This transcript has been edited for clarity and checked against the available source transcript and recording. Filler, false starts, and obvious transcription errors have been corrected without changing the speaker’s meaning.
James: Hi there and welcome. My name is James, and welcome to Graduate Theory. My guest today is a former high school principal. She’s since become the CEO at the South Australian Tertiary Admissions Centre. Today, she is involved with many academic institutions and is on executive boards across South Australia.
Her main thing is What’s the Stuff. What’s the stuff, Wendy Teasdale-Smith? Welcome to the show. It’s great to have you on.
Wendy: Thank you. It’s great to be on. I’m really looking forward to it.
James: Excellent. One thing I do want to delve into is that you’ve had such a fantastic career. You’ve gone through the whole chain, from right at the bottom to right at the top.
How did you end up in your current executive coaching and public speaking coaching role? How did that come about?
Wendy: That’s actually something I did later in my career. In some senses, I consider myself almost post-career because I’m technically, at least, semi-retired. The public speaking coaching is something I chose to do after I had, technically at least, finished full-time work, and it was really a hobby or an interest. I’m in a position now where I don’t need to earn a really big salary and all those sorts of things. I don’t want to work quite as hard as I used to or be under as much pressure as I was when I was in executive roles.
That’s really how I got to do that. Someone at the time was talking to me about consultancy in general. Lots of education people go into consultancy, and that really means they’re not doing much at all. Anyway, this person said to me, “Wendy, I think you could be a public speaking coach.” I thought, “Oh, I reckon I’d enjoy that.”
It’s one of the things in what I call a portfolio career now. I’m doing several different things: public speaking coaching, involvement in Women on Boards, and lecturing international students in an MBA course. There are lots of different things now rather than one big gig, like I used to have.
James: Public speaking is one of the ways I’ve connected with you, and something that you’re definitely very good at. You’ve received multiple awards for different public speaking things that you’ve done. Is that something you’ve worked on and improved throughout your whole career, or have you paid close attention to it more recently?
Wendy: It’s actually followed me throughout my career, to be honest with you. I remember being able to do things like debates really well at high school. That was about confidence, I think, and being able to argue a point. I used to get As in those, but I didn’t think about it much until I had just started my first permanent job and was sent to Port Augusta as a teacher. My then principal was a new and really up-and-coming person. He was all over the media, which was unusual in those days because it was way before social media as we know it now.
He spoke really well. He was really good at speaking to staff, engaging them and getting the message across. I remember thinking very early in my career, “That’s something to get good at,” and practising. I looked at how different people spoke and for different ways to improve: what made one person come across as credible and another person not come across as credible. I started looking at that sort of thing very early, basically in my first full-time job as a teacher.
James: Talk to me about your early days, when you started teaching and things like that. Was it something you really had a passion for when you were going through high school and university, or something you ended up in and your passion grew over time as you got more involved?
Wendy: Part of my story, part of my narrative, is the fact that I was born in Elizabeth. For people who are not familiar with that, it’s a very working-class part of South Australia. Jimmy Barnes grew up there, and that’s where the song “Working Class Man” comes from. I came from a poor background, in a Housing Trust house, without a lot of aspirations or leaders around in the community that we knew. My dad was a refrigeration mechanic, and my mum worked in the cafeteria at what was then Harris Scarfe, so they weren’t what you’d call well-paid jobs. The idea of leadership wasn’t part of the game at all.
University was a strong emphasis of my father’s. He’d obviously always wanted to get a degree himself but was never in a financial position to do so. He really pushed my sister and me to get a university degree. Teaching was the thing because, in those days, in Elizabeth in particular, or in working-class places, a woman had two career options. One was nursing and the other was teaching, and I didn’t like blood.
Teaching it was. That’s really how the decision was made. After I’d become a qualified teacher and started teaching, I wondered whether it really was for me. As you get promoted in teaching, it’s one of those things where you get moved outside the classroom. The more you get promoted for what you’re good at, the less you do of it. For many years, I wondered whether it was something that merely worked okay or something I had a passion for.
I wasn’t certain until I started lecturing at Kaplan Business School, which is with international students. Then I realised just how much of a passion it was, how natural it was and how great it felt to be back in the classroom again. It wasn’t until then that I really appreciated that teaching was meant for me and that I was in the right job.
