The week that Giam Swiegers took over as CEO of Aurecon was the scariest week of his life.With a background in accounting and having spent 12 years as the head of Deloitte, taking over as head of an engineering firm was unchartered territory.
“If I look at myself the day I walked an accountant into an engineering firm that I knew nothing about it was about the scariest week of my life. It was terrible. I didn’t know how little I knew and how little I understood,” he said.
But it’s this type of stepping outside your comfort zone is one of the keys to success, according to Swiegers.
“I’ve been in the role for 16 months, I am so energised that I have taken on something so far beyond my comfort zone. It’s the most rewarding way for me to finish my working career – and I’m so happy that I ended up doing it. So I’m just trying to teach people here –go to the edge of your comfort zone. Life is much more exciting over there.”
Swiegers will join Amal Clooney and other leading thinkers at the Women World Changers Summit in October to discuss the importance of greater workplace diversity and equality.
And his message is simple. Every single industry is going to be hit with disruption in the coming years and companies have a choice – to either defend their organisation or go under.
He says that in order to defend your organisation you need to liberate creativity. And in order to do that you 100 per cent have to have diversity of thinking.
“If you have a group of people who are similar to each other and they have worked together and looked at problems together – the chances of them coming up with an idea that is unique is zero. There is no chance,” he said.
“The competitive edge you get when you accept diversity is worth the struggle of getting there.”
Swiegers caught up with Women’s Agenda ahead of the Summit to talk about diversity, disruption and how to succeed in business.
The global engineering sector is facing some big challenges – what is your plan to future-proof Aurecon?
All professions are changing dramatically. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing law, tax or engineering – digital is having a big impact. While there’s a lot of infrastructure development in Australia it’s a good time to be in engineering but it’s an important time to invest in the future. So we have got to teach this organisation to deal with more diverse workforces because those will be the people able to cope with changing futures. You won’t get innovation without diversity. Having an accountant in charge of an engineering firm, that’s already good diversity. So right at the top we can deal with diversity. Then we teach people to look at client problems through a different lens. So we are investing heavily in design thinking.
You mention “design thinking” and I know that was a big part of the change program when you were at Deloitte. Could you explain what it means and how it works?
Engineers are traditionally problem solvers, and we’re trying to shift them from being problem solvers to problem finders. So instead of saying, ok I’ll work out how to build you a bridge, it’s asking why do you want a bridge? Do you really need a bridge and what is the problem you are trying to solve. Is there a solution that we haven’t thought about? For engineers it’s simpler to go to design thinking because through their training they are designers. So if you train as a designer, moving into design thinking is easier than if you are trained as an accountant and you have to learn a whole new skill. I’m excited about what we’re doing with design thinking and how our clients are experiencing it and what people are realizing is that they get better answers if they have a diverse group of people in the room. We have trained 600 of our people in the last 6 months. It played an important role for opening the eyes in Deloitte and putting people at the center of every solution.
What is the key to creating a culture that embraces disruption?
Firstly, you’ve got to make people aware that disruption is real and it’s going to happen. You’ve got to deal with the fear of the unknown and secondly the frustration that you’ve just learned to do something and then you find out it’s not going to be done like that anymore. So there is a natural resistance. If you look at disruption through two lenses – firstly, what must I do to defend the organization. If people are going to attack me what do I need to do to safeguard my organization. That plays a bit to fear and concerns. And then you’ve got to say to people what are we going to do to attack. You’ve got to defend and attack. It’s easier to get people excited about how we use it to attack the competition than it is to get people to say how do I protect my job and defend it. And I think the only way you do it is to constantly talk about it, constantly show examples of it and you constantly demonstrate how people in the organization have dealt with it. You have to deal with disruption before people get paralysed with the fear – you have to get them excited about the options that they have.
Given the rate of disruption at the moment, you want to liberate creativity within Aurecon. Do you think there’s a strong link between creativity and diversity?
Absolutely 100% linked. If you have a group of people who are similar to each other and they have worked together and looked at problems together – the chances of them coming up with an idea that is unique is zero. There is no chance. Because nobody is challenging the ingrained beliefs. So when we talk about diversity we say it’s gender, it’s culture (because we operate in 27 countries and you need people from 27 countries all working as equals to reach the answer) and then it’s a diversity of qualifications. You have got to work with people who think differently. We have a lot of civil engineers here and we find the more we put them in with people from different backgrounds the more unusual the answer that we get is, and the more the answer appeals to the client because the answer has got a certain uniqueness to it.
