George Savvides
Former Managing Director, Medibank Private
Ceremony: 7 May 2018, 2:00pm - Graduate School of Health, Faculty of Health
Speech
Thank you. Firstly, let me pay my respects to the traditional owners of the land on which we’re meeting here today and pay my respects to their Elders past and present, and also to the faculty here today: Dr Ron Sandland, Professor Andrew Parfitt, Professor Charlie Benrimoj, Professor Fiona Brookes, Tracey Conroy and Dr Wayne Brookes.
And to you, mums and dads, relatives and friends, and to the graduates, it’s great to be in this wonderful auditorium with lots of happy faces and very proud friends and relatives here. I was sitting over here about 33 years ago and waiting for my time to come up and receive my graduation at the MBA and I’m, my wife is over there, Vivian, with the little baby, little Peter at two months old, and he was trying to contribute to the ceremony as well, in fine voice.
It’s a special day and it’s lovely to remember that through this ceremony today – it’s a great privilege to have been invited and I thank UTS for that. Today, I wanted to address just in the short note this afternoon, the topic of leadership in this broader health setting that we’re talking about through this graduation ceremony. Your leadership is expressed today in your achievements, academic achievements, and the graduation, postgraduate work that you’ve done.
You are leaders in the field that you’ve studied, and that’s fantastic – you’ll take that specialisation of knowledge and learning into your workplaces – some of you are already doing that – and that contribution of leadership will last for many years, I’m sure, to come. But something else will creep into your resume for many of you on that journey in the next few years, if it hasn’t already. And that is the opportunity or the challenge to lead beyond knowledge – to lead people. To lead organisations. To complement what you know and what you’ve found and researched, what you’re passionate about in seeing system change occur through the insights that you have in your work, to being more than just the owner of that insight but to lead the implementation and the delivery of the change of practice.
Leaders are change makers. They make the systems that they work within better – they improve them; they continuously work on enhancing their performance. And the Australian health system needs you. It is a high-quality health system, it’s a very large and well-funded, 160, 70 billion dollar system, but it needs your intellect and your passion to continue to change it and improve it so it can be a system that serves our society and community in the years to come, without compromising some of its great qualities, such as access and the high standard of care that we provide through the Australian health system. But like many systems, it has issues around efficiency and coordination and alignment. I call them, with my engineering background, discontinuities, and there’s several in the Australian health system. Discontinuities between public and private health care – they don’t talk very well together. They don’t do hand pass well. Discontinuities between acute care and primary care. The discontinuities between federal funding and state funding. And the new, emerging but very significant discontinuity of caring for older Australians in their homes, or in a residential institutional setting, where home care and residential institutional care struggle to engage in an aligned way.
We need your brilliance and your problem solving and your innovative capability to invest in leadership, not just of what you know, but leadership of changing the way we work and implement and look after people in the Australian health system. And it’s going to be challenging, because the assumption that a great idea deserves great funding, bountiful funding and lots of sponsors, doesn’t always come. And you might find yourself in a career role where you’re managing a clinic or a health facility or part of the research environment where the work is showing great outcome, the queues are getting longer, but more people want that service but the funding is not growing as fast as the demand for the service.
And in this place, this is the inflection point where I believe leaders are born. Instead of sort of asking somebody else to solve their problem, they gather a team, a group, a collaboration together and they say, ‘Is there a better way to make this health service deliver its outcomes for the demand it has and the resources it’s provided?’ And in my time, in the 30 years I’ve navigated leadership roles in this health system, they’re the moments that I remember the most, where people have stood up and stood out to come up with things that we’d never thought would be possible, ideas to solve what looked like unsolvable problems, or to be able to surmount insurmountable barriers, because they worked out a way to gather a group of people together – teams, organisations, people – aligned them around a common sense of purpose and mission, and extract the talent and creativity and contribution that solved the unsolvable. And this is where your leadership starts to flourish.
If you can find a way, in an adjacent way, to add to your expertise and knowledge and academic achievement with the knowledge of how to lead teams. Team leaders, leaders in the health system, are in short supply. People who can innovate and change the processes to produce better outcomes with sometimes constrained resources. And you know more than anyone else the demand bubble that’s coming – you have picked your career timing so well. The demand bubble of an ageing Australian population will see the need for health services and the related aged care service environment just expand and balloon, and we need your talent to lead that change program as it comes through.