I think it comes into the broader category of being an altruistic kind of person. I get a really strong sense of satisfaction when my students achieve. I don’t get lots of satisfaction from making a profit; I get lots of satisfaction from those sorts of things. That’s the type of person who’s going to be good at teaching. It’s the same with people in any type of service industry: it’s about giving and getting back from other people. That’s the sort of thing that wakes me up in the morning and makes me feel enthusiastic. It turned out to be the right career, although a few times I thought perhaps it wasn’t.
James: I think that’s really cool, and it’s certainly a great story that you almost lucked into something you ended up being so passionate about.
Wendy: I don’t know how that happened, but it was the right career. My parents didn’t expect me to do more. I remember my dad saying, “Take typing at school in Year 10. Just in case you don’t become a teacher, then you can become a secretary.” The idea that I would do anything else, or that there was anything else to do, was far outside their worldview. It didn’t occur to them that there were a whole lot of opportunities out there, so they didn’t share that with me at the time.
James: You started work as a teacher and then went along this path where you were getting promoted within the school. You were going up and up, and the further you went, the more you moved outside the classroom.
One thing that really interests me is that some people can continue this progression, while other people struggle at certain points. Some people aren’t interested in going up, which is totally fine. There are also people like you who manage to continue going up, while others get stuck at a certain level or want to go up but have something in their way. Have you seen examples of that? In your situation, was there anything you did in particular to get past those barriers?
Wendy: For me, I had to have a career. I didn’t realise that when I was younger, and I wouldn’t have been happy unless I had one. But it isn’t for everyone, and you don’t want or need a world where everyone wants to climb a career ladder. You want some people who want to do their job really well. That’s actually the important thing.
When I was a principal and we had some sort of leadership position, maybe an acting job, I’d approach one or two of my really good teachers and say, “Have you thought about going for this coordinator role? Have you thought about doing this?” They’d consider it and then say, “Wendy, I really love teaching.” I’d say, “Great. You stay in the classroom and do that, because that’s where I need people like you: people who really love teaching, want to stay there and want to make a difference.”
It’s really important that a career ladder isn’t for everyone, and it isn’t a measure of your success or what contribution you make to the world. There are times I’ve wished I was a little less driven than I am. A couple of times I’ve thought it would be nice to have a bit of a break, but it isn’t for me.
There are real qualities that make you a leader and the sort of person who’s bound to do well in life in terms of what we call traditional success: having a career, moving forward, earning more money and so on. I see some of those traits in younger people now, and I’ll say, “You’ll be fine. I know you’re frustrated at the moment, but you’ll be fine because you’ve got the drive.” You really do have to be somewhat driven.
It took me a while to get used to those ideas. Something I want to share is that being a feminist and being a woman makes a difference to how you look at this. Words like “driven” are not good women’s words. They’re words we don’t like. I always say that you never hear “ambitious” and “woman” in the same sentence when it’s meant as a compliment.
Often, you’ll see stereotypes on television of successful women who are nearly always unhappy or whom no one likes. There aren’t many positive portrayals. I reject that view and the way it’s portrayed, but it’s still around. The Devil Wears Prada is a great example: a hugely successful woman is portrayed in an atrocious way in that movie. That’s commonly the way it is.
You don’t always get rewarded for those things, but the qualities that make people successful are certain driven qualities. Those people continually look for ways to make themselves better. They think of different things, put extra things in and do extra ahead of time.
I’ve had circumstances in which people wanted to be leaders. To use a school scenario, because it’s easiest for me to talk about, a teacher would suddenly say to me one day, “I want to go for this coordinator’s job,” but they would have done nothing extra except teach. As I said before, there’s nothing wrong with that, but they weren’t on one extra committee. They didn’t help out in PE when we had sports events. They were never there a minute longer: they drove into the car park at the last minute so they wouldn’t be late for the start of class, and they left as soon as they could. Then, all of a sudden, they’d say, “I want to be a leader,” and I’d think, “Really?”
