29. CEO Insights with Anthony Vuleta and Prina Shah: How to Optimise Your Culture

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Hello and welcome to this episode of Ways to Change Your Workplace with Myself, Prina Shah. This episode is a really good one. Get confidence and do this. Hello. And welcome to this episode of Ways to Change Your Workplace with Myself, Prina Shah. And I'm really, really pleased to be talking to my guest today, who is Anthony Villetta, the Chief Executive Officer of the Town of Victoria Park, which is a suburb within Perth. Anthony, we have people who watch my interviews around the world. So will you allow me to give a little bit of an introduction to yourself and a little bit of an introduction to the town as well?

SPEAKER_01 0:48

Yeah, sure, I'm happy to do that. The town of Victoria Park just sits adjacent to the city of Perth. We're only a couple of kilometres out from the centre of the CBD. We're 17.5 square kilometres, and we have a population of about 38,000 in our community. The town's got a triple population growth trajectory over about 50 years, and I suppose that's been part of the objective for the town in terms of where what it needs to actually do to continue to change and be agile in responsive to that growing demand that will actually come over a fairly long period of time, but really change the dynamic of what we actually do and how we deliver our services to that community. The local government has nine councillors led by a mayor, one of those councillors, and we have about 216 full-time equivalent staff with about 400 staff on the books today. So it gives you a bit of an insight into the town itself. A little bit about me. I've been at the town for 19 years, yes, 19 years, but uh it's been the third role I've had here. I've as CEO, I've was the manager of technical services when I started, eventually got the role as director of what they called Renew Life at that point in time. So I was in charge of all of the operations of the organisation. And then local government reform came about in around uh 2014-15, and there was an amalgamation program being put on the cards, and at that point in time our previous CEO left, and the council then asked me to act, and I ended up acting as the CEO for 15 months. And then after that program didn't actually work, uh the state government abandoned. Um, the job was advertised, and I got the job, and I've nearly uh hit six years in the role uh coming up this May. So I've been doing the CEO role for about seven odd years total. So that's me in a nutshell.

SPEAKER_00 2:44

And here you are. I want to add a little bit to your introduction as well. In terms of Victoria Park as a destination for Perth, it is quite the destination for people who don't know, it has a real flavour to it, not only for businesses, not only for residents, but for people like me who live elsewhere and who will travel far to the town. You have quite the really diverse strip of food outlets, restaurants, and it's it's a really thriving uh community and town that you and your people have built over time.

SPEAKER_01 3:17

Yeah, I look, I'd agree, I've been here a fair while. I've seen it from when it wasn't that to now that it is that. And there are a lot of foodies in the town, and our strip is probably the most popular, I think, in Earth at this point in time. Um, I went there on the weekend, and the amount of people on the strip is insane. In fact, uh, we actually don't have enough parking to cope with it. That's probably our hub. The the centre of the town is actually a our fresco strip, which is the largest uh main street in the southern hemisphere, and that is our point of difference. But we also have an entertainment precinct, um Burzwood, that actually has a casino, crown resort, a racetrack, the state's premier stadium, as well as bookended by uh a university with Curtin University and even a tech park. So we've got quite a lot going on, you know, a fairly small area.

SPEAKER_00 4:07

And with that large amount of things that your council work on for the town, it also focuses on the way that you run your business, your organization. And I'd love to talk to you today about organizational culture, specifically, Anthony, because I remember the first time that I walked into your office, we were talking about things culture related, and you have one a few awards in relation to that as well. I just wanted to pick your brain because optimizing your organizational culture for the betterment of your town essentially is the you know end result, does not happen overnight. How did you get started on this journey and what prompted you to focus on your organizational culture? Because you're as a CEO in Perth, you're quite renowned for your organizational culture.

