Five Days

The first warning light appeared almost immediately.

On 11 June I met with Kylie Chamberlain, my Board Sponsor.

I was trying to understand tension around the CEO role and the existing staff structure.

The problem was not that somebody disagreed with me. I expected disagreement.

The question was whether the organisation had properly prepared long-serving staff for what the creation of a CEO position meant.

A new layer of leadership changes reporting relationships.

It changes who owns decisions.

It changes who attends which conversations.

It changes what the Board expects from staff and what staff expect from the Board.

If those boundaries are not clear, everyone can believe they are acting appropriately while pulling in different directions.

The next evening, by my recollection, I raised serious concerns with Secretary Justin Ford over dinner.

I had been in the job for five days.

Three days after I started, on 11 June, I had also contacted my WorkCover case manager privately. I told her that the role, expectations and organisational environment were already appearing different from what had been represented during recruitment. I was not resigning or making accusations. I was asking for advice before making any decision.

That email matters because it existed long before the termination, long before Fair Work and long before there was any reason to reconstruct the story after the fact.

Then on 2 July, three and a half weeks into the role, I told vocational adviser Kate Southall that the job had been interesting and at times very frustrating, that long-established ways of working were making change difficult and that I had a Board meeting that night which might tell me whether the role was genuinely tenable.

Those were contemporaneous warning signs, recorded while I was still doing everything I could to make the appointment work.

That date became important later.

I was not inventing a story about workplace resistance after my employment ended.

I was telling Board members almost immediately that I could see problems in the structure and culture I had inherited.

At the same time, I was still highly motivated by the role.

Those two things were not contradictory.

A difficult organisation can still be an exciting organisation to lead.

In fact, the problems were part of why the job appealed to me.

I liked solving problems.

I just needed to know the Board wanted them solved too.