Article about NZLEAD in Employment Today Magazine, October 2015

1. 14 Employment Today OCTOBER 2015
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2. OCTOBER 2015 Employment Today 15
Amanda Sterling is a woman with a vision. In 2013 she
co-founded the online community NZLEAD. This year, she
published her first book, The Humane Workplace. Raewyn Court
talks to her about telling stories and the future of work.
S
itting in Amanda Sterling’s sunny living room overlooking native bush, cup of tea in hand,
it’s easy to imagine why she wants people to be as comfortable at work as they are at home.
That’s part of her vision for the future of work, about which she has just published a book,
The Humane Workplace. The book grew from an online community, NZLEAD, which Sterling
co-founded with HR specialist Tash Pieterse on social networking service Twitter, early in 2013.
This year, with around 400 people actively participating in NZLEAD’s weekly, one-hour tweet chat,
Sterling has begun to notice tangible outcomes from the ideas flowing through the group.
It all began when Sterling’s employer at the time merged with another company, and she put her
hand up for a role in learning and development, moving from HR. The managers of the two companies
had very different working styles and Sterling felt cohesive leadership was needed. She put her idea of
an 11-month, 11-module development programme to the executive team, and was given the green light.
“But unfortunately, I had no idea what I was doing,” laughs Sterling. “I was in my mid-20s and I
thought, I’m going to be helping all these managers who are twice my age learn how to manage peo-
ple. I have no experience, no resources and no budget—what the hell am I going to do? So I talked to
some different training providers and they said I was nuts, but one said, ‘You’re nuts, but here’s how
you could do it’.
“Over a month, my manager and I pulled together the material using people we knew, books, and
the internet. We designed and delivered the whole programme as we went along. A lot of the design
was around the managers having the conversations, so rather than me going, ‘Ok guys, this is how you
should do performance’, I’d go, ‘Here are some different models on how to do performance. Let’s have
a discussion on what works for you and what doesn’t’.
“At the end of the year I thought, one, we’ve designed this course using information that’s already
out there, and two, we’ve got managers sharing their experiences and stories, and it got me thinking,
why do we have to pay consultants hundreds of thousands of dollars to deliver this stuff?”
Sterling eventually left for a new challenge and while looking for a job ran an experimental course
in leadership development using blogs and Twitter. It failed. “I learned so much from that,” she says.
“One reason it failed was that people didn’t have the social technology skills, and the other was be-
cause it wasn’t in the context of their work, they didn’t have a compelling reason to use it. But what
ON THE JOB
Taking
the lead

3. 16 Employment Today OCTOBER 2015
“We’re not restricted by physical and geographical
location any more, so I can have a conversation with
someone in India who’s having the same challenge as
me, and I can say, ‘What are we going to do about it?’”
ON THE JOB
worked really well was the tweet chat. People from around the
world started participating in our conversations—I thought, this
is awesome, we can talk about leadership principles with an HR
director in London or a health and safety advisor in Texas.”
Feeling they weren’t getting the professional development they
needed from traditional avenues, Sterling and Pieterse decided to
continue the tweet chat, with a different topic around HR, recruit-
ment and L&D each week. And so NZLEAD was born.
Held every Thursday at 7pm, the topic of the tweet chat was
originally chosen by Sterling or Pieterse, who would devise four
questions, facilitate the discussion and then recap. Over time, peo-
ple in the community came forward with topics they wanted to
explore so that now, many different people preview, facilitate and
recap. Topics have included authenticity, recruitment and sourc-
ing, learning, performance reviews, performance management,
professional accreditation, and youth employment.
Sterling says that, quite quickly, the connections formed in one
hour a week turned into other discussions, real-life meet-ups and
job opportunities.
“It turned into a networking thing, so the flow-on effect was
much bigger than the tweet chat itself.” She notes that statistics
around social media show that only 10 percent of people are
active, with the rest being ‘lurkers’, meaning there could be thou-
sands following without commenting.
Because the traditional hierarchy of power in an organisation
is ‘top down’, the extent of those at the bottom having a voice is
limited to a small group of colleagues, says Sterling. Her vision is
for social technology to shift the power dynamics.
“We’re not restricted by physical and geographical location any
more, so I can have a conversation with someone in India who’s
having the same challenge as me, and I can say, ‘What are we
going to do about it?’ I can now connect with hundreds or thou-
sands who have the same challenge and the same ambition. And
you start to get the numbers and with those numbers, you start to
get traction and change.”
Sterling believes the most powerful way NZLEAD can initi-
ate change is to tell stories. “People say they want to work for
Chorus because it’s a great place to work, so we tell the stories of
companies like that, and other organisations look at them and say
‘Maybe we could be doing some of that’. It’s powerful because it’s
indirect—you can’t tell people how to do things, they’ve got to
make that head switch themselves.”
Sterling says people often have to bring a different version
of themselves to work, “but you can’t bring your strengths and
creativity and capabilities to work if you’re being told what be-
haviours and cultural norms to abide by, what to wear and how
to communicate. People need to feel safe to participate. They need
to be able to speak up and be themselves without their leaders
shutting them down.”
She believes physical space also has a part to play. A book by
Susan Cain, The Power of Introverts to Change the World, got her
thinking about how to create office environments where introverts
feel safe to participate. “Cain says introverts are not shy people,
they just get more energy and replenishment by being alone and
thinking through their own thoughts, where extroverts get more
energy by being with other people. In an open plan workspace,
designed for collaboration and connection, we’re actually shutting
down half of the workforce. Physical space has a lot to do with
safety, because a drained introvert is not going to feel safe.”
I ask Sterling if treating people holistically at work might
encourage some to think they have free rein and take advantage
of employers. “Managers often say that if they open up Facebook,
people will just waste time,” she says. “But if you’ve created a
culture where people are excited about going to work, then yeah,
they’re probably going to be spending a little bit of personal time
chatting to their colleagues or surfing on Facebook, but they’ll still
want to do a good job for you.”
Sterling says it’s hard to quantify the impact NZLEAD is hav-
ing on traditional HR practices because, although she’s seeing
many more good stories now, she doesn’t know whether it’s a
case of new stories, or more being shared. The other thing she’s
noticed is action.
“More people are saying they’ve implemented something from
a tweet chat. We had a chat on policies, which are often very
long-winded, so for an hour we brainstormed on how we could
write policies in 140 characters—the size of a tweet. I summarised
the tweets into a policy manual, and a regular in NZLEAD imple-
mented it in their organisation. So while they’ve still got longer
policies, they communicate it to staff in the tweet-sized version.”
Sterling says her motivation to write The Humane Workplace
came from seeing HR people’s fear of “this social technology
thing”.
“I wanted to tell a story in a way that was easily digested
about why social technology is important, how it’s changing the
way we learn and work, what that means for our people and
culture professionals,and what we can start to do with it.
I wanted something that was a little bit more traditional, kind
of a friendly introduction into this world.”
RAEWYN COURT is an Auckland-based
freelance writer.