SPEAKER_01 4:55

Well, it actually started when I was a director in our executive at that point in time under two CEOs ago, and we undertook a staff survey to look at what our issues were, what our what our culture was, what our levels of satisfaction were. And back in 2009, we undertook uh an LSI through humans and logistics just to get an indication of where we were at. It didn't really bode all that well. We weren't in a fairly very good place, a lot of avoidance within the organisation, a lot of what I call red behaviour, aggressive sort of defensive behaviour. And I suppose when I was in that executive at that point in time, it actually played out in the actual leadership team. I could see it actually happening, and it was a bit of a jolt for me to get into that space and see how that operated. So it probably didn't sit all that well with me. We did change the exec and the CEO over that period of time, and around 213, 212, 2013, the new CEO came in who wanted to change a few things, and we indoctrinated him in LSIs and tried to get him on board in that space, and he's now a true believer, and he started to help us transition a bit of our culture at that point. He left, as I mentioned earlier, some six, seven years ago now. And over the last six or seven years, what I've tried to do is actually really bring that to life. I suppose I have an engineering background, but I also am really interested in people and how they operate. And I suppose not calling it human engineering, but I really am interested in terms of how they tick. I spend 90% of my time talking to people throughout the day. So if I can get the culture right in the organisation with the appropriate levels of accountability, the organisation would just keep would thrive. And I suppose at that point in time I set and presented to council a uh like a five-year plan to transform the organisation. And it included getting our strategy right, so engaging with our community like we never have before, in a sincere way over an extended period of time, to actually really understand what they wanted us to deliver on, then looking at what they wanted us to deliver on and then realigning the entire organisation to meet that need, but allowing the staff to design what the organization looked like to meet that need, which is a little bit unusual. And you're probably getting a theme, bottom up is probably the way I generally like to engage, and the reason is to get high levels of acceptance of the outcome, even though you may know there's a solution there, you're saying it and then, or you're getting people to be involved in the delivery of the solution, two different things, and you get much better outcomes if they're involved in the delivery of the solution. And so look, we did the strategy work, did the structure, um, we ended up with a hybrid matrix type structure, quite flat below manager level, which is a little unusual again in local government land. And we then focused on systems and processes, policies and things like that to give us the backbone of the government. So we needed any accountabilities that we needed. We upskilled all layers of leadership within the organisation, and we then also focused on shared values. So again, we have values for our organisation, but we've learned from a few years back where we just rolled out the values and left it at pretty much that to you roll out the values, you also look at signature behaviours that are meaningful for each of the parts of the business that operate, I suppose, independently. There are we have 28 different service areas with different leads and they have different deliverables. So we let them develop their own signature behaviours, what's meaningful for them that aligns to the values. And what we've seen is massive delivery output from the organisation. We've looked after them for through COVID, and they can see us leading from the top and aspire and basically espousing the values as an executive and a management team. And I think that's coming back to us in spades where you know, casuals, for instance, that were looked after through a period of hardship when most other organizations were letting them go. We looked after them and redeployed and things like that. And all of these things that we've been doing over that, and it's been a strategic approach. This it's not something that just happened overnight, has led us to the point where the outcomes that we are delivering now is that we have we are the third highest level of satisfaction in our community. So it's transferred and relatable back to the community based on what we've actually delivered on. We are the benchmark for community engagement across the industry, and we're starting to get to that point where we're actually now able to actually build into all the systems and processes and our organisation, what we deliver, a recognition sort of program that it comes back into the organisation. So you win an award for this, and it's not just about winning awards, it's recognising the fact that a lot of effort's gone into these things and we're doing things quite well. The one thing that we fundamentally focus on, though, is trying to redefine, I suppose, what local government's all about and in a new world. We don't know exactly what that is, but trying to actually set a target and a goal to actually do the best for not only for this community, but the community at large. So we go beyond the Local Government Act saying it's just within these boundaries to something quite different. And if you do that and raise the bar, then you know you get third-party endorsement. Others actually see what you're doing, they come back and want to know what you're doing. And then if 10% of what we do sticks within other local governments, we've had a 10% benefit across that global community or that state community or that nation's community. So that's how we've structured it and why we've done the things we've done. And it is paying dividends.

