The Australian and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG) has launched its Women Leading the Public Sector online workshop which is to begin in July over six weeks.
The workshop will involve former Victorian Police Commissioner, Christine Nixon (pictured) and Amanda Sinclair from the Melbourne Business School, looking outside traditional leadership models and providing a mix of practical and theoretical approaches to help women leaders reach their potential.
Dr Nixon said the skill-sets for really good leaders were not limited to middle-class males.
“The idea of the course is that women make good leaders and we need more of them,” Dr Nixon said.
“What has struck me in teaching this course is the talent that exists among women in the public sector. We don’t think that women need to be told their styles of leadership are good.”
She said the issues were more about the systems and processes in organisations.
This involved how people were chosen for jobs; how flexible work practices were introduced or followed “and all the systems that see the ‘manager bloke’ as the norm”.
Professor Sinclair said that while parts of the Public Service were now more deliberative about diverse recruitment and reducing bias and discrimination, outdated stereotypes of leadership were holding women back at middle and senior levels.
She said there were still significant biases against women leaders, who were held to different standards and had a lot more visibility and scrutiny, such as the recent treatment of Chief Executive of Australia Post, Christine Holgate.
“Women are still often judged against a single template and assumed to represent the whole, regardless of our different views and backgrounds,” Professor Sinclair said.
Further information on the online workshop can be accessed at this PS News link.