The people who are successful have already done a heap of those extra things well ahead of time. They’re not the ones who sit around and wait for things to come. When you go for a leadership position, you’ve already done a whole lot of things you can talk about when they ask, “How do you inspire people? How do you motivate them?” You can talk about running an event or, to use education examples, running the fete for the school or a sports day, and how you got people on side. If you haven’t done those things, how are you going to talk about how you do them? The people who show those qualities and become successful nearly always have that type of personality.
I did one of the Myers-Briggs tests. It’s one of those personality tests you can do. There are serious arguments that it’s not terribly valid, but if I do any of those kinds of tests, it will say, “You’re a leader.” I remember doing one of them once, and it said, “It doesn’t matter what background you’ve got. You won’t be happy unless you’re a leader, so just get on with it.” That’s true for me.
It’s interesting because we know each other from Toastmasters, and this year I’ve picked up the president’s role, something I’d chosen never to do before. I’m loving it because it’s a leadership role. I was naturally attracted to that kind of thing. The people who become leaders are the ones who go out of their way.
I had a client recently who hasn’t a minute of time. She’s in one of the Big Four professional services companies and is working her way up. They don’t get paid a lot in the early phases. She was meeting me on a weekend to get coaching in public speaking, and she was obviously scraping together a bit of money to do that. That’s the sort of person who’s going to achieve, not the one who waits for their organisation to pay for it or recommend someone. She wanted to do it, so she sought it out herself and got it happening. People who show that sort of initiative are the ones who become successful and become leaders.
People say it’s luck sometimes, but it isn’t really. It’s usually hard work, being ready to take chances, putting yourself out there and seeking things. You’re doing this podcast and probably aren’t making lots of money out of it, is my guess. You’re choosing to do extra things. That’s what people choose to do.
James: That was a really amazing answer. There are so many things to dive into. I definitely agree with what you’re saying about going for a role. You don’t want to get put into a role and then become the thing once you’ve been given the opportunity, rather than being ready for the opportunity first.
One example of how I think about it is a soccer team, or any sports team. You get into the team once you’re good enough to be in the team. You don’t get put into the team when you’re not ready and then get expected to perform.
Wendy: The skills that might make you captain of a team aren’t necessarily the same ones that would get you into the team. The things that get you onto the team are the technical skills associated with playing the sport, but what will get you into the captain’s role will be leadership skills.
It’s the same, and a piece of advice that I would give, particularly the higher you go: the things that make you good at the first job, or get you a job at a certain level, aren’t what will get you promoted. If you think about it, the next-level skills are different. You need opportunities to learn them, take chances and make mistakes so that you can talk about those experiences.
James: It’s that whole distinction between hard skills and soft skills. Can you do an Excel spreadsheet? Can you program this thing? Then there’s the other stuff: can you get the team to finish this project on time and make it a good project? Those soft skills are so important.
You were talking about leadership and drive. Is that something you’ve always had throughout your career? With leadership in particular, have you grown your abilities and interests in that area as your career has gone on?
Wendy: I think I did have it, but I didn’t realise it early on. I was a contract teacher first, and I wanted to get permanency. In order to get permanency, you had to do a lot more than just be your average teacher.
My teaching background is home economics, so it’s not considered the most powerful subject in the school. You can hide at the back. Most people who go to a school in Australia know that the home economics area, starting with tech studies, is at the back of the school. The front of the school is all about power. If you look at the classrooms closest to the front office area, that’s where maths is taught.
How far out you are in the school says something about you. It’s the same with any office set-up, by the way: how physically close you are to the boss says something about you. The further away you are, the less powerful you are. Home economics was way out there, and everyone forgot about it or didn’t think it was terribly important. I had to go out and about immediately, make myself known to the principal and be seen to be contributing and doing things.
Looking back on it, when we were being taught about home economics teaching, they talked about many of these things. I realise now that those were actually leadership teachings. They would talk to us, and we’d have to write papers about scenarios such as being called into the principal’s office and being told that no student beyond Year 8 had to do home economics. How were you going to change his mind? How were you going to influence him to think something different? That was part of what we were taught.
As a casual or contract teacher, I was always busy proving my worth and being visible. I thought I was doing that only because I had to get a permanent job. When I became permanent, I was sent to Port Augusta. That was part of the deal. The principal took me off probation, and I remember the day he signed off to say I was a good enough teacher to become permanent. Frankly, once you’re permanent, you can almost never be sacked, so it’s a big deal in any education department in Australia.
