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Harnessing the potential of diversity to improve the public sector: A conversation with Div Pillay

6 February 2025

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Public leaders have always needed to think creatively to solve complex problems and deliver public value to their communities. ANZSOG’s Public Leadership Masterclass series (PLM) are designed to re-energise and educate hard-working and passionate emerging and current leaders and expose them to fresh ideas. 

The format of the PLM series features five masterclasses that speak to an overarching theme and are structured to allow for ample reflection and discussion with your counterparts from across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. 

The Applying leadership values for impact: a Public Leadership Masterclass series begins on 6 March. Participants will explore how to lead with values like authenticity, courage, dignity, inclusion and ethics – hearing from experts that have experience in creating impact in the Public Sector. 

One of these experts is Div Pillay, CEO of MindTribes, who will explore how fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace strengthens public sector performance.  

Ms Pillay is an expert in race and cultural inclusion, backed by behavioural economics, psychology, and qualitative data research methods. She co-designs with clients, including a range of public sector organisations, systemic and sustainable change that advances their work. Prior to founding MindTribes in 2012, Div spent 14 years in People & Culture roles working across Australia, Asia and South Africa. 

In this interview she comments on the current backlash against DEI, both globally and locally, why diversity targets often fail, and why Australia public services need to move beyond diversity training and education. 

Thanks for talking to us about the Public Leadership Masterclass series Div. Can I start by asking what are the key benefits for public services, of increasing diversity and inclusion, particularly in leadership roles? 

It is the concept that your workforce should represent the people and communities that you serve, and that includes the right representation at the right levels.  

It is especially important for the public service is to have that representation at senior decision-making levels, of people of colour, people with a disability and First Nations people at senior levels. No matter which public service you go to, in which state in Australia, you will not see that representation at a Deputy Secretary or Secretary level  

Marginalised, diverse groups, are very much front-facing public servants – the people who deliver the services like waste removal, transport service, health services. What we don’t see in a workforce composition, is the progression of those people into middle levels and then senior levels.  

Which is a worry because, from a civil society perspective, it is socially inequitable when people in positions of power don’t understand your everyday experience. In the public service, we will just be better at design and service delivery, if we are more connected with lived experience of the communities that we serve. 

We know from the Productivity Commission that public services actually seriously under-employ migrants, commensurate to their skills qualifications in overseas countries, because our public services place value on public service experience in Australia. 

The other big part of the puzzle is not enough effort is put in the public service around being valued and respected and safe at work. Diversity and inclusion are often used interchangeably but inclusion is about psychological and cultural safety and respect and fairness at work. 

We find continuously in our qualitative research that people from marginalised communities often don’t have a fair, respectful, or safe experience at work. I’ve had people from marginalised communities who’ve had long careers in public service who leave and leave for good because they just have had enough. 

That is a huge loss not just of talent in the public sector, but for communities. Work is a social determinant of our well-being. It’s such an important factor, it’s pretty much linked to every health and social determinant of a healthy lifestyle. Yet, we see an underinvestment in inclusion and safety efforts.  

There has been a lot of emphasis on DEI initiatives in the public sector, including a target of 24% of people from Culturally and Linguistically Diverse background in SES positions in the APS (up from the current 11%). What is stopping these initiatives from succeeding? 

The benefit of diversity in the public service is often an easy conversation. There’s probably never a senior leader in the public service that I speak to who says there’s no benefit, but there still are question marks around how they would cope with that diversity at a very senior executive level. 

The big barrier that I get in conversation with executives is a fear of losing merit, at a time when the public service context is complex, due to resource constraints, changing structures, etc. This fear is reinforced by the DEI backlash globally and locally. The response I get in Australia and New Zealand is: “we don’t disagree that DEI is important, we have done a lot in the past, but could we be losing productivity and performance at a time when we can least afford it by hiring people who are less skilled or competent?”. 

I usually try and influence this thinking with the proposition that there will likely never be a time that is quiet or less complex in the public service and that a leadership responsibility and accountability to DEI should be continuous and not sporadic if we are to see steady progress.  

I often feel that leaders below Executive Directors may not feel confident to lead DEI change, unless there is strong public promotion and support from executives to prioritise DEI efforts.  

I’ve seen some good examples of slow change, but it’s not transformative change it’s glacial change. The critique I have is that diversity equity and inclusion hasn’t been embedded into everyday business rhythms so it gets siloed. 

What are the some of the issues involved in setting hard targets for ethnic/racial diversity, such as the one the APS has set for itself? 

When it comes to targets, we really can’t see too many good examples of getting there in one shot. A lot of organisations have tried, failed, learned. Or more worrying, tried, failed and stopped. The reasons for not getting targets implemented well goes back to basic people processes.  

If talent management, workforce demographics analytics, development for career paths and succession planning is not done well in the first place, there is a legacy of poor decision-making around the ‘build, buy, borrow pipeline’, i.e. who to develop, when to hire externally and when to contract or outsource. If a target is added in, in this context, we know it is highly likely that it won’t be implemented well.  

Another critical indicator of target failure or success is a good understanding of the workforce composition. Typically when auditing a workforce’s composition, we are looking for gaps in representation – i.e. where, and at what level does a public service entity not represent or over-represent the communities they serve.   

A complexity in doing this workforce composition audit is that HR systems often don’t carry race, ethnicity, religion, language, disability, various gender identities or sexual orientation demographic data. Understanding your workforce, especially a large public sector workforce, is very difficult when you don’t have the data behind it. This makes even setting an achievable and realistic target challenging, but it can be done.  

