you know, fair play but … and we’ve got our own corporate code of conduct, our own set of values that we genuinely lead by and our people see us do it and you can’t say “these are our values” and we’re pretty much, most of the time, always lead by those, just at the time … except if we happen to be working for that client or except if we happen to be doing that then, you know, let it slide. We do that. Now Tony and I are very visible to the whole organisation and as you say, we work together. Their organisation has never seen us engaged disrespectfully with each other, ever. Even our children will tell you that. You know, of course we disagree on things. We’re never disrespectful and we always … and they watch us negotiate our way to an outcome that always ends up in a better result and we share that. So our leaders know how to make decisions in our absence and they know the way to come to those decisions and I think that clarity for them can be really liberating and we give our people a lot of authority at Buildcorp which is a bit scary to do when you’re at a sector that has such low margins but we’ve attracted people with aligned values.

Jenelle: Fantastic. Want to acknowledge, obviously we are in a time of, you know, covid. How has … I know construction was deemed an essential service which is great but I do wonder how it affected your business and was there anything that happened during covid that you want to build into your forever way of operating even when the pandemic is long behind us.

Josephine: We do an annual employee opinion survey. Our hardest state of course was the Victorians. So we have about 40 staff in Victoria and they’re an amazing team. Brisbane and Sydney, yes we all took the financial and economic hit. None of us had the emotional hit that Victoria had, even though they were still working on reduced numbers on sites, it was really hard for them. Now we fully expected when we did our employee opinion survey, which we never change the timing of, whether we’ve just delivered a terrible budget or a great budget or the economy is terrible, the economy is great, this would be a bad or a good time to do it. We just never change the times. So in the middle of covid, we fully expected the results of an employee opinion survey coming back to Buildcorp would produce terrible results out of Victoria and the contrary happened. They really solidified their relationship and they bunkered down as a team and they generally understood that if they wanted to move through as well, they would go much further if they did it together. So they began their regular amazing communications. Tony and I had communications go out every single day to our staff, every single day to everybody but to see Victoria not just come through their journey unscathed, to come through and actually rise. You should have seen our net promoter score, it was off the dial. You know, continuing to learn from what each of us are doing more broadly, the pride in that team because they … probably our least seasoned leaders in that team, we have a joint management team in Victoria and they do a fantastic job of leading their people and just the pride.

Jenelle: I want to turn to the philanthropic streak in you which is a huge one. You … it’s not … you have the Buildcorp Foundation and as I said in the opening of this podcast, you also have Opera Australia, the Australian Museum, the Infrastructure Advisory Boards and the University Football Club Foundation … you’ve worked in some very eclectic and very diverse groups in these roles. What are some of the lessons you’ve learnt in collective decision making.

Josephine: I would say the Buildcorp Foundation has probably been a result of a cumulative learnings, I suppose, that I’ve had in each of those organisations including Buildcorp, including some of the boards I’m on. One of the organisations I was a director of years ago, it was a publicly listed company, they’re saw and learnt how different trusts and foundations were structured and some that did things really well. We had an amazing sector in property, that I know a very generous and want to give and don’t quite know how and we made decisions to set up a Buildcorp Foundation to sort of harness all of that energy within our sector and try and make a difference, in our case for things that matter to people at Buildcorp. So we asked our staff what, if we were to get behind a cause, what do you think it would likely to be if it were Buildcorp and mental health, you know, has continually been the one so we just went its just going to stay mental health and over the last six or seven years there have been, you know, site BBQs where the teams raise, you know, 10/20/$30,000 and we talk about mental health and teams being safe. We have a very big event at our home, Tony and I, that raised, you know, 6/7/$800,000 profit in a night. The Foundation has no operating costs but we’ve learnt how to bring the community together. So LifeLine received around a million dollars from the Foundation in the last few years but the partnership piece has been an important one for us which was “how can we partner with government to ensure that we have better mental health outcomes for Australians” and so I approached the Department of Education a few years ago and said “if we came to you with a million dollars, how would you use it to achieve that for children”. So we began on a journey of partnering with government to help their achieve their social and economic outcomes and we ran this project, The Pilot. I wanted to understand along the lines of if you partner with us and you match us in our own million dollars, we’ll increase our contribution to 1.2 million. They said fine, they came along the journey, 2.4 million dollars and I’m very grateful to the then Minister of Education, Rob Stokes, who was totally supportive of that and The Pilot has finished. The idea was to get to 100,000 primary school children and we got to I think 150,000 they got to and over 10,000 primary teachers and the results of the impact of those where we benchmarked the schools before we arrived and the school communities and what happened after has shown that this is a really important and powerful tool. We equip young people with tools to move forward into the world and manage anxiety and, you know, keep them psychologically safe in a world that feels a bit unstable and sometimes unsafe. To me, I’ve learnt how to bring communities together, be it government, [00.22.16] community, for a particular event at our home, the big fundraiser that we have, its fully underwritten by sponsors, their sponsors, our subcontractors but they’re also clients. They also just friends, you know, people who we build for, consultants who we work for to subcontractors who say “you know, we always wanted to give but we just don’t know how to, you do the heavy thinking for us” but what we try and do is ensure we achieve reach to a scale and impact. That project has now wrapped up. One quarter of New South Wales primary schools are now trained in the Smiling Minds programme and that’s big for me because the New South Wales Department of Education is the second largest Department of Education in the world, second only to New York City …

