Why a good leader must banish their biases and baggage
A few months later, she wrote to me asking if I would be part of a campaign of hers, #celebratingwomen. God knows why I said no but I was just at the end of my PhD and barely coherent - and had no desire to be the centre of anyone's attention. It ended up, with author Catherine Fox, designed to celebrate women supporting each other and became the book Women Kind.
We've kept in touch since then. When she wrote her award-winning book about leadership, Head and Heart, she suggested I do the accompanying questionnaire to see what kind of a leader I was. Headish? Heartish? I ran from that too. Impulsive. Grumpy. Intense. Not exactly sure how my family survived me (although, spoiler alert, they have).
Now, I've come good. In Ferguson's latest book, Blindspotting, I've found myself. What is a blind spot? Blind spots, says Ferguson, are really those flaws in our thinking where we've done something really well in the past and we plan to stick to our knitting.
And she's got advice for the politicians in our two major parties. She fears the Labor Party's capacity for self-reflection may have been buried under its landslide victory.
"Hubris can absolutely become a blind spot where you think that you now know what people want, you think you now know the answers," she says.
And the Coalition? "I don't know that they're truly being honest with themselves about why they had such an appalling result, and unless they do that by seeking views outside of their own circles, then they'll just continue to perpetuate the blind spots that got them into this position in the first place.
"They need to be able to disentangle their egos and really put that aside, to put the party first if they want to have any hope of succeeding in the future."
That might take them at least another couple of election cycles.
*So was I right about Ferguson's school captain energy? Nope, nope, nope, as one of our former prime ministers with major blind spots famously said.
Ferguson went straight from school to ADFA. She was the first woman to become dux of an Australian air force graduating class at ADFA (in her year, women made up less than 10 per cent of the class). That's where her leadership began. As part of her first job, straight out of ADFA, she was appointed to a job which would break so many of us, the base burials officer in the Royal Australian Air Force, organising funerals for serving members who died because of illness, car accidents, misadventure. And for those who died by suicide. Years later, she undertook a Churchill Fellowship to talk to bereaved military families, to find out how our defence forces could do better with support.
Doing better is what she's about. Being pleased with ourselves, though, can be a bit of hurdle if we really want to do well.
But what's the problem with being pleased we've done well?
Says Ferguson: "We think we'll do it well again. It can come through prejudice, not wanting to believe others can achieve something or do something. It can come through power, through being someone who can't put themselves in the shoes of others.
"These are flaws in our thinking that we all have. Absolutely no one is immune from blind spots, and they're fuelled by biases and baggage we bring with us and a lack of curiosity about the world around us."
Ferguson, now in her early 50s, says she has blind spots herself. She says she was a real advocate for working from home. She loves working from home herself. But it was only when she started listening to her own daughters, 23 and 25, and reading correspondence responding to her column, Got A Minute, in the Nine newspapers, she realised she needed to open up.
"People miss working in the office, they get a lot out of being present, that camaraderie and culture.
"I talk about needing to hold our convictions lightly, and on that one, I did, because it's not as though I've gone full tilt the other way. I still think we should have working from home, where it's feasible. The position should be made for people to have a choice. But it's no longer as black and white as I perhaps thought it was."
How do we get past our blind spots? Ferguson has a training regime.
Be honest with yourself. Be curious. Be flexible. Which is fine for her to say. The rest of us struggle. Her tips? (Dear god, they read like the first week back at the gym after a holiday).
"We have to be honest about the fact that we have biases, and we have to be able to disentangle our ego from thinking that we have to be right," she says. I hope our politicians are reading this as we speak.
The next one is easy, at least for me. I'm a native-born nosy parker. "Be willing to question for insights rather than trying to win arguments," says Ferguson.
And finally, we need to be flexible. "That is all about being willing to change our mind in the face of new information, it's being able to embrace ambiguity, because the world is uncertain," she says.
Too many of our leaders across all sectors pretend they are certain.
"When we look at some of the political leaders we have, some of the business leaders, other people that we celebrate, so often they're exactly the kind of vacuous people that operate off charisma.
"But for time immemorial, these people have consistently failed us in the end - but we continue to be caught out by the ease with which they can convince us they know what they're talking about when they really don't."
Ferguson's right about this: "They convince us that they've got our best interests at heart when they really don't."
Love books? Us too! Looking for more reads and recommendations? Browse our books page and bookmark the page so you can find our latest books content with ease.
Years ago now, I ran into Kirstin Ferguson at one of those networking events. She had what I thought was strong school captain energy* combined with wildly curly hair and an air of extreme calm. You could tell, just from a five-minute conversation, she had a wise centre.
