Listen in as Sue McCarrey, CEO of the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Authority (NOPSEMA), reflects that in life and in your career, you learn so much more from when things didn’t go the way you thought they would and how over time, that’s how you grow. Sue also stresses that it only becomes learning if you have someone to talk about it with, and that’s important advice for leaders in how they approach and support younger leaders today.
Sue McCarrey, CEO of the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Authority (NOPSEMA), talks about how different groups of people in an organisation need to be treated and approached differently in considering new challenges and opportunities in their organisation. Sue explains that in addition to people who naturally love and are up for taking on new challenges, it’s important that leaders also recognise and encourage others who have the ability to take it on but may lack the confidence to think about giving opportunities a go before they’ve lost the chance to.
As a regulatory organisation, the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Authority (NOPSEMA) is an independent, statutory decision-maker. And with that, it means that their decisions can be challenged in court. Sue McCarrey, CEO of NOPSEMA, talks about how leaders need to provide a safety net for their staff in this FAQ and how that’s about supporting them in challenges in court or day-to-day decisions, acknowledging that they are trying to do their job with the information they have, and if they had all the right reasons and intention, how it’s important to be a coach in helping them and the organisation learn from it so you don’t fall down that trap again.
Listen in as Sue McCarrey, CEO of the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Authority (NOPSEMA), explains that as a regulator, one of the most important skills to do what you do is courage in this FAQ. Sue explains how it takes courage to make their decisions and approach their role and not to interfere where you don’t believe it’s your role to interfere.
Sue McCarrey, CEO of the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Authority (NOPSEMA), provides the attributes she looks for, particularly in the leadership part of the organisation. These include the ability to be able to critically analyse issues that can be complex and good communication skills. Sue also distinguishes that being a good communicator isn’t just about being a good talker, it’s also about having the ability to listen, understand the world and context that they are working in, being respectful to others, and providing a safety net for their team so that they feel they are able to put ideas forward.
Sue McCarrey, CEO of the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Authority (NOPSEMA), explains in this FAQ how she rarely looks at anything and says that it failed. Instead, she acknowledges that things didn’t go as expected or to plan but then focuses on who they need to work with and talk to, how she supports her team to take it to the next step, and how having that mindset and approach helps you achieve things.
Sue McCarrey, CEO of National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Authority (NOPSEMA), provides her perspectives on timing in this FAQ, and how often it comes down to the time potentially not being right for a project or plan to move forward, but it doesn’t mean that circumstances won’t change in the future when the need arises and you need to pull up that work and move forward.
Sue McCarrey, CEO of the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Authority (NOPSEMA), provides an honest reflection from earlier in her career when she was younger and how, like many of us, she would often perceive things that didn’t go to plan or when things went wrong as failures and take them to heart. Sue shares that as time goes on and you build your experience in your career, you develop the ability to look at things more critically, observing what’s occurred and distinguishing if it was really a failure, if it was potentially inevitable, or if it’s something you can look at to see then the opportunity to do it differently in this FAQ.
For leaders to manage failure within their teams, it’s important that they reflect on their own careers to remember the times when they have failed to help foster resilience and create a work environment where it is ok to fail. Maree Bridger, Chief Operating Officer at the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communication, and the Arts, provides some important lessons for leaders in acknowledging their own mistakes early, being accountable for the mistakes of their team, and not shooting off blame to an individual as these actions lead to create teams that are loyal and resilience and helps to build an environment full of trust and respect.
Listen to her full episode here
Taking the time and effort to capture the sentiment and feedback and presenting this back to your decision-makers in a format they would appreciate and understand cannot be underestimated. Listen in as Maree Bridger, Chief Operating Officer at the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communication, and the Arts, discusses this further through her experiences working in the public sector.
Listen to her full episode here
Maree Bridger, Chief Operating Officer at the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communication, and the Arts, shares some of the challenges of running a large department where there can be vast differences in projects being delivered. She also speaks about running projects in an agile way where there is a degree of flex with balancing the needs of central agencies who require costings and reporting to be provided in a more traditional and formal format.
Listen to her full episode here
Innovation isn’t just about creating something new and shiny; it is also about finding new ways of doing something. Listen in as Maree Bridger, Chief Operating Officer at the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communication, and the Arts, provides her unique perspective on innovating in the public sector. Maree explains that in her experience, innovation can take time, it can be slow and it can be incremental. Often, you may not think that you are innovating or moving forward, but when you look back, the tweaking and adjusting along the way has led you to a new place. That’s innovation, although it may not be called out as that at the time.
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Maree Bridger, Chief Operating Officer at the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communication, and the Arts, describes how her department adopted ‘Red is your friend’ in how they viewed and presented projects that weren’t going to plan. Maree explains that at first, it had a high degree of scepticism, and it took 18 months of a concerted effort for teams to understand why a project was going red and how, at a corporate level, they were supported and helped to turn it around.
Listen to her full episode here