Jenelle: Wow!

Josephine: … yeah, it’s just the way we’re structured here. So to me, I know when we say a quarter of one state, that’s a quarter of a big state, that’s a lot of Australian kids. So our goal is now to wrap up the other 75% if we can and walk hand in hand with government. So I’ve had a lovely conversation with the Department of Education and we’re ready to go again.

Jenelle: Fantastic. Some really great insights there around partnering, partnerships, bringing communities together, thinking about reach and impact. You’ve been driving, I mean, that’s an example. You’ve got many examples of driving impact for a meaningful change. Are there any other kind of key levers or insights that you’ve kind of picked up along your journey here that you would share around what it takes to drive change.

Josephine: Mmm … Tony and I have tried to do this a little bit with rugby union. So when I met Tony, he was playing rugby union and he was very passionate about the game and we were about 15 years into the match when we understood the landscape for women who were playing rugby. I didn’t even know that women played rugby but we’d been sponsoring Sydney University Rugby Club for years and when we saw a … the lack of opportunities for women compared to men and even though we were a small sponsor, when you look next to other national/multinational corporate sponsors in rugby union, we realised that we were able to, with a very small amount of support, begin to start to make a small and increasingly material change to the landscape for women in a sport and in this case, it was rugby union and I think my lessons were probably apply there which is how to be brave in asking for change in a sporting sector that has been traditionally very male dominated on its boards and more broadly and what Tony and I had done, we were in a club system in rugby, we were able to amplify into the National Rugby Team, well we’re the major sponsors of the Wallaroos (womens 15 a side team). There’s a competition now for women, the Buildcorp SuperW, which sits alongside super rugby so it’s the womens equivalent of super rugby but not sort of sitting back and going “this amount of money won’t make a difference”. I would like to encourage everybody to know if you have the genuine we are one and right intention and your why is sound and fair, it is fair and its honest and you can help a governing enable that to happen because often the reason governing bodies will decide that there are a lack of pathways for women in a particular sport will be money. So we will sit down and have conversations with rugby and say “what are the issues, how much will this much money solve”, you know, and begin to try and help them deal with some of their bottleneck because if you just come in with a stick and go “where are your women, why aren’t you there, you’re all a pack of [00.25.58]”, you know, that is really unhelpful. Genuinely sitting down to help understand, genuinely understand what the issues are so we can genuinely make a difference and the one thing that I’m really proud of with Tony is we stand shoulder to shoulder and we’re a private company – right, and we invest about a million dollars in rugby a year and that is our own money – right. Its not the shareholders money, its ours. So I hope the community, when we advocate, understand that we’re not just there on the sideline lobbing grenades. We’re in there trying to understand how to change the landscape and bring our advocacy, our money, you know, our time, our volunteering time to impact and grow wherever we are.

Jenelle: You’ve talked in the past about being a strong advocate for the role that sport can play in building an organisation’s success. Can you tell me a little bit more about that. In what ways do you see that.