He asked me when I was going to go for promotion. That was the long and short of it, because he said, “You’re ambitious, of course.” I’d never been so offended in my life. I said, “I am not!” I was so angry because “ambitious” wasn’t a compliment. It wasn’t a good woman’s word. He had a hearty laugh and thought, “You’re young.” He said, “Actually, you are. When you get your head around that, come back and talk to me.” I flounced off.
It was certainly later that I realised he’d picked something up. It wasn’t until I came to terms with it that I realised I was the sort of person who, once I’d mastered something, needed to do more. I had to get more involved. I was interested, motivated and gung-ho about that type of thing.
I had those qualities from early on and started going for jobs early. I also thought about going outside the education department. When I did leave the education department, it shocked lots of people because most people don’t leave; they stay in the education department forever. I thought, “I want to go and try something else.” It was brave and courageous to go into a different kind of employment where you weren’t permanent anymore and could get the sack.
That drive was definitely always there for me, but I didn’t think about it for a while when I was going up the ladder. Mine was a traditional ladder career: I was a teacher, then a coordinator, an assistant principal, a deputy principal and a principal. It was straight up a ladder.
When I was a deputy principal, I originally thought, “I don’t think I want to be a principal.” The deputy principal’s role was highly organisational, including doing the timetable, and I was very good at that sort of thing. I thought I didn’t want to make the next move. Through a fluke of circumstance, my boss got another job at about the time I started thinking about giving that principal step a try. She went off to another job, and I got an acting role. Once I was in there and became comfortable in the role, I thought, “I’m made for this job.”
The question of comfort is related to how high up you go. When I moved up to a deputy role, I was still teaching about 85 per cent of the time, so I was in the classroom a lot. I was doing other things, such as the timetable, organising year levels and holding a leadership role in the organisation. The next step up to principal is like moving into a CEO role: you go out of doing and start thinking.
You start thinking about where the organisation is going to be in five years, and how to position your school so it can beat the school up the road and be better than it. It’s hard at first because, when you’re doing task-focused jobs like a timetable or finishing a financial report, it’s done, you’ve presented it and you can tick it off. When you’re developing a vision, driving a school or an organisation, and bringing people on board, it’s not quite so obvious when you’ve achieved something. Thinking differently is a challenge.
These jumps aren’t even jumps on a career ladder. If you think about the organisation you’re in, the first step up is usually a team leader role. You know the expertise of the people in the team because you’ve done the job. You’re supervising people and know when they are or aren’t doing their job because it’s a job you’ve done.
Then you go up a couple of levels and get to a stage where you start supervising people whose jobs you haven’t done. If they were away, you couldn’t step in and do their work. That’s a bigger step up. Then there’s a step up to a stage where you don’t really understand people’s roles, which is tricky.
For example, when I was at SATAC, I supervised serious software developers while we were doing bespoke software development. I’m a home economics teacher by trade. Here I was overseeing a huge software development project, and it was bespoke. We weren’t even implementing something off the shelf; we were making our own. There are leaps that are much more significant than the little steps at first. Sometimes you move into a very different world.
James: How do you learn those things when you’re going into these roles? That’s a great example: you’re in the CEO role, running this software project, but don’t have the background at all. What steps are you taking at those times?
Wendy: It depends on the level. Graduates are obviously your major market, so they would be much earlier in their careers than people like me. Early on, you can usually see that you need to have a position description for a job at the levels above. One important thing is to look at that job and person specification, or whatever the organisation calls it, for the next level and maybe the one after that. Look at what it says in terms of the jobs you have to do, but also the words used to describe them.
They move from very task-focused words to higher-level ones. First they might talk about supervising, overseeing or managing something. The higher you go, the more they start using terms such as “drive”, “take full accountability for” and “assume responsibility”. That’s the step. It isn’t just about skills. The higher you are, the more the buck stops with you. Taking accountability means that you’ve got responsibility for it. Even though I can say, “I haven’t got a software background,” if it falls over, the bottom line is that it’s my job. I have to take responsibility and accountability for it.