A few months later, she wrote to me asking if I would be part of a campaign of hers, #celebratingwomen. God knows why I said no but I was just at the end of my PhD and barely coherent - and had no desire to be the centre of anyone's attention. It ended up, with author Catherine Fox, designed to celebrate women supporting each other and became the book Women Kind.
We've kept in touch since then. When she wrote her award-winning book about leadership, Head and Heart, she suggested I do the accompanying questionnaire to see what kind of a leader I was. Headish? Heartish? I ran from that too. Impulsive. Grumpy. Intense. Not exactly sure how my family survived me (although, spoiler alert, they have).
Now, I've come good. In Ferguson's latest book, Blindspotting, I've found myself. What is a blind spot? Blind spots, says Ferguson, are really those flaws in our thinking where we've done something really well in the past and we plan to stick to our knitting.
And she's got advice for the politicians in our two major parties. She fears the Labor Party's capacity for self-reflection may have been buried under its landslide victory.
"Hubris can absolutely become a blind spot where you think that you now know what people want, you think you now know the answers," she says.
And the Coalition? "I don't know that they're truly being honest with themselves about why they had such an appalling result, and unless they do that by seeking views outside of their own circles, then they'll just continue to perpetuate the blind spots that got them into this position in the first place.
"They need to be able to disentangle their egos and really put that aside, to put the party first if they want to have any hope of succeeding in the future."
That might take them at least another couple of election cycles.
*So was I right about Ferguson's school captain energy? Nope, nope, nope, as one of our former prime ministers with major blind spots famously said.
Ferguson went straight from school to ADFA. She was the first woman to become dux of an Australian air force graduating class at ADFA (in her year, women made up less than 10 per cent of the class). That's where her leadership began. As part of her first job, straight out of ADFA, she was appointed to a job which would break so many of us, the base burials officer in the Royal Australian Air Force, organising funerals for serving members who died because of illness, car accidents, misadventure. And for those who died by suicide. Years later, she undertook a Churchill Fellowship to talk to bereaved military families, to find out how our defence forces could do better with support.
Doing better is what she's about. Being pleased with ourselves, though, can be a bit of hurdle if we really want to do well.
But what's the problem with being pleased we've done well?
Says Ferguson: "We think we'll do it well again. It can come through prejudice, not wanting to believe others can achieve something or do something. It can come through power, through being someone who can't put themselves in the shoes of others.
"These are flaws in our thinking that we all have. Absolutely no one is immune from blind spots, and they're fuelled by biases and baggage we bring with us and a lack of curiosity about the world around us."
Ferguson, now in her early 50s, says she has blind spots herself. She says she was a real advocate for working from home. She loves working from home herself. But it was only when she started listening to her own daughters, 23 and 25, and reading correspondence responding to her column, Got A Minute, in the Nine newspapers, she realised she needed to open up.
"People miss working in the office, they get a lot out of being present, that camaraderie and culture.
"I talk about needing to hold our convictions lightly, and on that one, I did, because it's not as though I've gone full tilt the other way. I still think we should have working from home, where it's feasible. The position should be made for people to have a choice. But it's no longer as black and white as I perhaps thought it was."
How do we get past our blind spots? Ferguson has a training regime.
Be honest with yourself. Be curious. Be flexible. Which is fine for her to say. The rest of us struggle. Her tips? (Dear god, they read like the first week back at the gym after a holiday).
"We have to be honest about the fact that we have biases, and we have to be able to disentangle our ego from thinking that we have to be right," she says. I hope our politicians are reading this as we speak.
The next one is easy, at least for me. I'm a native-born nosy parker. "Be willing to question for insights rather than trying to win arguments," says Ferguson.
And finally, we need to be flexible. "That is all about being willing to change our mind in the face of new information, it's being able to embrace ambiguity, because the world is uncertain," she says.
Too many of our leaders across all sectors pretend they are certain.
"When we look at some of the political leaders we have, some of the business leaders, other people that we celebrate, so often they're exactly the kind of vacuous people that operate off charisma.
"But for time immemorial, these people have consistently failed us in the end - but we continue to be caught out by the ease with which they can convince us they know what they're talking about when they really don't."
Ferguson's right about this: "They convince us that they've got our best interests at heart when they really don't."
Love books? Us too! Looking for more reads and recommendations? Browse our books page and bookmark the page so you can find our latest books content with ease.
