What are you passionate about in your work at the moment?
My passion centers on developing innovative solutions to intractable social issues.
For the last eight years I have served as the director of the Asia Pacific Social Impact Centre at the Melbourne Business School.
The centre was founded to position the business school as a vehicle to solve intractable social issues by conducting world-class research that forms the basis for innovative community interventions.
In your opinion what is the value of diversity to organisations?
Diversity and innovation go hand in hand. In particular, organisations seeking radical innovation must develop a strategy for attracting, retaining and developing diverse workforces.
What advice do you have for managers and teams working across different countries?
In order to have an effective multi-national workforce, organisations must be willing to create practices that tailor to employee's needs.
For example, in a recent research article my co-authors and I examined the impact of work-life support practices on employees’ delivery of effective customer service across a sample of companies operating across 27 countries.
We found that the impact of work-life support practices was greater in those countries with a strong gender egalitarianism culture, such as you find in many Scandinavian cultures. However, the impact of work-life support practices was limited in countries with a low gender egalitarian norm, such as in many Gulf countries. The point is that one size does not fit all and organisations must take the time to learn what types of practices fit local norms and also be willing to incur the costs associated with tailoring their human resource practices across different regions.
What do you think the role of creativity is in leadership?
Creativity is a key first step in the innovation process. However, more important than leaders being creative is leaders creating an environment that supports the trial and error process required for creativity to occur within their workforce. Leaders should encourage employees to generate multiple options to problems, create a process for employees to play devil’s advocate about ideas presented to the group and institutionalise a process of reflection among employees. These are all actions that stimulate and support creative behaviour.
“Diversity and innovation
go hand in hand.”
Ian Williamson
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