Yes, but people often hire those who are similar to them? How do you get managers to hire a diverse group?
You’re 100% right – the biggest problem for businesses is people hire people who look like them. So what we’ve been doing here is we’ve been highlighting the exciting answers you get if you have diversity. And we’ve got to a point where most of our leaders are agitating for more diversity in the people who are being hired because they realise that they will fail if they don’t have enough diverse people to meet the goals we have set for them. We’ve got a program to make sure we get gender diversity right, focused and narrow. Then we’ve got a program to get cultural diversity right – we’ve got to teach people to work cross borders and collaborate and bring the best out of everybody. Then you have the third program which is the design thinking program which says ok how do we get diverse qualifications in. So 3 very distinct programs – I don’t believe in pooling diversity together it becomes unmanageable. I believe you’ve got to break it up into those three different elements.
What about your peers and fellow CEOs. Diversity is still seen as a “tick the box” activity in many organisations. Do you think your peers believe as you do the business benefits of diversity? And that a diverse team will come up with better solutions?
I think intellectually the majority of people get it. Intellectually. Emotionally, are they comfortable working in diverse teams – I’m not sure. A lot of people are far more comfortable working with people like them. But if you’re working with people as smart as the 7500 people who work here, they really understand that if you have diversity it should give a different answer.
You spent years at Deloitte. How far behind (if at all) is engineering to accounting/professional services in terms of gender diversity?
I think all of the engineering firms will agree that engineering is at least a decade behind.There are reasons for that. The accounting students on campus changed faster than the STEM students. From 2000 half the commerce graduates are female, I’m told for engineering it’s creeping up to about 30% of graduates are female. But it’s only today. For the past 16 years the accounting firms have had females coming through in equal numbers. When I started in Deloitte in 2003 we had 4 female partners and when I left we had about 150. It was a big shift over that period. Over here we are struggling because we don’t have senior female women. At graduate level for the first three or four years we have a nice gender balance – in the senior ranks we have a big big problem.
So you think one of the problems stems from University level? Is that because there’s only 30% female graduates in STEM coming through?
It’s only today it’s 30%. If you look at 10-20 years ago it was only 10%. Women don’t go into STEM as easily as men, it’s still a male domain. I really do believe that as a profession we have a responsibility for making STEM more attractive to females and making engineering as a profession more attractive to females. My focus is on how do I get more women into senior engineering roles in Aurecon with leadership ability. How do I make Aurecon so attractive for female engineering talent.
And how are you going with that at the moment? When a senior role is advertised are you attracting enough female candidates?
Because my aspirations are very high we’re not there yet. We’re getting an adequate number of female applicants for junior roles but not for senior roles, so we are not at my goal level yet. We run a succession plan for the 42 most important leadership roles in the firm – so who can succeed you tomorrow, in two years’ time and five years’ time. And when you give me the list and there is no female name on it I send it back to you and will not accept it until there is a female name or if you say to me you really don’t have one, I want a deadline for when you will hire one. It’s in the succession plan that you’ve
Are there any myths about workplace diversity that you’d like to dispel?
No. I don’t think there are myths. All the problems are real. Organisations through conscious bias and unconscious bias put a lot of roadblocks in the way for females.
Ok, could you tell me what some of those roadblocks are?
We haven’t got enough female role models. If you can’t see a female who has succeeded and who looks like you and leading the life you want to live it’s a problem. Until we have enough senior women, women don’t aspire to the roles because they don’t think of them as real. Also in engineering there is a culture, that’s why we became involved with the Words@Work campaign created by the Diversity Council of Australia, where we’re saying that we have to be very careful in our choice of words. So often when people describe leadership roles they talk about he instead of her. And I’m really allergic to that and get incredibly annoyed when people work on the assumption that every leadership role will have a male in it.
We have got so many competent female engineers, clients are not a roadblock. It’s our internal beliefs and internal structures. A lot of our people still struggle with the idea of part time and flexible work – and I’m told that we lose a lot of very good females in their late 20s and early 30s because they don’t believe the organization is flexible enough to balance family and work. Our priority is to create an environment where women can balance family and career with the organization being supportive rather than discriminatory.