Years ago now, I ran into Kirstin Ferguson at one of those networking events. She had what I thought was strong school captain energy* combined with wildly curly hair and an air of extreme calm. You could tell, just from a five-minute conversation, she had a wise centre.
A few months later, she wrote to me asking if I would be part of a campaign of hers, #celebratingwomen. God knows why I said no but I was just at the end of my PhD and barely coherent - and had no desire to be the centre of anyone's attention. It ended up, with author Catherine Fox, designed to celebrate women supporting each other and became the book Women Kind.
We've kept in touch since then. When she wrote her award-winning book about leadership, Head and Heart, she suggested I do the accompanying questionnaire to see what kind of a leader I was. Headish? Heartish? I ran from that too. Impulsive. Grumpy. Intense. Not exactly sure how my family survived me (although, spoiler alert, they have).
Now, I've come good. In Ferguson's latest book, Blindspotting, I've found myself. What is a blind spot? Blind spots, says Ferguson, are really those flaws in our thinking where we've done something really well in the past and we plan to stick to our knitting.
And she's got advice for the politicians in our two major parties. She fears the Labor Party's capacity for self-reflection may have been buried under its landslide victory.
"Hubris can absolutely become a blind spot where you think that you now know what people want, you think you now know the answers," she says.
And the Coalition? "I don't know that they're truly being honest with themselves about why they had such an appalling result, and unless they do that by seeking views outside of their own circles, then they'll just continue to perpetuate the blind spots that got them into this position in the first place.
"They need to be able to disentangle their egos and really put that aside, to put the party first if they want to have any hope of succeeding in the future."
That might take them at least another couple of election cycles.
*So was I right about Ferguson's school captain energy? Nope, nope, nope, as one of our former prime ministers with major blind spots famously said.
Ferguson went straight from school to ADFA. She was the first woman to become dux of an Australian air force graduating class at ADFA (in her year, women made up less than 10 per cent of the class). That's where her leadership began. As part of her first job, straight out of ADFA, she was appointed to a job which would break so many of us, the base burials officer in the Royal Australian Air Force, organising funerals for serving members who died because of illness, car accidents, misadventure. And for those who died by suicide. Years later, she undertook a Churchill Fellowship to talk to bereaved military families, to find out how our defence forces could do better with support.
Doing better is what she's about. Being pleased with ourselves, though, can be a bit of hurdle if we really want to do well.
But what's the problem with being pleased we've done well?
Says Ferguson: "We think we'll do it well again. It can come through prejudice, not wanting to believe others can achieve something or do something. It can come through power, through being someone who can't put themselves in the shoes of others.
"These are flaws in our thinking that we all have. Absolutely no one is immune from blind spots, and they're fuelled by biases and baggage we bring with us and a lack of curiosity about the world around us."
Ferguson, now in her early 50s, says she has blind spots herself. She says she was a real advocate for working from home. She loves working from home herself. But it was only when she started listening to her own daughters, 23 and 25, and reading correspondence responding to her column, Got A Minute, in the Nine newspapers, she realised she needed to open up.
"People miss working in the office, they get a lot out of being present, that camaraderie and culture.
"I talk about needing to hold our convictions lightly, and on that one, I did, because it's not as though I've gone full tilt the other way. I still think we should have working from home, where it's feasible. The position should be made for people to have a choice. But it's no longer as black and white as I perhaps thought it was."
How do we get past our blind spots? Ferguson has a training regime.
Be honest with yourself. Be curious. Be flexible. Which is fine for her to say. The rest of us struggle. Her tips? (Dear god, they read like the first week back at the gym after a holiday).
"We have to be honest about the fact that we have biases, and we have to be able to disentangle our ego from thinking that we have to be right," she says. I hope our politicians are reading this as we speak.
The next one is easy, at least for me. I'm a native-born nosy parker. "Be willing to question for insights rather than trying to win arguments," says Ferguson.
And finally, we need to be flexible. "That is all about being willing to change our mind in the face of new information, it's being able to embrace ambiguity, because the world is uncertain," she says.
Too many of our leaders across all sectors pretend they are certain.
"When we look at some of the political leaders we have, some of the business leaders, other people that we celebrate, so often they're exactly the kind of vacuous people that operate off charisma.
"But for time immemorial, these people have consistently failed us in the end - but we continue to be caught out by the ease with which they can convince us they know what they're talking about when they really don't."
Ferguson's right about this: "They convince us that they've got our best interests at heart when they really don't."
Love books? Us too! Looking for more reads and recommendations? Browse our books page and bookmark the page so you can find our latest books content with ease.