We often advise clients not to do targets for a whole of workforce, but to set targets strategically, isolating certain levels. The APS is an example of this, with the focus at SES levels and CALD executive representation. Setting targets at a certain level allows for trialling and learning for everyone involved in the process. 

Additionally, the timing is critical, and outlining when the target is to be achieved as an outcome and what the change plan is to get there. This allows for careful succession planning with balanced decisions on internal candidates and external candidates. What we see often is tight timeframes, poor change plans and, when the deadline is looming, e.g. a year out from achieving the target, a rush to ‘buy’ talent which often sends a signal to internal candidates that they were not prioritised.  

Many of the people who attend the PLM series are at mid-level ranks in the public service and may be team leaders with a reasonable amount of control in their own domain. What will they learn to improve diversity and create that inclusive sense of psychological safety for staff? 

Leaders will get a practical experience of auditing their own environment for opportunities to improve psychological safety and reduce risk.   I ask managers and leaders to take a very observational view of their everyday people interactions for a two-to-three week run when they get back to the workplace. I teach an evidence-based model of inclusion that I designed from global research, much of which is rooted in health and education public sector case-studies. 

This model has five indicators: Voice, Visibility, Perceived Fairness, Agency and Empowerment. So even in a typical meeting environment a leader has to think about whose voice is more dominant than others and why, whether this lack of voice for example is by choice or because the environment is not inclusive of different thinkers. We also cover how to build a psychosocially safe environment. This involves ways of working, team member interactions and leader interactions. People need to understand what constitutes everyday respect, when disrespect is happening and as a bystander what to do about it. If this is not picked up early and addressed, behaviours turn into habits and this in turn forms part of a team culture.  

Leaders need to have an understanding of key indicators and levers to improve psychological safety and reduce risk, and make that part of their daily practice. To improve psychological safety means you have to understand your people, and their different personalities, and their definitions of psychological safety. 

My aim is to have leaders and managers leave with practical ways to respond to disrespect and practical ways to proactively design a culture of respect, inclusion and safety. A practical focus that is embedded in everyday rhythms has more sustainability because it is integrated into people’s work.  

What effect is the anti-DEI agenda globally having in Australia? How can organisations track or measure their programs to show the positive impact they are having? 

The backlash to DEI in the US is changing things already in Australia and New Zealand. We know it in our conversations with clients as well as what’s reported in the media here locally. DEI has become politicised. 

We have encountered this anti-DEI narrative before, what is different is that now it has a more public forum.  Some of the critique or critical questions are valid and should be asked. For example, if all that has been done in the DEI effort in an organisation is training and education and this has been year-on-year, then there should be an assessment of return on investment.  I am not a supporter of standalone training and education without a link to the business and strategic deliverables.  

So often, DEI programs in Australia only stay in that low first rung of the ladder, education and awareness. With every public and private sector client we have commenced with, we can see a long trail of direct investment in training with little to no accountability to apply that learning in improved and more equitable people decision making.  

I would love to see a reduction or elimination in bias at hiring, development, promotion. If I could see that, I’d know this training is actually being applied in an everyday people decisions in a workplace. All efforts in DEI need to directly and qualitatively, cause a positive difference in the lives of people at work, to improve psychological safety and the experience at work.   

An added complexity in the DEI backlash is the potential disempowerment of Chief People Officers or Executive Directors of People and Culture, Heads of Diversity Equity and Inclusion. If these People and Culture leaders have not had much influence before – a seat at the executive table to prioritise proactive prevention of risk to people at work – then in the face of DEI backlash, their power is diminished. It is critical to ensure that the most senior custodian of people and culture is empowered and has access to other executive leaders to reaffirm why this work is important to service design and delivery.  

One difference between us and the USA is that we have a lot more robustness in our legislation and our duty of care obligation to people at work. We’ve got OH&S, psychological safety, work safe legislation that helps us keep that progress. We’ve got some good governance around that in the public service, which focuses the business on what has always been important, the safety of all people at work.  

What do you want people who do the PLM session to do differently as a result? 

I often ask leaders who come on our programs to give two commitments to act. I want them to make an institutional structural change. Choose anything, whether it is recruitment, selection, development, promotion. Then make a structural change in how that process runs., so it’s more fair and more respectful for everybody. Work with your lead in People and Culture to support you with how you improve fairness and equity in these people processes.  

And secondly, I would like leaders to think interpersonally about how inclusion happens every day – do people know how to behave inclusively and respectfully towards each other?  Leaders steering and role-modelling this everyday respect and being brave to call out disrespect has the highest correlation to embedded respect in everyday team interactions. When leaders positively showcase what respect looks and feels like, and provide a legitimate authorising environment to identify negative behaviours, this gives people voice, agency and empowerment – and inclusive environments are then sustained.  

I think leaders need to look inwardly to what guides them to do the right thing by people every day. This is about ethics and it is about followership. People will follow a leader willingly even through the toughest of times, if they believe they are trying to do the right thing always with high integrity. A public service leader is a servant leader, in service of others, both people and communities. If we can’t operate with fairness, care for others and address inequities in civil society, then we cease to be in service of others.  This work requires courage, character, curiosity and conviction to do the right thing in the face of uncertainty and complexity.  

Registrations for the Applying leadership values for impact: a Public Leadership Masterclass series are open, and our Earlybird Special closes on Friday 7 February. The series starts on 6 March and the five masterclasses are: 

More information about the Public Leadership Masterclass series available here including session times and discounts for group bookings.