What are the three characteristics you think are most important to succeed in business?
You’ve got to be a good leader and a good leader is defined as somebody who has followers. Good leaders achieve the outcomes they set out to achieve. But in today’s business you need to be able to deal with ambiguity. A lot of people are capable leaders in predictable environments and I think what you’ve got to do is be able to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity. I’ve always lived with a personal mantra that life begins at the edge of your comfort zone. If I look at myself the day I walked as an accountant into an engineering firm that I knew nothing about it was about the scariest week of my life. It was terrible. I didn’t know how little I knew and how little I understood. There were times when people were talking about things that I didn’t have the vaguest idea what they’re talking about. But I’ve now been in the role for 16 months, I am so energised the fact that I have taken on something so far beyond my comfort zone. It’s been the most rewarding way for me to finish my working career – and I’m so happy that I ended up doing it. So I’m just trying to teach people here –go to the edge of your comfort zone. Life is much more exciting over there.
So to recap, that’s dealing with ambiguity, having a followership and getting outcomes.
So being a good leader is one of the characteristics – but people don’t always recognise when they’re a good leader?
I think for the really good leaders it comes so naturally to them. But it can be taught. You can teach people to become a much better leader. And they’ve got to learn to lead to outcomes. When I talk here about leadership I say “to me leadership is about taking people to where they ought to go not where they want to go.” It’s easy to sit around the table and run a democracy. Anybody can do that. But it takes a lot of courage to stand up and say “where we are is not where we should be.” This is where we should be and then to make that destination attractive comes through storytelling, creating a vision and explaining to people why that option would be better, And having the iron fist to say I will deal with people who will stand in the way of the journey. You need to be 80% cheerleader and 20% iron fist. That balance is required for good leaders. It’s carrot and stick, but there needs to be a lot more carrot than stick. But if you think you’ll get away with no stick, you’re fooling yourself. Every bit of research shows that you have to deal with the people who refuse to accept that change is needed.
Going off topic for a second – in terms of your reading material in this area…what do you read to stay up-to-date on the latest thinking?
I read quite widely, I’m obviously a Harvard Business Review fan, a lot of good stuff comes out of there. I follow a lot of the leading thinkers on Twitter and get some good information from there. I have several friends that research interesting things and I just finished reading a book two days ago called Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader by Herminia Ibarra, an academic I met at Harvard and I will be encouraging a lot of people at Aurecon to read that book because it gives such good practical advice for someone who is stepping into a leadership role.
If you want to be a good leader you have to read what the best people put out. You need to go leading edge. There’s a lot of OK stuff but you’ve got to have the breakthrough stuff and the newer stuff.
What skills make for a successful employee in your eyes?
A successful employee is someone who wants to learn. That’s why I love working in professional firms. People are smart, they’re ambitious and they are hungry to learn something and enjoy debating. So I really can’t work with people who don’t aspire to be better tomorrow than they were today. I can only work with ambitious and smart people.
You were one of the founding male champions of change. What do you think is taking so long to achieve gender equality at exec and board level in Australia?
I wish I knew why it took so long. We’re all frustrated by the fact that it’s taking so long. It’s clearly harder than we realise. We clearly make mistakes. The one alibi that people have to accept is that there are still cultural issues in Australia that have not been fixed but I still find it incredibly frustrating that it’s taking so long.It’s a long hard battle – but it’s worth it. The competitive edge you get when you accept diversity is worth the struggle of getting there.
What is the role of leadership in ensuring a more diverse board?
I’m pushing the executive to make sure they are mentoring females and they are responsible for getting more women into senior roles. I have a slightly different concern to what a lot of other people have. If you ask me where is it most important to succeed, board or executive level. Because I believe female role models are so important, I have a preference for succeeding at executive level ahead of exceeding at board level. A lot of people favour the board instead. The problem is if you have a lot of females on the board they come out of the executive ranks and you deplete the executive ranks and then you don’t have role models for the next generation of females. I know it’s a controversial view – and there is no science behind it. But I would rather see more female CEOs in the country than see more female chairmen or directors in the country. But it’s a personal preference – because I feel sorry for the women between the ages of 25 and 40 that work in organisations where there are no female roles models. That is tough.
If you’d like to hear more from Giam and a line-up of international speakers at the World Women Changers Summit, click here to get a special discounted rate for Women’s Agenda readers
