A few days ago I went to the Victorian Workplace Mental Wellbeing Collaboration Business Leaders Breakfast, the theme of which was ‘Positive Leadership through Change’.

The panel was chaired by Mark Dean, CEO and Founder of En Masse. The panel consisted of:

• Dee McGrath, Managing Partner, IBM Global Business Services for Australia and New Zealand
• Nick Nichola, Managing Partner Australia, K&L Gates
• David Fitzgerald, Director, LOPUS Pty Ltd
• Simone Wilkie, AO- AFL Commissioner / former Major General

It was a great session and below are a couple of interesting points that arose during the discussion.

Qualities of positive leadership include:

• Developing trust;
• Caring for people;
• Being available to your team;
• Showing respect;
• Showing humility and
• Being able to shore up psychological safety for your team (create an environment where people feel comfortable speaking out).

There was a lot of interesting discussion about showing vulnerability as a leader – showing your human side is OK and may well elicit trust and open up discussions with your teams.

A really interesting topic that was well covered in the discussion was that of getting enough sleep in the interest of maintaining positivity and avoiding a tendency towards abusive behaviour (a manifestation of feeling tired and frazzled). David Fitzgerald advised leaders to pare it back to basics – do get enough sleep, do allow for recovery time from work, turn off your phone from time to time, don’t send or answer emails at 10pm at night, make time for one to one conversations with members of your team.

I am fascinated with culture and how it affects creativity in the workplace. I have a growing interest in wellbeing and its importance in maintaining good workplace culture. It’s really great to be able to get along to events like this and hear discussion about such an important topic.