Josephine: If you are an organisation that has people working in teams and I’d say that’s most organisations. There are transferable skills that you learn. Tony has been a huge advocate for this over the years and I’ve literally seen it with him in the way that he applies himself and approaches a team within Buildcorp. He brings everything he learnt on the rugby field. Rugby union, I should say, where again for all, we need every shape and size. We need the little half back that can’t be bigger than this. We need a really tall second rower so they can jump high in lineouts. We need a big strong, you know, squat front rower. So rugby sees itself as everyone having a role that’s different to everybody else’s role and that collectively as a team. So everybody is very clear on their role and respectful of the fact that everybody has a different role to play that they’re all equally important but also if you lead a high performing sports team. You are leading a group of very sort of diverse personalities within the team and also external to that, the coach, sponsors if you’re, you know, a larger club, the president. The goal is almost the same. In a high performing team, their goal is to win a grand final in a way that people will respect the way they’ve done it. They were honest, they didn’t cheat. Sponsors will want to come back again and align themselves with it and a construction company, if you’re the leader of a team on a construction site, again you have a group of very diverse stakeholders on your teams and how … what behavioural competencies do you have. What emotional, what do you bring to be able to convince all of those people that this is where we are heading, this is the direction we’re going in, we need to deliver this project on budget safely to a high level of quality on time in a way that a client will give us a project again. So if you see they’re sort of the same type of skills, just applied to different areas.

Jenelle: Absolutely. Now very excitingly for our country, I believe, you’ve taken the seat at the head of the table at Chairperson for the Australian Sports Commission. Notably, the first female in the role in its 37 year history. Josephine, I cannot image that you had a huge amount of spare time on your hands …

Josephine: [laugh].

Jenelle: … this is probably not a job for the fainthearted, given how highly politicised sports funding in particular is. What attracted you to this role. Why did you say yes, tell me about that.

Josephine: I was approached for the role. I had been chairing for the Prime Minister, Maurice Paine, the sports diplomacy advisory council for her within DEFAT and I was really enjoying that and when I was first approached I said no, thank you, I’m happy doing this but they came back again for another conversation and said “we’re really like you to consider this role” and like any decision Tony and I have made, we sat down together and had a conversation about it and Tony actually said to me “you know, we’ve never been that couple on the sideline telling people the things that are wrong but we have been frustrated and expressed our frustration” and I certainly did to the Minister of Sports, Richard Colbeck at the time. I said I don’t understand why you use our taxpayer money to enable sports that are poorly governed, that are poorly run, that are not aligning community expectations around which is participation of women. I don’t understand why sports are allowed to develop pathways for just one gender whereas if you and I did that in Corporate Australia, we’d be in front of the [00.30.16] so I don’t understand why there aren’t consequences for that and I’d been asking these questions more broadly and Tony said to me “here’s your chance to actually try and make a difference”. Now if I look at our performance from 2000, our Olympic tally, medal tally has gone down. I felt the sector was a bit fractured, but I didn’t really know that, that was my observation and I suppose Olympic medals are a bit of an outcome of, you know … well lets put it in reverse. 2000 went really well, Sydney, the 2000 Olympic Games. There was an outcome of having a [00.30.49] in place which was established in 1981 and a genuine focus and it all coming together to deliver that. I feel like we have slipped a little bit and I look at each of the individual sports and everyone is working so hard but we’ve forgotten … how to work hard together. There’s a little bit of friction and tension between there. I historically like to work to bring people together and facilitate that and how do we do this together because frankly, the enemy is on the outside, you know, its across the ditch, its up in the Northern Hemisphere, its everyone other than Australia so we’ve got to figure out how we can bring ourselves together and what structures are the best structures to do that within because we do have this likely – fingers crossed, an Olympic Games in Southeast Queensland in 2032 and here is our opportunity for us to focus on the participation of ten and eleven year olds who go, 2032 will be well and truly old enough to be able to think about participating if that’s their desire or their ability in an Olympic Game but more broadly, how do we prosecute the case for Federation funding and investment and the value that sport has, no just in the Australian psyche but in its post covid recovery. Its health benefits, its mental health benefits, what are the halo effects that sports bring. So we know that we’re a country where sport is such a huge part of our psyche and I genuinely believe that sport, it can be part of the solution. So with that backdrop, then yes I am busy. We made a few changes at Buildcorp and our son, who’s been in the business for seven years, set up into some of my operational roles. I’m still there but left. I’ve pulled back from a couple of boards and making time for this because there are a lot of people who have been working really hard within sport who deserve to be working within structures that work for them. The government have been really committed to work with me on this and I believe that. I believe the Federation government on this and with that, if we all want to, you know, look towards 2032 and point ourselves in the right direction. I thought this was an exciting time to be on the bus. So I jumped on the bus.

