Deborah Yates: Why Leaders Should Resist Making Rules for the Minority

The workplace shift to remote and hybrid teams empowers some and unnerves others.

“Hybrid is definitely here to stay and there’s quite a spectrum of what that looks like,” says Deborah Yates, global chief people officer for Lendlease. “It’s important to talk about ‘return to office’ not ‘return to work’ because we all worked really hard during the pandemic and are still working really hard. Figuring it all out is a long-term game plan.” 

Yates – who indirectly looks after 6700 employees around the world – was speaking at Qantas magazine’s final Think. event for 2023, a dinner at Cutler & Co. where the panel discussed driving motivation and innovation in a hybrid workplace.

“We need to think about the work that you’re doing, how you best do that work and have an adult-to-adult relationship with our people where we focus on the outputs rather than a rule that you need to be at your workplace,” says Yates, who has previously worked in people and culture roles at KPMG Australia, Reckitt and News Corp. 

She urges leaders who are trying to mandate a return to the office – or thinking about doing that – to take a beat. 

“Resist the need to create rules because that really only deals with the minority of people who are doing the wrong thing. If you’re hiring the right people, the vast majority of them are doing whatever they can to deliver for you and your clients and customers. I say this to my team every day: ‘We develop leaders, not processes and policies.’ Develop someone who can make a good decision and who can create the place where people want to come into work.”

A lot of Lendlease employees are onsite for work, rather than in an office. “The way that we’re thinking about hybrid at Lendlease is that the magic is in the middle,” says Yates. “The answer is not that I’m never in the office or I’m always in the office. The real magic happens when we’re together often enough – whether physically or well-curated virtually. We need to make the effort so that we don’t just bump into the people in our team but that we bump into people who we don’t normally work with. Those incidental meetings are really important to innovation – that’s when diversity of thinking happens.” 

Yates says another major shift is distributed leadership, with employees as young as graduates stepping into leadership roles. 

“Distributed leadership is the future – leadership from an early age. We’re asking more junior managers to have the skills to lead in situations where you don’t see what people are doing every day. Instead we set and agree upon strategies, key milestones and what success looks like – and then let it happen.” 

Yates reminds leaders of the value of elevating humanity at work. “We confuse activity and productivity – and there’s a really big difference. We are teaching first-time managers those skills and reminding them to be human – get to know the person, be clear about what success would look like and then trust them, adult to adult.” 

SEE ALSO: Dr Larry Marshall: How KPIs Kill Innovation