SPEAKER_00 10:23

Yeah, I really like that top-down approach that you take to any change or anything that you try from a culture perspective or anything for the community, sorry, bottom-down from your internal perspective, which not only empowers your people, but they're the people on the ground who know what's happening and what's not happening as well. You know, you trust them, so you empower them. I understand that around three ish years ago, Anthony, you created a brand new role in the HR team. I believe it's a new role, the wonderful Chris's role in organizational development. What was your intention for that?

SPEAKER_01 10:56

Well, there were two parts to his role. Um, but well, the main part was we wanted to get, we spent a lot of time and effort and money on organisational development. So we don't, so even through COVID, our budget in that area hasn't been cut. We keep investing in the people. So we keep putting in programs that are fit for purpose at a point in time when there's a specific need. So we don't just roll the standard sort of things out all the time. So Chris's role was to make sure that we have a managed way of introducing and maintaining levels of skill within our organisation on an ongoing basis. So you know, things like core competencies around, you know, it could be anything from a subject matter expert in you know, project management, you wanted to have those project skills built into the organisation, or around customer service, or cultural optimization, or leadership type courses. And Chris's role was to make sure that that was routinely embedded within the organisation and entwined within that was innovation. Um, so how we innovate and we've developed an innovation framework which we use and now becomes embedded in what we actually do. His role is now evolving also into not just training but ongoing coaching, and we're doing this right across the board. So again, leadership doing the same thing and the council doing the same thing where we train people up on certain things, then we shadow them and coach them through the difficulties of the day-to-day operations of their roles, and we make sure that what they've learned is actually embedded and put into place in the organisation. So Chris's role is just making sure that that's all managed and we've got a programmed approach to maintaining certain levels of skill, but also that we get you get little spark-ups every now and then in certain service areas where now the culture's maybe not quite as good as it probably should be. And you have to be aware that nothing's ever going to be perfect. You're always going to have that 10%er right across the business. The thing is the little flare-ups move to little parts, other parts of the business over time, and they're largely led by people. And you know, sometimes people don't align to the values of the organisation and need to give them a chance, but also you know, sometimes you've got to make the change to make change and not be brutal about it, care for the people and give them every opportunity to change, but sometimes they just can't or don't want to, and they need to make choices. And I think that's what we're trying to actually deliver on, I suppose. And yeah, one of the other things that Chris has some level of involvement is we undertake operational reviews regularly. So over a four-year period between major reviews of our strategic community plan, we do deep dives into each of the service areas, and we may pick up a structural issue, we may pick up a process issue, a system issue, or a cultural issue, and then we actually have an implementation plan, an action plan to actually resolve that problem. So the staff, because we've got a mentioned before, a massive growth projection out there, also constraints on budget, we have to keep adapting to whatever those needs are and can't sit still. And so for the last five odd years, we've just continually been refining and redefining what we actually do, and we basically look at positions that become available and redefine them into roles we actually need at that point in time. So we don't just replace like for like and we get the right culture as we replace those positions as well.

SPEAKER_00 14:05

So you're always on the ball in relation to your organizational culture. I think it's always on your mind in relation to whatever you work on, and that role of Chris's is such an important one to keep everyone honest and you know, that accountability across the organization also. While you play within the rules and remits of a traditional local government organization, you also break many rules. And I want to ask you about you do work in the hierarchy, but you've created a different kind of hierarchy. Can you tell me about the various groups that you have? And I'm specifically leaning towards your salt group. If you could tell me about the collective that you've created there and why, what does the SALT group stand for? And what was your intention for creating that bunch of people?

