HR Connect Leadership Series | Peitta Dyball on culture, strategy & the evolving HR landscape

Welcome to the Mentorlist podcast and our HR Connect Leadership Series. I'm your host, Simone Turner, marketing manager at Mentorlist, and I'm really excited to be speaking with leading HR industry leaders about culture, transformation, leadership, and how they're building better workplaces. Today I'm joined by Petter Dybbøl, Chief People Officer at Brown Family Wine Group, to explore the impact of culture on strategy, leading through change and uncertainty, the expanding role of the Chief People Officer, leadership in the age of AI, and navigating a successful career in HR. Peta is the Chief People Officer at Brown Family Wine Group, having recently taken on the role supporting the fourth-generation family business in its next chapter of growth. She was previously the Chief People Officer for Killius Downer, operator of Yarra Trams, leading the strategy and delivery of all aspects of the people and culture function to enable the to deliver safe and reliable services on the world's largest tram network. And prior to this, Peta had almost 20 years of experience in the aviation and travel industry, and most recently as the Executive Manager of HR for Qantas after holding senior HR and IR roles at Qantas, Jetstar, JTB, and SkyWest Airlines. Peta's experience includes leading HR teams and supporting leadership teams through significant events, including COVID-19, the Qantas grounding, establishment of offshore Jetstar operations in Vietnam and New Zealand, and major IR and legislative reforms. So a huge welcome to you, Peta.

Thank you. What an amazing introduction. I sound really impressive.

You certainly are impressive. I was so impressed when I was researching and just reading about your background and everything you've done. So we're so excited that you're on the podcast. So I thought I'd start off with asking about your journey in HR and what actually led you to a career in HR and how has the profession for you evolved over the years?

Yeah, great question. Look, it's probably not the textbook answer. I kind of fell into HR as a profession. I knew pretty early on in my schooling days that I really loved to travel, but I didn't really know what I wanted to be when I grew up. So I actually left school and joined— did a Bachelor of Business in Hotel Management and Travel and Tourism. But after spending a few years studying and working overseas for a little while, I came back and decided I wanted to focus in more on the people side of things rather than the operational side of things of a business. And I was really lucky to get an opportunity straight out of uni to join SkyWest, which was an Ansett subsidiary, in an HR role over there, which was pretty much the start of my love of HR ever since. And, you know, I think the role has evolved so much in the years that I've spent in the HR profession, and I think it keeps getting broader, it keeps getting more strategically important, and we keep getting thrown different challenges and different opportunities to really influence the way businesses think about their people their culture, their legislative requirements. So it's just kept me hooked from an early age.

Yeah, and I love how it has evolved that way for you. And I guess speaking of HR evolving in that way, I know that you've had some incredibly high-stakes experiences, including your time at Qantas during the industrial action. And I'd love to know, yeah, what that period taught you and yeah, the relationship between culture and business and what you found you learned during that time.

Yeah, I mean, it was a really interesting time. For those listening, we're talking about back to 2011 when Qantas was going through quite a big period of industrial action. The— we had 3 of our major unions taking fairly coordinated action in a round of bargaining, and it culminated in the CEO at the time, Alan Joyce, making a call to ground the airline. in response. So what I thought I was learning at the time was how to manage a really high-stakes industrial relations strategy in the face of some pretty combative union relationships. But what it ended up teaching me was really my first live experience of what happens when there is damage to an organisation's relationship with its employees and when there's real damage to that level of trust and to the cultural elements that people hold dear. within an organisation. I mean, the industrial strategy played out as it was intended to.

Yeah.

And ultimately the Fair Work Commission ruled to stop the industrial action. We went back to the bargaining table. Eventually deals were done and, and everything kind of went back to normal. But it didn't really go back to normal at the time. You know, Qantas's strategy, as most companies are, was a balancing act between 3 key priorities, which was our people, our financials, and therefore our our shareholder returns and our customers. In the face of that industrial action and those tensions with the unions in that round of bargaining, we were really running a strategy that was aimed at taking care of our customers because they were being impacted by the industrial action at the time, but also taking care of our shareholders to make sure that we had enterprise agreements in place that were financially viable for the future and setting the business up. We didn't take as much care with our people through that process. And what we found is that after that had run its course, the damage that was done had a really long tail and a really long impact on both our customers and our financials and our people.

Yeah, absolutely. I can imagine. And what are some ways that you worked, I guess, on repairing that damage and rebuilding trust between pilots as well and management, um, in the following year?

