Chapter 3      

Always look for ways to extend yourself

I loved doing new things so I applied to act in John's role as Operations Ranger, overseeing the park's day-to-day operations when he took his annual leave. This would be a big step up. I would be manager of 18 rangers, all older (some as much as 40 years my senior), wiser and much more experienced than me.

Acting up

To my delight, John accepted my application. He showed trust in my potential and knew that if I had a shot at it I would give it everything. And I did, repeatedly! When he was away I put in long, long hours coming up to speed with some of the mysteries of Operations. Budgets! Spreadsheets! Reports! Meetings with contractors! There was a huge administrative burden that I wasn't prepared for. But I plugged away and leant on some of the more experienced rangers for guidance and advice. When John returned he was happy with my performance and from then on I applied for every acting role that became available across the state.

I knew that to progress quickly I needed to build my capability across a wide variety of situations, in different regions, parks and roles. I moved around the state a lot over the next two years. I knew the one advantage that I had over many of my peers was that I was unattached and childless. Many of my peers with equal or better qualifications and experience were married and settled, and had put down roots in their local area. They had babies, children at school and mortgages. I had none of these, and although I think I wanted them at some point, I knew that the opportunity to be mobile and learn from the best in the farthest flung corners of the state would quickly pass.

Each year I would take a six- to eight-week secondment to another region. One year I worked with NSW Parks and Wildlife on planning for the Sydney Olympics, another time I spent six weeks in Mildura, and other times I stayed local.

My selection of secondments was quite strategic, however. To date I had spent all my time in the metropolitan parks. Since we had merged with the national parks authority I knew that to have credibility outside of the metropolitan areas I would need to be immersed in national parks. These parks are very different ecologically and in terms of visitors. The focus in these parks is much less on visitor amenity and much more on protection of the natural environment. Chasing gun-wielding hunters back to their car isn't something you get to do in a metropolitan park! The closest you get is a golfer wannabe practising his or her driving skills in the middle of the crowded barbecue area.

I focused on broadening my skills and my understanding of national parks. I worked on the koala relocation program and caught, tagged, bagged and relocated koalas threatened by loss of habitat leading to overpopulation and starvation. (I still hear people call them koala bears! I reckon I spent as much time correcting that misnomer as I later spent correcting perceptions about polar bears.) I worked around the state, anywhere the organisation needed extra rangers.

My next break came when a role was advertised internally for a District Program Manager in Ballarat. Knowing very little about managing large-scale programs, and recognising that once again I would be on my own in a regional town where I had no friends, I applied and was awarded the role.

It was Monday morning on my second week on the job. I was a city chick in the bush, surrounded by ‘blokey’ blokes. I understood very little about life in rural areas. Peter, one of my peers, came up to me as we were getting ready for our weekly meeting: ‘How was your weekend, Rach?’ he asked cheerily. ‘Did you get a couple of inches?’

I turned red, opened my mouth and turned around. That was how my girlfriends and I would talk! I was certainly not going to discuss my nocturnal activities in the tearoom on a Monday morning with someone I hardly knew. I beat a hasty retreat to my desk and buried my head in some paperwork. I felt ashamed for being talked to that way and shocked that Peter would be so bold and brazen. Fancy asking a young, single woman you hardly knew if she had got a few inches on the weekend? How rude!

Thankfully Marcia, who was my age and knew quite a few city chicks, had seen the interaction. She came over to me very quietly, bent down close to my ear and whispered, ‘Rain. He's talking about RAIN!’

‘Oh, my, God …’ I exhaled.

I had a lot to learn! After a week it was apparent that rain was the number one topic of conversation in the bush. We were by then seven years into a 10-year drought, so it was never far from people's thoughts.

The power of influence

My role in Ballarat involved administering and managing the range of programs that were planned and in place across the Grampians. I again found myself knee-deep in very large, home-grown and complicated spreadsheets, managing programs like ‘Rabbit Busters’ (you can imagine) and ‘Weed Control’. I had no staff reporting to me and had no direct power over anyone I was working with. There were four rangers-in-charge (RICs) who were equal grade to me, but I needed them to participate and contribute current information in order for me to do my job. Apart from the ability to wrestle with a spreadsheet, I knew that to succeed in this role I would need to very quickly develop the ability to influence those around me. I had to be able to get them to do things that weren't interesting or even related to their existing roles.