Years ago now, I ran into Kirstin Ferguson at one of those networking events. She had what I thought was strong school captain energy* combined with wildly curly hair and an air of extreme calm. You could tell, just from a five-minute conversation, she had a wise centre.
A few months later, she wrote to me asking if I would be part of a campaign of hers, #celebratingwomen. God knows why I said no but I was just at the end of my PhD and barely coherent - and had no desire to be the centre of anyone's attention. It ended up, with author Catherine Fox, designed to celebrate women supporting each other and became the book Women Kind.
We've kept in touch since then. When she wrote her award-winning book about leadership, Head and Heart, she suggested I do the accompanying questionnaire to see what kind of a leader I was. Headish? Heartish? I ran from that too. Impulsive. Grumpy. Intense. Not exactly sure how my family survived me (although, spoiler alert, they have).
Now, I've come good. In Ferguson's latest book, Blindspotting, I've found myself. What is a blind spot? Blind spots, says Ferguson, are really those flaws in our thinking where we've done something really well in the past and we plan to stick to our knitting.
And she's got advice for the politicians in our two major parties. She fears the Labor Party's capacity for self-reflection may have been buried under its landslide victory.
"Hubris can absolutely become a blind spot where you think that you now know what people want, you think you now know the answers," she says.
And the Coalition? "I don't know that they're truly being honest with themselves about why they had such an appalling result, and unless they do that by seeking views outside of their own circles, then they'll just continue to perpetuate the blind spots that got them into this position in the first place.
"They need to be able to disentangle their egos and really put that aside, to put the party first if they want to have any hope of succeeding in the future."
That might take them at least another couple of election cycles.
*So was I right about Ferguson's school captain energy? Nope, nope, nope, as one of our former prime ministers with major blind spots famously said.
Ferguson went straight from school to ADFA. She was the first woman to become dux of an Australian air force graduating class at ADFA (in her year, women made up less than 10 per cent of the class). That's where her leadership began. As part of her first job, straight out of ADFA, she was appointed to a job which would break so many of us, the base burials officer in the Royal Australian Air Force, organising funerals for serving members who died because of illness, car accidents, misadventure. And for those who died by suicide. Years later, she undertook a Churchill Fellowship to talk to bereaved military families, to find out how our defence forces could do better with support.
Doing better is what she's about. Being pleased with ourselves, though, can be a bit of hurdle if we really want to do well.
But what's the problem with being pleased we've done well?
Says Ferguson: "We think we'll do it well again. It can come through prejudice, not wanting to believe others can achieve something or do something. It can come through power, through being someone who can't put themselves in the shoes of others.
"These are flaws in our thinking that we all have. Absolutely no one is immune from blind spots, and they're fuelled by biases and baggage we bring with us and a lack of curiosity about the world around us."
Ferguson, now in her early 50s, says she has blind spots herself. She says she was a real advocate for working from home. She loves working from home herself. But it was only when she started listening to her own daughters, 23 and 25, and reading correspondence responding to her column, Got A Minute, in the Nine newspapers, she realised she needed to open up.
"People miss working in the office, they get a lot out of being present, that camaraderie and culture.
"I talk about needing to hold our convictions lightly, and on that one, I did, because it's not as though I've gone full tilt the other way. I still think we should have working from home, where it's feasible. The position should be made for people to have a choice. But it's no longer as black and white as I perhaps thought it was."
How do we get past our blind spots? Ferguson has a training regime.
Be honest with yourself. Be curious. Be flexible. Which is fine for her to say. The rest of us struggle. Her tips? (Dear god, they read like the first week back at the gym after a holiday).
"We have to be honest about the fact that we have biases, and we have to be able to disentangle our ego from thinking that we have to be right," she says. I hope our politicians are reading this as we speak.
The next one is easy, at least for me. I'm a native-born nosy parker. "Be willing to question for insights rather than trying to win arguments," says Ferguson.
And finally, we need to be flexible. "That is all about being willing to change our mind in the face of new information, it's being able to embrace ambiguity, because the world is uncertain," she says.
Too many of our leaders across all sectors pretend they are certain.
"When we look at some of the political leaders we have, some of the business leaders, other people that we celebrate, so often they're exactly the kind of vacuous people that operate off charisma.
"But for time immemorial, these people have consistently failed us in the end - but we continue to be caught out by the ease with which they can convince us they know what they're talking about when they really don't."
Ferguson's right about this: "They convince us that they've got our best interests at heart when they really don't."
Love books? Us too! Looking for more reads and recommendations? Browse our books page and bookmark the page so you can find our latest books content with ease.
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