John McDonald

When you talk about politics are you referring to power? 

Exactly. Who holds the power? Who gets things done? Who do people pay attention to? Who’s risky to hang around with? Who gossips? Who’s discreet? All the intrigue that goes on in every system are relationships. It’s just way too complex to deal with one on one.

And it is always the case that the person that’s higher up in the food chain has the most power? 

Look, there are formal and informal leaders. And you can have people who have no authority formally but whom others give a huge of authority to informally. So it varies greatly.

Like the secretary who is the heart and soul of an organisation? 

Totally, the people who are the gatekeepers to the boss or the people who you go to because they have an informal network where they get things done.

Every workplace has its own unwritten rules which really define the culture of that group and while you can talk about organisational culture we would think that culture happens group-by-group and is determined by what the unwritten rules, the informal arrangements or protocols, whatever you want to call them.

I want to take it back a little bit to find out more about your business and your background in particular. 

We’re an Australian company and we’re based in Australia, Canada, the States and England, with two owners in Australia and two in Canada. We’re a growing company so we’ve got, I think slightly over a dozen people here. We’ve got a bit more than 20 in the North American operation, we’ve just got a few in England but that’s growing there as well. I first came to this idea when I was with the NSW Police.

That’s when you worked with Christine Nixon? 

Yes, who I happen to think is one of the best leaders in the country, by the way. They really gave me the freedom to look for different ways for dealing with conflict when I was with the police. We tried this stuff in policing and it seemed to work and in fact, it’s been adopted in criminal justice systems all around the world now. I mean, I’d been 10 years with the police.

What were you doing with the police? 

I was the principal advisor to the minister and the commissioner on young people and crime. And police agencies are fascinating places but 10 years – it was time for a change. So we started a business taking what we’d learnt in the criminal justice system with conflict into the workplace.

My background is in education and policing and industrial relations, so the business really grew out of that.

Conferencing really deals with one of the streams which we call repair. We have what we call prevent, repair and protect.

The work grew out of the conferencing experience when you keep getting organisations who come back to you and say, “Hey we had that absolute mess and you sorted it out, can you do another one and another one?” We started thinking hang on, there must be ways to stop people getting into this mess.

So we developed products that we call the respectful workplace products and they really help people get a definition on what a healthy respectful workplace is and then they give people a technique for challenging your peers or your supervisors or bosses, about behaviours that you’re uncomfortable with without making it worse for you.

They also give people the ability to be challenged, so there’s giving feedback and there’s receiving feedback, and we really searched the literature worldwide looking at how people do that sort of stuff and found that there’s a lot of stuff there, but a lot of it is complex and there’s a whole lot of things that you have to remember when you do it. A lot doesn’t recognise the fact that whilst most workplaces have policies that say, “If I’m unhappy with you I should go and talk to you about it”, most of us wouldn’t dream of doing that, it would be too difficult for us. So we manage that stuff by avoiding it or we go and tell other people, not the person that’s upsetting us.

I think we just have to acknowledge that’s what human beings do. I mean one of the reasons is our bodies, our physiology; we’re conflict averse, it’s kind of stupid to put yourself into a threatening situation.

So we suggest to organisations that rather than wait until a conflict happens, don’t change the policy about approaching people but give them a template or an outline of a conversation so that everybody agrees, “This is how we’re going to talk when we’re finding things difficult”. I mean, it might seem a bit silly but you need to talk about how you’re going to talk if we have that conversation, and how you’re going to listen to it when it happens to you.

To have these conversations I think requires a bit of courage to initiate them and then to receive the feedback requires a fair bit of self-discipline – not to want to argue with someone.

So all those things, people need to be given some time and space to get their heads around that say, “Yes we agree this is a good way to do it and then practice it”.

We provide that stuff in our prevent stream and in our repair stream we provide conferencing, which is to say even with all the best intent in the world you’re always going to end up with people who going to rub each other the wrong way. So you need a process to deal with that.

And the other stream we call “protect”, which is around risk of violence assessment, so it’s when someone loses the plot completely and threatens people’s safety or even lives.

All our products are what we call evidence-based products; there’s a lot of research and a lot of science gone into how they work.

