Introducing Our New Blog Series: Leadership Spotlight - Episode One
We’re thrilled to launch this series with Tom Dalton, CEO of Neami. In our conversation, he shares powerful reflections on leadership, community, and the future of social services. Press play below to hear the full interview and get inspired.
Whether you’d rather tune in to the audio above or skim the highlights, we’ve got you covered. Below you’ll find a written summary of some of the questions we asked Tom and the insights he shared. For the complete conversation, make sure to listen to the audio interview above.
What shaped your journey into leadership?
I started off as a lawyer and worked in private practice and community legal centres. I was always very driven by social justice. I did a stint in government, and then someone offered me a job at Forensicare, which happened to be both interesting and very close to my home. So I had four young children. It was great to have a work-life balance where I could walk to work in 10 minutes. But I didn't ever really have a plan.
What for me has shaped my leadership journey in some ways has been luck, being in the right place at the right time. And so I described that I fell into my first CEO role. I was in an executive position with a very small team as the general counsel, but my CEO got ill and I had to step in. I think one of the lessons I learned from was after acting in the role for quite a while, the board advertised it and I felt a very strong weight of expectation amongst my colleagues to go for that role.
In retrospect, I wasn't ready for the sort of leadership that that required. I had to learn a few important lessons and made a few mistakes in that period from which I learned. That really shaped how I then pursued leadership for the rest of my tenure in that role. I have very strong view that CEOs have a particular lifespan. People used to ask me, what do you want to do next? And I seriously used to say, you know, my dream job would be being CEO at Neami, then that job came up about a year out from when my contract was due to expire. I applied for it and got it. So there wasn't, I'd say a lot of design in how I went about it, other than I particularly think you've got to be very conscious in a leadership role of both how you carry yourself, but what is your use by date and let your needs and desires shape that as well as the organisation's.
How is the organisation adapting to challenges and change?
I think there's a mix of internal and external challenges. I think, importantly, in the community sector as a whole, in terms of how we respond to the sort of structural inefficiencies that arise from the way government funds the work that we do. The growing gap between contract indexation, which occurs much of the time, but not all of the time, versus wage indexation, puts organisations like us, and small and large on the back foot. What we see is costs grow every year and the funding that contributes to an organisation providing the services, does not grow to the same extent.
I think there's a strong view in the sector that the only way we can beat that as a community sector is for organisations to get bigger. I'm not necessarily of that view. I think, what people need in their communities is a diversity of services. And sometimes that's smaller organisations with a more local bent than bigger organisations like Neami. I think how do we adapt to this ongoing environment of fiscal restraint, and thinking more purposefully for us about the partnerships we build in local communities so that we do reflect the needs of those communities.
I think one of the big challenges is where organisations in our sectors are looking to go into new areas to bid for work. How do we go about understanding those communities? So we're not building a cookie cutter approach, one size fits all, when we bid for services. But instead, what are the ways we build partnerships and understand community needs? The challenge with that is it requires a fair bit of investment by the organisations themselves. That investment isn't forthcoming from government. So I think that rapid turnover of short contracts and a high regulatory and accreditation burden is putting a lot of pressure on our sector. There are glimmers of hope. New South Wales has just taken a different approach to contracting NGOs. I'm always an optimist.
You said you're big on collaboration, even with other providers. What is the point of difference for Neami?
I think one of the key points of difference for us in the mental health sector is we have an approach that we utilise when we work with consumers through all our services called the Collaborative Relational Practice. And that's evolved over the years, originally based on work that came out of the University of Wollongong. So being able to describe to staff what that means in all the different areas of work that we undertake, homelessness services, housing supports, suicide prevention or postvention or mental health work, is something that we've focused on a lot.
So really thinking about how that Collaborative Relational Practice plays out in different service types, and this is something we're spending a lot of time on right now, but also how does it play out in the way we make decisions as an organisation or the way we have board meetings or board committee meetings and things like that. Really thinking how we drive that through the organisation, I think for me is something, and I've heard people who come here that have worked in other organisations that really value that difference.
What's something you've learned as a CEO that you wish more people understood about leadership in the not for profit space?
We don't have to accept the dominant paradigm that competitive models of procurement produce the best outcomes for consumers. So that's the sort of idealist in me that would like to see governments and funding organisations commission services in a different way that didn't just assume everyone investing huge resources in developing tenders, produce better outcomes for consumers…
But the more realist in me says, really what I think we need to look for and what I would like to certainly see more of is a greater emphasis on collaboration, because many of us in the NGO sector, we compete for pieces of work or territory, essentially defined by tenders. But we're all doing the same work for the same people, whether it's in specifically the mental health sector or more broadly, other social services. We're all here for the same reason, which is to support people who are in need and striving to achieve greater social equity. And we would be better able to do that if we collaborate.
Our audience are either working in the broader community services space or directly in mental health or thinking about joining it. What advice would you offer to people working in mental health or community services who are looking to grow their careers?
Sometimes we can tend to pigeonhole ourselves. People who work in clinical services, might feel apprehensive or fearful of going to work in a community-based service for an NGO or vice versa, or they might feel reluctant to jump sectors and go from housing and homelessness to mental health.
But I think at an individual level, what really helps you to develop your career is finding a mentor. I think a mentor is a really valuable way of exploring your own potential for leadership development. I certainly would not have been the leader I am, were it not for a really strong mentors. Being prepared to learn, exploring leadership development with your manager, and spending some time for yourself.
One of the things that I think people forget is, you've got to make time for yourself. And that's my fundamental piece of advice to anyone in a leadership position, because that time will make you a better leader. If you spend a bit of time reflecting on how you work as a group, the ground rules that you have and your fundamental reason why you're coming together. Because if you're clear about those things, and we've done a lot of that work at Neami with our national leadership team, hopefully then the way you work together will provide greater clarity and the outcomes will be better.
What's on the horizon for Neami over the next 12 months?
We're in a great space. We've been through a period of significant growth and that's plateaued a bit in the last couple of years. I think organisations like us have to reflect on the imperative of growth because I don't think you have to keep getting bigger and winning more work to be able to survive as a quality service provider in the community space. We've been doing some great work and thinking about different approaches to what we call safety and opportunity, but more broadly risk assessment. As well as thinking about what are the ways we support the staff in the organisation to be strong in their practice and have the right conditions in which they work.
We've got a really strong future doing the type of services across mental health and homelessness and suicide prevention and postvention, that we can be confident that we can continue to deliver those to consumers in a really effective way that meets their needs. So a lot of it's going to be about understanding the outcomes they want to see from us, making sure we can measure those and listen to the feedback they give us. Its really focusing on the quality of our practice so that we can support people effectively.