What can I leave you with in terms of some ideas that I’ve, as I reflected, why is it that a graduate at UTS MBA program 33 years ago had no expectations of being involved in senior executive leadership in health care, what was it that triggered that kind of journey? I guess when I left UTS, I left with a sense of being a change maker. That’s how the program that I was involved in in the then-days of Brickfields Hill, pioneering days before this facility, sort of educated me to look at the environment that I was going into. And a couple of paradigms came into play. In some of the leadership roles we would reflect on the Jim Collins investment in research around what made high performing organisations perform for such a long time at a high performing level. And he thought they were tangible assets – intellectual property, exclusive access to resources, significant brand advantage, channel and distribution advantage. None of those were the determinants of high performance in organisations. When he saw the results the first time around, he didn’t believe them. He asked his researchers to go back and to check the stats. What he found was that the high-performance determination did not come from tangible assets. They came from the qualities of leadership in those organisations, and as he broke that down, the qualities were leaders who were less captains and more coaches. Leaders who did not draw the attention to themselves, but actually stayed focused on the mission and their teams and people to enable the pursuit of that mission.
So, one of my learnings in that journey was that leadership is not about ambition; it is about the mission. And the more you can manage that process of staying focused on what it is that inspires you to change the system and make it better for people and patients as you go forward, the more it will attract to you the opportunity to lead.
The second thing was the analogy of, or the metaphor I used to reflect on leadership on that journey, was how do you help organisations change and let go of old practices so they’re willing to take up new practices? And again, the force imposed model doesn’t work; you create resistance straight away, the rigidities that are there get even more rigid as people defend boundaries, practices and turf. And it was a funny afternoon at an Oxford CEO program about in my 10th year as CEO of Medibank where I was transported to the UK for a week’s immersion with 30 other CEOs, and it was a right brain creative leadership immersion program. The son of Sir Laurence Olivier, Richard Olivier, was running a program on a Thursday afternoon that I was asked to be at, and we did an immersion around Henry V and the requirement of the unplanned leader, the young lad who steps up to lead in that Shakespearean play. But the more memorable metaphor was the conductor. And the program had flown in a Danish conductor out of Europe who just came in for the day, and he gathered the 30 CEOs around and for the next two hours, his mission was to teach us to conduct a choir. I was petrified when that was explained, and we spent the first 30 minutes practising the expression of conducting, which for an inarticulate engineer I found challenging. But I moved my hands like my other colleagues did and tried to practise being a conductor of a choir. And then the doors opened and 30 music grads came in from the Oxford environment, and they gathered around the old music hall we were settled in, and they became the choir, and each CEO was asked to step up and conduct. And I was hiding at the back to not be noticed, and Peter called me up straight away and said, ‘George, you’re first.’ So, I stood in front of the choir and I was asked to conduct. I didn’t want to be there, but the expression of conducting a choir was meant to be a metaphor for leadership, so I had to do my work. So, I got ready to move my hands and the choir settled in and we were handed out the corporate plan, which was a hymn sheet, and I looked at it and I noticed that it was in German, and the music notes were there as well, and I said to Peter, ‘Well, Peter, you’ve got the wrong guy, because I can’t read the German, and therefore you can get one of my other colleagues to do this.’ I was really keen to get out of this. And he said, ‘George, I haven’t asked you to read German. I’ve just asked you to conduct the choir. Could you just settle in? They’re ready to go.’ And so, I got ready and I started to move my hands, but I stopped and froze and he said, ‘What’s wrong with you now, George?’ And I said, ‘Well, if I move my hands and they don’t sing, that will make me look silly.’ And he said, ‘George, when was leadership all about you?’ The talent is in the team. The conductor does not have to sing. If he believes in the team and he understands that the role of leadership is to unlock that talent and bring it together in an aligned way around a common hymn sheet or plan or strategy, focus it on the purpose, the talent that is unlocked will solve an amazing set of problems.
My hope for you, as you move into your assignments in the health system, is that you will, in addition to your leadership of knowledge and expertise, find those opportunities – those opportunities where you will be asked to lead human beings, people around a common cause, to solve a problem that is worthy of being solved, and that you’ll be so surprised to discover that you didn’t have all the answers, but because you were willing to invite the team, to unlock that talent, you were able to make amazing things happen, and we’re looking forward to that in the health system you go on to lead. Go well, and congratulations.
About the Speaker
George has more than 30 years of experience in the Australian and New Zealand health care sector. He is currently the Deputy Chairman on the Special Broadcasting Services (SBS), and is Chairman of Macquarie University Hospital, and Kings Transport Group. He also serves on the board of Ryman Healthcare, New Zealand’s largest residential aged care provider.
George has held a range of senior positions including Managing Director of Australia's largest health fund, Medibank Private, Chief Executive Officer at Sigma Pharmaceuticals, Smith & Nephew, and Commonwealth Industrial Gases and Vice President of the International Federation of Health Plans
Recently George stepped down as Chairman of World Vision Australia.
George holds a Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) from the University of New South Wales, and a Master of Business Administration from UTS. He is also a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.
George has previously served on the UTS Graduate School of Health's Pharmacy Industry Advisory Board.
