Intellect and Heart Have Formed the Core of Elizabeth Broderick’s Career Path

This lawyer has tackled some of our thorniest issues – from gender discrimination to human-rights violations – with intellect and heart. Here's how Elizabeth Broderick's career path has shaped her work.

Focus on your long-term impact

2017-present: Special rapporteur (independent expert) and member of the Working Group on discrimination against women and girls, United Nations Human Rights Council

“We go on country visits to look at the status of women and girls, and make recommendations to that country as to how to lift the status. We write to the heads of nation states, drawing to their attention human-rights violations, such as in Afghanistan and Iran. We’re a group of five rapporteurs and we have to be comfortable that any action we take may not have the outcome we want. When we started to see problematic laws in the United States about women’s reproductive rights, we wrote to the Trump administration to draw their attention to the regression. Not only did we not get the response we would have liked, we believe he somehow used it in his re-election campaign. You have to assess impact in a different way. I now ask myself, ‘Do I believe in the value, the truth and the rightness of the work that I’m doing in this moment?’ Without that framing, you could get so discouraged. It makes you become braver – you need a lot of courage to call out human-rights violations, knowing the power of nation states. Self-care is also important, as is having hope. Not blind hope – intentional hope. And looking for goodness in the world. If you show up and refuse to leave, you will find so much that’s good. Movements for change will only ever be as strong as every one of us who makes up that movement.”

Understand the true issues

2015- present: Principal, Elizabeth Broderick & Co

“We do a lot of cultural-change work and have a fantastic, diverse team. We work with boards, members of executive teams and management, helping them understand the importance of listening and getting proximate to the issues they’re trying to solve. I tell boards that when they’re onsite for a meeting or a visit, they need to get out in the organisation and ask people about it. Similarly, management teams need to be listening and not arriving as the boss or the manager but rather arriving as one human being who wants to listen deeply to another while suspending judgment. This increases capability and performance for an organisation and delivers to the bottom line. If you care about your business, you care about infusing humanity back into it.”

Prioritise people over data

2011-2015: Commissioner responsible for cultural change collaboration, Australian Defence Force

2011-2013: Chair, Review into the Treatment of Women in the Australian Defence Force

“Leaders have so much data coming across their desks every single day – you have to present them with a human story. I was able to bring those who were the most powerful in the Australian Defence Force face-to-face with the most vulnerable. I was with the then chief of Army, sitting uncomfortably in his chair, and this beautiful young woman – one of the stars of the recruit school – came with her mother to tell her story of sexual assault, of having the courage to speak out and having her career trashed as a result. At the end, the mother looked the chief of Army in the eyes and said, ‘I gave you the person I love most in the world and this is how you’ve treated her.’ I think it forced him to stare into some really uncomfortable truths. When you bring the personal front-and-centre to leaders, even the most conservative organisations can transform.”

Big shifts come from the top

2011- present: Founder and convener, Champions of Change Coalition

“If we want to redistribute power, we need to work with those who hold power and 12 years ago, that was largely men. It still is but it is shifting. We needed powerful, decent men stepping up. Not to advocate for women or to rescue them but to stand up beside women as equal partners in change. I’m a pragmatist. I don’t care why you come to the agenda. Champions of Change is an internal journey for men because change starts with each of us. We can ask those people over there to change but our family won’t change, our organisation won’t change, our country won’t change until we change first. When powerful leaders change or shift, their organisations shift and the nation shifts. It’s not about fixing the entire world all at once; it’s fixing the part of the world that’s within our reach.”

Change takes time

2007-2015: Australian sex discrimination commissioner, Australian Human Rights Commission

“I had all these ideas about how change happened. I thought that I would just open up my contact list, reach out to all the amazing women across Australia who I knew and together we’d drive change. I realised that it was much more complex than that. I started to learn about the importance of operating on multiple levels, from the individual level to the system level. A country can have strong laws but strong laws aren’t enough. Those laws need to be understood and effectively implemented all across the country. I learnt that there’s no one thing you can do to create change in a nation. It happens through thousands of people who care – the relentless pursuit of ordinary people never giving up. Change happens one small step at a time.”

Concentrate on what you can control

1988-2007: Partner, Blake Dawson (now Ashurst)

“I was there at the time of the dotcom boom and went into an internet incubator. We worked out that a billable hour is a perishable good, a bit like a hamburger or a hotel room: if you don’t sell it today, it has zero value tomorrow. It was the beginning of my change-management journey. I learnt that being 10 years ahead of the game in innovation can be as bad as being 10 years behind. We learnt that we should fail fast, fail cheap and take the learnings to help us into the future. A number of web services from that time are in full fruition today but we were probably 10 to 20 years ahead. I learned that most disruptive technologies don’t perform well at the beginning but over time they quickly gather speed so you need to keep an eye on them. But for immediate revenue-generating purposes, they’re often nowhere near as profitable as your existing service.”

Listening is a critical skill

Circa 1966: Tea server and conversation maker in her parents’ medical practice

“My dad was a nuclear medicine specialist and my mother was a physio and ran the practices. From the age of four or five, my twin sister, younger sister and I worked in the surgery, making cups of tea for patients. From that, I learnt the ability to sit with people in periods of suffering, although I would never have called it that back then. My dad was using nuclear medicine to detect things like brain tumours and lung cancer. Our job was to make small talk with the patients, bring them tea and see if they needed anything. We were little kids – what a privilege to be with people in that moment and none of them telling us to go away. It shows you the generosity of people. Now I’m out across the world, listening to the stories of human suffering… the ability to sit and listen is at the core of everything.”

SEE ALSO: How Steve Cox's Career Path Landed Him as CEO of Destination NSW