Jenelle: I’m very glad you have jumped on that bus. Now its that exciting time but it can also … I mean it would also be overwhelming time. You’ve got the backdrop of covid19 which has thrown the funding and operations of Australia’s sporting federation into, you know, disarray. We’ve … you’ve got the delayed Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. You’ve got a bid for the 2032 Brisbane Olympic Games. Lots and lots of things to focus on. How and where do you start.

Josephine: Oh with the leaders. So I’ve made it my business to confess the first three months of my time in the role with the organisation, within the Australian Sports Commission and with the presidents of the 100 national sporting organisations to first of all, hear from them as the leaders of their sector as to how do you … what’s your perspective, what do you feel, engaging with the Commonwealth Games Association, The Australian Olympic Committee. So there’s lots of stakeholders within the landscape and its understanding for me, where are we working well together, where are we getting in each other’s way and where’s the duplication and more importantly, where are the gaps and what should we be looking to do for those.

Jenelle: And so, as you said Josephine, as a sports is such a fundamental part of the Australian psyche and Australian life, the suspension of sports during covid was one of the more visible and some would say more difficult limitations that Aussies have had to deal with and continue to deal with. Not just for the entertainment side but at that health and social benefits. How do you see this playing out (pardon the pun) particularly amongst youth and is there stuff that we really need to be uber conscious of given the times that we are sort of navigating at the moment.

Josephine: What I understand from sports is that we had pre-covid 3.1 million volunteers participating in Australian sport. They’re coming back a bit slower. Participation rates are coming back a bit slower. You know, Mum and Dad who were … got their Saturday mornings back when they were in lockdown for covid. Some of them are going “you know, its been really nice having Saturday mornings back”. So you know, we need to re-prosecute the case for what are the other things your child might benefit from if they were to continue to participate in sports. We also need to prosecute a case for people who don’t think sport is … for whom its not important. You know, I am on the Board of Opera Australia and there are people who think there have been insufficient investment in the arts and we’re too heavy in sport but I think we need to do our job well enough within sport that anybody regardless of whether they’re sportspeople or not look to an application of federation funding to a sport or sports more broadly and go “okay I get it, I understand why that’s important”. So I think for us, within sport, we’ve got to really redefine and reimagine for those Australians who aren’t necessarily on the journey with us, what the benefits are.

Jenelle: Josephine, you have such a big platform for driving change in all the various spheres that you operate in. We have an opportunity now to define a new Australia as we come ahead of covid, how do you see Australia looking and how would you want us to be reimagining the future.