One thing I did that is important to raise is that I worked out that this change was happening during my five years at SATAC. It wasn’t very much an IT-heavy role, but it became one. We were moving in this direction and suddenly received a lot of money to manage a project, and I’d never managed anything like it. One staff member, who was a key team member, had just finished his master’s in project management. I asked him, “Do you think I need to get a qualification in project management?” I’d already done a master’s by that stage. He said, “I think it’s time you do. Actually, we want to talk to you about it because you’re not the only one who needs it now.”
A small group of staff ended up doing a graduate diploma in project management, which I organised through the workplace. It’s important to know when you have to upskill. There are a variety of ways to learn those things. Looking at what a person does at the next level up and whether you can do it is important.
Bigger organisations are usually much better at having well-developed person specifications and things like that. For example, when I ran SATAC, my staff were employed by the University of Adelaide. If someone wanted to be reclassified from one position to another because their job had become bigger, there was background information you could look at. It would say, “At Level 4, this is what you’ve been doing and these were your responsibilities. At Level 5, you’ll need to do these things. Can you do them?” It was very clear. I’d go through those with staff and say, “See the different words here? These are different levels of responsibility.”
The other thing I want to highlight, once again about women in leadership and for the women who listen to this, though not only the women, is not to get what I call women’s ghetto jobs if you’re a career person. Real leadership roles have two critical things: you’re responsible for staff and you’re responsible for money. If a job doesn’t have those things, it’s questionable whether it’s a real leadership role.
For example, when I was in the education system in South Australia, I could have gone from my principal-level job, where I had 100 staff and a really big budget. I was responsible for the curriculum and students’ outcomes, the facilities, IT, and I was responsible to a board. I could have moved to another job within the education department where I got the same money, or perhaps a little more, but I’d be doing my own typing with no staff and no money. Those are what I call women’s ghetto jobs.
Women often get moved into those. No one necessarily sits around and does it with some evil intent, but you can easily find yourself moved into one. They’re not real leadership roles because the tough stuff is people, and the next hard thing is money. That’s where real leadership roles are. If you haven’t got those, I question whether it is a leadership role.
James: That’s great advice. At some level, you have to be a little strategic about what roles you go for and get into, so you can prepare yourself to continue down that path.
Wendy: That’s very true. I never wanted to be a home economics coordinator. This was when I was a teacher, and I kept saying I wasn’t going to do that job. I ended up doing it for various reasons, but not for long. That did matter, because I’d kept wanting to go into another coordinator’s job that didn’t involve supervising staff.
It was a really tough time. I had a hard group of staff to work with and all sorts of issues in that school, but I learnt a lot. I’m glad I did it because then I realised how damn hard staff were to lead. I’d been a bit naive before that. I thought I’d be nice to them and they’d be nice to me. I was young and naive, and it doesn’t always work that way. I learnt that by doing.
You’re right about being strategic. You need to think about what you’re good at, because if you do what you’re good at, it won’t feel like work. If you end up in a job you really hate, when you stop and think, “Actually, I hate this job,” it’s often because it involves a skill set you don’t like.
For example, I’ve never liked doing finance. I make myself do it, but I really don’t like it much. For various reasons, I ended up in a job that turned into a different kind of job, and I was doing finance about 80 per cent of the time. My husband said, “You never would have chosen that job,” and I thought, “You’re right. I hate it,” because it was something I really didn’t like. That’s when it feels like lots of really hard work.
James: I agree with that. Around strategy, did you set goals and have mentors along the way? How did those sorts of things affect your direction and your ability to go where you wanted?
Wendy: I’m definitely a goal-setting kind of person. It’s the nature of who I am. I’ve always set goals and worked towards them because I’m like that. I’m also tenacious, so I don’t necessarily make things happen really quickly, but I’m a person who can work towards something in little steps over a long period. Goal-setting works quite well for me. I set goals every year and review them, often around the financial change of year, because it’s important to do.
I’ve always looked at what I need to do, or could do, to gain extra skills for the next job. It’s interesting now because I’m in a different position as an academic and actively saying, “I don’t want a leadership role.” It would be easy for me to end up in those. I still choose to do different things that I would once have done to put on my CV, but now I do them because I’m interested and they engage a different part of my brain.