Rangers are like everyone who is deeply passionate about what they do. They relish getting their hands dirty on a project; they love to plan out new programs and deliver great outcomes for society. They don't, however, like to write up reports. It's the same everywhere. Salespeople who have to submit their outbound call sheet to head office know that mundane activity isn't going to get them a single deal. Project managers know that accounting for why they overspent on pesticide by $15 isn't going to reduce the number of rabbits in a park. So mostly they put it off. And off. Until head office notices. And then they'll be ‘good’ for another couple of months before they put it off again. Does this sound familiar?

It was precisely this type of environment I found myself in when I arrived at Ballarat. The first month went by in a blur, mostly spent talking to the project and program managers, getting a feel for their passions, projects and progress. At the end of the second month I fired up my spreadsheets and got to work on the reports to head office.

Have you ever tried to write a report without any data? Have you ever read a report that is so devoid of data you can't trust it? Well, that was my first monthly submission to head office. And … no one noticed. I lost sleep during the first week after my submission. I was waiting for the phone call: ‘Oh Rachael, sorry we made a mistake putting you in that role.’ But it never came.

What did come, however, was next year's interim budget. I still wasn't completely on top of the finances by this stage and I just forwarded the budget around to my RICs. And then the phone went crazy …

‘What do you mean by this?’

‘Why have you cut this program?’

‘Don't you know that the weed problem in this park is out of control? Why have you cut the weed control budget by 15 per cent?’

Cut budgets? Me? Whaaaat?

I was very much under the pump, stressed and worried when I got through to the program team at head office who controlled and allocated the budget.

‘Oh, well it all comes down to evidence doesn't it … There's simply no evidence that what you are doing is working … There are any number of projects and programs around the state that have a much higher profile than yours and, more to the point, we don't actually know exactly what's going on down there and we must prioritise somehow, so we use the information provided by the parks themselves.’

Here was the answer to my two biggest issues: what had happened to the budget, and how would I get my RICs to do what I wanted even when they didn't want to?

I'm sure you know what I did next. I did it fast. I got all my RICs together for a tactical meeting. I drew a line for them between their reporting activities and their budget allocation for next year. I put myself in the middle and explained that my job was to help them succeed, and that their success would depend on accurate, timely data that provides full justification for their work.

They quickly went to work, backtracked through a year of raw data, prepared their reports and entered the data into the system. It went straight to the budget allocation team, who were able to see the value of the work we were doing and, importantly, could see the return on investment.

The key lesson I learned through all of this was how to exercise influence when not in a position of power. When I sat back and reflected I realised there was a simple three-step process that was now only beginning to dawn on me.

Firstly, I had to understand the interests of my people. What is at stake for them, what do they have to lose and what do they have to gain? In this case it was very simple: they stood to lose their budget allocation for next year. In most cases, it's much more complex and will involve social and political aspects as well as access to resources, including people.

Secondly, I had to understand the levers I had at my disposal that could ‘change the game’ for my team. In this case, the lever was data. Good quality, lots of it, analysed and summarised in a way that made sense to people used to making financial decisions.

The third step, I realised, was my role in both the stuff-up and the solution. I contributed to the initial problem by not grasping the link between data and budget decisions. My ongoing role became one of facilitation between the RICs and the finance people. When I left that role a year later I had learned a lot about influence, but I had also left behind a much stronger and more financially accountable set of projects and a group of RICs who knew why reporting variances and reporting on progress were so important.

For anyone looking to develop their influencing skills, I would highly recommend taking on a role where you have no positional power to make people do things. You will learn how to position yourself, how to develop your value proposition, how to sell it and, importantly, how to sustain the relationship when for the other person it gets too hard.

In my experience, IT professionals often do this extraordinarily well. They don't run a ‘line of business’ so they're not responsible (and don't get the glory) for top-line revenue. They design and run companywide programs that take years and eat large chunks of available cash. Yet they (the good ones) are able to sell the concept and idea to their diverse stakeholders. For a marketing director, investing in IT platforms means a smaller budget for marketing campaigns. For a human resources director, it might mean tightening an organisation's training and development budget. There are always trade-offs, but good influencers know how to make their trade worthwhile. (Delivering on the promise is also important, and somewhat fewer IT professionals are as successful in this arena!)