Josephine: Well I think if we start to look at the immediate impact we saw at around not being able to access PPE, for example, and having a mirror held up to … well we can’t manufacture things here very much anymore and we extend that back to and interrogate a bit further and go well manufacturing requires blue collar work, requires a participation in TAFE, requires schools to think about directing students into technical and TAFE type courses, how have we elevated those courses to attract blue collar workers into the sector. So when I looked at what happened when the border shut, of course we had a labour shortage in construction, of course we do because we’re (1) not only are we not training enough people in that, there is a lack of appetite for parents and schools to students in any school year 10 go straight to TAFE the way I did. Now I went to [00.37.05] High School. At [00.37.08] High School at Year 10, there were 200 of us. In Year 11 there was 70 of use. So that’s 130 people enter the workforce or went to, you know, began to be upskilled at TAFE. Today I reckon those 200 in Year 10 probably all continue onto Year 12 and when I think about what we learnt then. We learnt to read Chooser, we learnt skills that … I struggle to see how that would help somebody who really wanted to be an auto electrician or a hairdresser. Now we all understand the value of education but these days and I think it was when one of the [00.37.40] guys came out and said “yeah, what's the point of University these days, pretty much everything you need to learn, you could learn on YouTube”. He might have a point so I think somewhere within our public discussion within Australia, repositioning and revaluing our technical skills which you are not going to learn off YouTube, which you do need to be … so how do we reelevate that. We’ve got so many people with degrees who are not using them and we think about how we talk about education in this country and not allow parents or students to use language like “I only went onto Year 10”. That was never how we spoke about this when I was at school. I can remember looking at my girlfriends on the station as I was heading off in my jeans to University and they looked glamorous and gorgeous heading off to their jobs in the city, you know, EAs, receptionists, whatever they were doing, [00.38.27] and we were all equally valued. Something has happened in our public discretion that has landed us where we are. So a manufacturing nation or a country that can do more than dig stuff out of the ground and, you know, sell that is going to need to reimagine how we can value to that stuff we dig out of the ground ourselves here and what are the technical skills we need there. So to me, a reimagining looks at that, in the future. I do know, I was speaking to a dairy farmer a few months ago who told me that he can’t get people to milk his cows so he has to bring them in and apparently the best people to help in milking cows is German backpackers because they arrive on time, they’re really clean and they’re efficient. I guess none of us would be surprised at that but you know, do we totally want to lose our food bowl. Do we totally want to … so if we then can’t grow and produce our own food, our own milk, well then what and if borders close and what if the geo-political major of the law means that of a sudden we can’t feed our population, then what. So I think all Australians need to lean into this a bit and go “oh, what do we want to look like, what are the risks that now face … that we’ve seen, genuine risks that have and could amplify and face a country like ours and how can we look after ourselves”.

Jenelle: Such an important discourse to be engaging in.

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

Jenelle: I’m now going to finish up Josephine on a really fast light-hearted three questions. So what are you reading, watching or listening to right now?

Josephine: I actually just reread a book that I give to everybody who I see who’s not entirely sure how to move to the next level of their career and it’s by Viktor Frankl and its “Man’s Search For Meaning” and that is around controlling our own responses to whatever is happening in the world around us that we can’t control and being in control, when you’re like me, you’re A Type, you want to be in control. You can control the way you respond to things and Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psycho analyst who ended up in Auschwitz and lost his whole family but said “you know, while I can’t control what’s happening around me, I can control the way I choose to respond”. So that’s one I’m back into and I’m enjoying.

Jenelle: Wonderful. What is your super power. It can be something that’s highly additive to the world or a useless party trick, I value both of those.

Josephine: Oh sometimes I think it’s positive that I have no boundaries so I do pick up the phone to people I have no business picking up the phone to, like a minister or … I have this really great idea, what do you reckon, come on a journey with me [laugh].

Jenelle: Love it. If you were going to put up a quote on a billboard, what would it say?

Josephine: It would be my late father’s advice to people who took on a lot. “One day at a time”.

Jenelle: So good. Such good advice. Josephine, thank you very much for your time today. I’ve really enjoyed the discussion so much that I’ve taken away from the conversation. It is your hard work ethic, your clear life of gratitude for what you’ve had and your desire to continually give back and share the opportunities with others is really evident. I can’t help but be struck the number of times that you’ve talked about Tony in this conversation with such pride. You’ve woven him in every one of your life stories and that journey together is so clear and natural, that partnership and teaming. You know, you said the words, the quote “if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together” and I think, you know, I joked about the #couplegoals with you too, but that sense of teaming, whether it’s with Tony, whether its with your own organisation, whether its with government, whether with communities and sports is so clear and that is why you go so far because you go together. The clarify on what you stand for, what your business stands for and the clarity of goals guiding your decision making is really clear and you know, for someone who’s asking us all to be brave in asking for change, I have to say that its clear you’ve never been on the sidelines, that’s you’ve always put yourself on the field and you are brave in asking for change. So thank you for being that role model and long may we learn from you.

Josephine: Its very kind of you Jenelle, thank you very much. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Jenelle: Me too. Thanks Josephine.

The ‘Change Happens Podcast’ from EY. A conversation on leading through change. Discover more where you get your podcasts.

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