SPEAKER_01 14:52

It came back to the structure. So I suppose I've worked in local government long enough to know that, and it's the same as any business, really, they always have silos of some description. But if your service delivery, which is largely what an we would be basically local governments only do two things, believe it or not, a deliver a service or deliver a project. That's it. And you can deliver a service in a project framework, funny enough. When you look at how we deliver services, for instance, if a planning approval came through, large part of the people who touch that particular planning approval are going to be within the planning section. However, they depended on five other bits of the business to actually deliver that service and to deliver on a timeline at a certain level of quality. So what we tried to do is say, well, and what ends up happening, sorry, is because of the silos is those other parts of the business go, no, my job's more important than that job, and I'll leave that for last, and then there's an impact on delivery. So what we tried to do is in this in the restructure, we have basically an executive, so myself, we have three chiefs called the C and inclusive of myself called the C-suite. We have a management band across the business with about 11 odd managers. And underneath those 11 managers, they usually have about three to four lines of business. And those lines of business are basically all service areas. And the service area leads, there is a lead in each of those places, is responsible for the they're end-to-end responsible for the delivery of the service of that service area. That means they're not only responsible for the team that they oversee, but they're also responsible for five other bits across the organization, other parts of the business that have to deliver for them. And this will be the first year where we put in place a performance review process which enables that service area lead to rate the performance provided back to them from other parts of the business, and vice versa. So that'll be an interesting outcome, I suppose, in terms of seeing what that actually delivers. But the idea is to hold each other responsible and make sure that you're focusing your attention on the things that actually matter, delivery of the service, not the specific thing I've got doing that I'm doing in my particular silo. So that's where the service area leads have come from, and that's what that group's about. That's service area leaders group or team at the SALTS, basically an operational management team that oversee end-to-end service delivery across the business. And they meet once a month, they talk about operational issues across the business and then resolve some of those conflicts. And one of the things that we've done in this process is that because they're end-to-end responsible, the service area lead here needs to speak to the service area lead here or any other part of their business that actually is providing that service to them. They're not to escalate to their manager and then their direct chief and then back down to the next chief and the next manager across the business to sort the issue out. They've got to do that across the business. So a lot of the issues that used to be escalated up and around and across aren't actually happening anymore, they actually just get dealt with across the business.

SPEAKER_00 17:54

Trust, amazing, beautiful. I have a question for you. What would you say to CEOs who say that focusing on their culture on an ongoing basis is not needed. They only need to focus on their culture just twice a year when the survey happens, let's say.