In the protect side of things, we would have one of our forensic psychologists go through a whole process of deciding whether it’s a low, medium or high risk of the violence taking place and then we would report on that to the organisation and then we would help them manage it.

And then we would help them provide what’s called individual testimony in courts when there has been a violent incident.

So it’s a range of approaches, but they’re all around behaviour from when we want to keep things on an even keel right through to when someone completely loses the plot.

So how do you find your clients? Are they referred to you by the courts or do the companies approach you directly? 

You know what? We’d been in business for 10 years and it was a real struggle when we started because you had things like mediation and arbitration but there was no market; we had to establish a market to say, ‘look when you’re dealing with conflict, mediation is not to deal with conflicts, it’s designed to deal with disputes and they’re qualitatively different things.’

So now a bit over 60% of our clients are repeat business now. People get us to roll our training out across the whole agency and then I guess we come in each year and top that up.

And then every so often when a conflict happens, they call us in to run a conference and very, very occasionally they will have a threat of violence and we will be available to help them deal with that.

So it’s mostly repeat business although we do a lot of work in the criminal justice system in the UK for the government. We’re also off to Switzerland to meet with a multinational who’s a client over there. Then in October I’m off to Florida where we’re meeting with a whole group of vice presidents from Fortune 500 companies who are interested in what we do.

So that international work that you’re speaking of, the only people that are able to do your programs are your own? 

That’s right. We’re pretty conscious that things can go wrong. So you don’t want to let people lose and get it badly wrong, they’re pretty serious issues for people these things.

Having seen so many conflicts, what things do you do in your own company to make sure it’s a healthy culture? 

What a great question, we hate each other. (Laughs) No, that’s not true, we actually get on pretty well.

The single thing we do is when we take on new staff, part of the induction is around understanding our values and understanding what the ingredients of a respectful workplace, and then being tutored in how to give and receive feedback rather than let things build up.

Often HR people and managers and lenders tend to manage difficult stuff by avoiding it, and it comes back to bite you.

It comes back to having everyone skilled in giving and receiving feedback. And you know it took a while for us to get that right too I must say. It’s just not simple stuff for us.

In Victoria we’ve seen the introduction of Brodie’s Law that deals specifically with bullying in the workforce. Do you think that industrial relations settings have a huge influence and how people relate to each other in the workforce? 

You know, I don’t think they have much influence at all on individuals, but I do think they are incredibly important for organisations and they can be a great motivator for an organisation to take seriously the way people behave and their interactions with each other so they don’t let it develop into more serious behaviour, into more destructive behaviour. So in that sense legislation usually works for people who are going to behave themselves anyway.

Politicians tend to think that deterrent theory works. I’m not sure that it does actually anywhere. Well, it works for those who are going to behave, but I think organisationally I think that stuff makes a difference.

I think organisations pay attention when they know they are going to have to pay in some sort of way or senior people in the organisation could be held personally responsible for things that happen if they don’t provide a safe and healthy workplace for people.

One of the temptations when you have conflict in your business is to fire or isolate or demote a person who is seen to be responsible for that conflict. Is that the best way to go about it? 

You know what? Sometimes the right thing to do is to let people go. There’s no doubt about that.

And it sometimes becomes obvious during a conference, not often, that there’s too much water under the bridge and people come to their own conclusion that they should leave. But if someone is unstable and they have mental health issues, you can put your organisation and individuals at risk if you just unilaterally fire someone. Not only can it be unlawful, but it can motivate someone to want to seek revenge.

So you really need to be careful about doing things the right way. And look, the policies and the laws and the things like that around that stuff are there generally for the right reasons and their intent is to protect people and not let people harm each other.

I think those things are best done the right way because they’re tricky when they aren’t. If we’re doing a threat assessment and it’s been a very tense workplace and someone’s threatened and we’re asked to come in and they say, ‘we just want to give them the flick.’ We say, ‘we need to settle down and slow down because doing that may exacerbate the situation.’ They may feel as if they’ve got nothing to lose, the individual and that can increase the risk of violence.

Well, thank you John, it was great to talk with you.