Peter Cumming is Director, Operations (Perth), National Operations for the Office of the National Rail Safety Regulator. In this interview Peter reflects on his work with Kylie Cutten.
How do you describe your business?
We are the National Rail Safety Regulator, so we’re a national organisation with branches across the country.
What were you wanting to achieve in your work with Kylie?
We were looking for better cooperation and communication between the team to get better safety outcomes in the work that we do.
How would you describe the process that Kylie took you through?
We found that Kylie was very engaging. She started off really by getting an understanding about our team and who we were as individuals and collectively as a team. She spent a lot of time personalising the experience for the team. We thought it was a very successful way to go about doing things.
What kind of feedback have you got from the people who were involved in that process?
It has been exceedingly positive. The team was very impressed with the way that she delivered the work. They felt that it made a change to the way that they saw their work and the way that they see each other as a team.
What’s been the impact of this engagement on your business?
Quite simply, there’s been a change in the way that our office operates. It’s a more open team who are prepared to share their strengths and their weaknesses and to jump in to assist each other. We’re seeing better results in the team.
How does this make your life easier, Peter?
It makes my life easier because I have to spend less time managing the people in the team. It frees me up to focus on other strategic outcomes. It also gives me that real sense of satisfaction when I can see a team getting on and achieving the goals they’ve set.
What is the thing that makes you feel happiest about working with Kylie?
There is something about the humanness of her approach. Very early on, while she was asking the team to be vulnerable and expose their own vulnerabilities, she was prepared to do the same. As a result, she connected with the team really well at a really early stage. I think that made a really significant difference. A lot of those courses that you go through aren’t like that. You find people who are subject matter experts imparting their knowledge on you, not actually engaging with the team and becoming like a part of the team.
From the very first session she did that. She exposed a little bit of something about herself that made people go, “Oh, okay. Yeah. She’s not just here to tell us how to do stuff.” That was refreshing and powerful.
Has the work with Kylie met your expectations?
Yes, absolutely. Succeeded them actually. She’s done a better job than I thought it would be possible to do.
If you were speaking directly to someone thinking about working with Kylie, in the Australian Facilitation Company, what do you think she’s going to bring to your organisation?
She’s going to bring some understanding of people and the way that people relate to each other. She’s going to learn how to understand the business, and she’s going to combine those two things to get the best result for the company.
You can expect to meet someone who is very engaging. She uses a fair bit of humour and mixes that humour with some real seriousness. She is able to touch on some sensitive issues for people. She understands when she’s touching on something sensitive and is able to temper that to the style of the crowd in order to get the message across. I think that is a really significant difference. She was very lighthearted with the team, but then when things got serious, she could manage it really well to drive a point home without making it too serious.