SPEAKER_01 18:12

Well, firstly, we don't focus specifically on culture itself. We focus on embedding our culture within the things we do ongoing. So people would say, how much time you spend on culture? Well, it's pretty much every part of what we do every day, but it's embedded within the things we do. So it's not a just I'm going to isolate culture for the day and silo it and talk about that. It's actually now you set you set the teams up with signature behaviours that align to the values of the organization and you measure it and you hold people to account to deliver on it. So our whole performance review process has got that in it. And we meet a few times a year with the teams and hold people to account in that space. So we actually measure values and culture. We don't actually just measure technical expertise and delivery of other outcomes. I suppose I would use is that you have to take a strategic approach to this. You can't just go in and go out and deal with culture and someone getting a consultant in to help deal with a specific issue and hopefully it's all good. You actually have to run with it yourself. You do need technical expertise coming in to help you out in sticky situations. Funny enough, we've had you, Brennan, to work with our um our executive team to go from great to greater, in my view, to get over those little things that inhibit your reaching your potential. So you do actually need to have that have that strategic approach. Make sure that you're constantly demonstrating those values. And a good example would be, you know, someone talks about they've got a work, we do um staff meetings, particularly on Zoom these days, and we get word clouds of, and I always ask stuff, what's one word that describes how you're feeling at the moment? And can give me one word that describes why you feel that way. And so we get a pulse of that quick snapshot, and any issues that come out of those word clouds within, you know, if they're a higher order issue, we'll look at okay, what's the issue there? Do a deep dive, provide some training, provide some guidance or coaching, and we respond to that and actually deliver on that. And in fact, I had one earlier this year about workload, and it's been on the agenda for a while, and we've been doing things in the background. One of the comments in there was, you know, we we we tell you there's a workload issue, but you're not doing anything about it. And so I wrote a blog at the end of the week and I sort of described some of the things we had been doing, but also said the onus is on you as an individual to take responsibility for your own workload. We will definitely help you. But what is it that you can actually do to deliver on change within your workplace? And I gave them a whole range of things that they actually they could actually check in on first before they even raised workload. And workload always usually equals an extra resource. And we don't keep applying getting new resources in the organization. We've been pretty stable for the last five years in terms of number because we just keep redefining ourselves. So it's really acting on the values, being responsible. Like ours is our values, is around integrity, one of them is around integrity, innovation, proactive and caring. Yeah, being proactive about that, responding to it when it counts, give them the information they need and actually show that some level of um integrity in terms of you responding that you know quickly on the issue and actually doing something about it. So say what do what you say and lead by example is pretty important. Again, I sort of mentioned a little bit earlier, you can't underestimate a bottom-up approach with things. A quality solution will only be effective with acceptance. So if you can't get acceptance, and with humans, you get high levels of acceptance if they're involved in the development of the solution. If you don't involve them in it and you make a captain's call, which sometimes you have to do, COVID, we're gonna send you all home. Sorry, not engaging, it's gonna happen. But if you don't engage with them generally, you'll get a substandard result. And I suppose going back to where it was started, avoidance in the organization is high, engagement was low. If you get people involved highly and your engagement index rises because they're involved in some of the decision making and you trust that they can actually make decisions, ultimately they'll definitely definitely make mistakes as well, and you have to wear that, but ultimately you'll get better results because they'll actually deliver for you and you don't have to actually do the work yourself, which is ultimately where a lot of leadership positions go. They just go in and rescue, as opposed to allow their people to learn to swim, not have to be rescued, and hopefully get better outcomes. So that's probably my few tips for the the culture in the culture space.

SPEAKER_00 22:24

And this really plays out in your various, you know, everyone who works at the town also, I know a few people who have moved on and uh share the same sentiment and continue on with the way of working in that respect as well. So whatever you're doing there really seems to gel with people and they they carry it forward to other organisations, which is just so beautiful and pleasing to see.

SPEAKER_01 22:47

That's a really good point. And I and I going back to what I said originally around our objective is to get better outcomes for the community at large, not just the town, even though some rate payers think I pay your rates and you need to focus on us. Yes, we do. However, the broader picture is really important. If you focus on your staff as training them and educating them for the industry at large, they'll come back to you. I've had many, many people applying for jobs back here who used to work here in different roles in the past, wanting to come back in at a higher level usually, you don't usually get that cycle coming through. So you know it plays out and you can see it.

SPEAKER_00 23:22

Yeah, that's amazing. I have one final question for you, Anthony. If I gave you a magic wand, what is one way that you would change the workplace? If you had no rules, what's one way you'd change your way of workplaces?

SPEAKER_01 23:40

It's not a word, but it's too empowered community.

SPEAKER_00 23:44

What does that mean?

SPEAKER_01 23:45

If you have an empowered community that helps make decisions for you, and rather than having to go the very bureaucracy of our decision-making processes, ultimately they will live with what they've requested from themselves in terms of outcomes for out their town. So if they make mistakes, they own it. If they make really good decisions, they own it. The legislative framework we work in is okay, but not transformational and doesn't allow the great community at large to help be the decision maker in this process.

SPEAKER_00 24:19

You're working ways around though, which I have clearly seen. It's quite the organization that you're running, Anthony. Thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure talking with you.

SPEAKER_01 24:29

Thanks very much, Brina. Much appreciated.

SPEAKER_00 24:31

If you want to meet great thinkers who stand against crappy workplace cultures, lousy leaders, and toxic teams, then you need to join the Ways to Change Your Workplace Facebook group, which is linked in today's show notes. I will see you in the next episode. Bye for now.