I’ve had a variety of formal and informal mentors in my career, and I’ve learnt an awful lot from different people. I’ve also paid a couple of coaches to coach me on different things. For example, when I was thinking of leaving DECS, the Department of Education, which was a big decision, I got a coach to help me with that transition. Part of the job was to help me work out what I wanted to transition to. It was a clear role and a clear job: we knew what she needed to help me do.
If you’re going to pay someone, I think it’s really important to get the best out of it. She was operating as a coach rather than a mentor. The roles are quite similar, but coaching is focused on what you want to achieve.
In another circumstance, I was part of the principals’ association here in Australia. It was a tough group of men and was all men when I started. They didn’t necessarily want a woman at the table, and I found it very hard to get along with and influence them. I went to another male principal colleague who had been involved in the past and asked him to mentor me on how I was managing myself at that table. I said, “Whatever I’m doing, it isn’t working very well,” and wanted him to help me. That worked quite well. Sometimes putting yourself outside your comfort zone around that type of thing is important.
Mentoring can be formal or informal. I’ve also always noticed things. When I was a deputy, for example, I’d watch a principal from another school and think, “That doesn’t work very well when they do that,” or, “They managed that really well. Look how they do that. That’s really good.” I’ve always been observant of people in that way.
You also learn what not to do by having mentors. They make mistakes, of course, and you can think, “I’m not going to do that because it went really badly.” You can work through that.
I’ve also had the circumstance, which other people will have had too, where you outgrow your mentor but they don’t want to let go of you. They still want to tell you what to do. Even after I became a principal, there was one principal I’d known since my early days who still told me what to do. I remember saying to him, “You’re not my boss anymore,” because he’d say, “Why haven’t you done that yet?” Excuse me? I said, “You’re not my boss. I chose not to. I thought about it, reflected on what you said and decided I didn’t want to do that.”
You can get into those circumstances. It’s good to get out of that scenario, or to call it as I did: “You’re not my boss anymore. That’s not how this game is played.” You can certainly get into those circumstances as well.
James: That’s a great point about outgrowing your mentors. Always be aware of who you’re getting advice from and how relevant it is to your situation. My mum isn’t going to give me advice on technical things I’m doing at work. The people you take advice from have to be people whose advice means something in that area.
Wendy: You said something I’d like to follow up on. It’s important to mention that I chose a career in which I went from being a specialist to a generalist. But another career path involves a small or tight field, knowing it really well and knowing it deeply. You often get that within technical fields. That’s another career path that works for other people. They might become the top financial person in an organisation and still very much know their world in detail, with knowledge and understanding.
That’s a slightly different career from someone like me, who moved into more of a generalist role. I like to have lots of things under my responsibility rather than being a specialist.
James: I’ve heard that described as a T-shaped person. You have the depth, which is the specialisation, and the top of the T, which is more general. As you move into a CEO or senior role, you have to be very general because you’re looking after all these different areas. Naturally, it isn’t a specialist role. It makes things difficult if you’re really into one tiny area when you want to take over and lead the whole organisation.
Wendy: That’s right, and you can lack those broader skills. It can be tricky to move from a role such as chief information officer into a CEO role, because you’re moving from an area of strong expertise into a broad role. Not everyone makes that transition very well.
James: When is it too early to get a mentor, or when is the right time to start? I know you’re a career coach and mentor on some level. How early would you say is too early, or is there a right time?
Wendy: I don’t think there’s ever really a time that’s too early. I don’t know whether I always would have considered them mentors; that depends on whether you would call them that. I learnt a lot from people I started teaching with very early. Some of them were senior people who managed really difficult classes, which we certainly had at Port Augusta. I learnt a lot from watching other people’s teaching practices, hearing them talk about them and seeing the things they did really well. They wouldn’t have been called mentors, but essentially they were.
It’s also tied up with whether you formally have a mentor. Different organisations sometimes have a process where you have a mentor, or you seek out someone you want to learn from. If you’re seeking a mentor, it’s usually because you’re looking for a promotion at some stage. You are declaring that by seeking out a mentor. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you need to be clear that it is what you’re doing.
I don’t think there is a time that’s too early. These things often happen naturally.
James: That’s good.