Yeah, it was, it was a really interesting time. Um, so I was working in a role looking after the, um, the flight operations department and the operations centre, so mostly our pilots and, and the integrated operations centre. Um, and what was really apparent after that time was that the break in trust and the feeling of, I guess they would say, betrayal that the pilot body in particular felt as a result of that decision to ground the airline was really deep and wasn't going to be fixed on its own. If anyone's worked in the airline industry— but many industries are like this— there's often kind of the rock stars of the industry that you're working in that have— that really set the tone for the rest of the business. And in the airline industry, the pilots are that body. You know, they have ultimate control over the safety of your operations. They have ultimate decision-making rights over when the aircraft departs or whether it does or not. They have a huge influence around, you know, how the cabin crew do their job on the day and how they're feeling about their work. And so having a really highly disengaged pilot body was having a beginning— big impact across the whole organization. So what we needed to do there was work on rebuilding the trust. That was the main thing that had been broken at that point in time. And it's one of the hardest things to rebuild, I think, when you're thinking about your company culture and your relationship with your people. So we embarked on a series of design forums. So we actually, We invited the head of the pilots' union, a number of our very influential pilots from across the organisation, our CEO, our CFO, some of the heads of the flight operations department, senior managers from other areas, some of our cabin crew...

Mm.

...and some of our customers to join us in some sessions designed at looking at what had happened, reflecting from both sides around what was needed to move forward, and then really starting to co-design a piece of work this is how we're gonna behave going forward, that both sides are gonna commit to, to start to both put a line in the sand and kind of go, we can't completely change the history and we can't keep looking backwards, but what we can do is fix how we go forward.

Yeah, I love that strategy. And did you find, I guess, yeah, moving on to your Chief People Officer role also at Yarra Trams and making culture such a core part of your 5-year strategy there, did you find, I guess, that you took lessons from that experience as well and implemented those into this 5-year strategy as well?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the learnings from that period of time within Qantas have really stayed with me throughout the rest of my career, to be honest. And it was one of those things that, I mean, I think we all read it a lot in textbooks and we see the studies that come out from the consultants and everywhere that says that engagement and culture has such a critical critical link to the performance of a business. But feeling that firsthand and seeing the real impacts of that throughout those years at Qantas after the grounding were hugely influential in how I run my roles and my— the approach that I take to businesses. So when I joined Yarra Trams, I joined in the middle of COVID It was a really interesting time for the business. So not only were they dealing with COVID and running an essential service in a really disrupted environment and a really different manner for for our people, but they were also 4 years away from the end of their term of their existing franchise with the government. So they were looking to set themselves up for what do we need to do in these next 4 to 5 years to really make ourselves a viable proposition to regain the contract for a third term and put ourselves in a good place to tender for that. And so the CEO and the leadership team at the time were really interested in having that moment of really doing a big strategy refresh and bringing my learnings from Qantas and, you know, understanding the culture of the Keolis Downer business at the time, I was really passionate about the fact that we couldn't build that strategy in isolation from our culture. And so what we did there was do a really deep dive into our current state culture, to really start to define it in practical terms so that we knew what the behaviors were that were going to drive the culture that we wanted. But we also knew what the behaviors were that were gonna derail that culture and that we wanted to avoid. So again, it was working with employees from across our whole business to kind of say, when we, when we have these 5 core values and we did, like many organizations already have a set of values articulated, but we wanted to understand what that actually meant and how we were doing against those values at that point in time so that we could then say, well, okay, we've, we, you know, the data suggested we were doing great on safety culture, right? It's a highly operational environment.

Yeah.

Safety culture is key, but maybe we were doing less great on our care for our people or our innovation. And so by capturing a whole heap of quantitative and qualitative data, we were able to express what our current state culture was and where we wanted to move to in the future, which really then became a critical pillar of our strategy to inform all the other areas of focus as well around operational performance and financial performance and community engagement and all the other things that make a business like that successful.

I'm just smiling because you've just done so much and it's, it's so inspiring to hear like what change you've made. You know, for— I think of Trams of Melbourne, but they're everywhere, aren't they? They are.

Melbourne's the most iconic and still the closest to my heart, of course.

Well, I travel on the tram every day, so I'm just smiling thinking, wow, you have have done so much and to change that. So that's absolutely incredible. Um, I could keep talking about that as well, but I'd love to know also more about your more recent role as Chief People Officer for Brown Family Wine Group, which you have let me know has an amazing family culture. And I'd love to know what are some ways that you're working with the business to protect and maintain that culture or their culture, um, as they do grow?

Yeah, I mean, you're right. I'm so fortunate to be where I am now. And at this point in my career as well, I've joined, um, the Brown Family Wine Group at a point in time when it is really looking at that challenge of how do you maintain this amazing legacy, this, um, you know, kind of 130 years of a culture of innovation, but a very family-centric, um, business and a very kind of regional-centric business as it grows now and expands into other locations, but also looking for expansion overseas and to really bring its products to more and more consumers over the years. The challenge for me in this role that the board and the family have set for me and the CEO is to help them with that challenge of how do we maintain this culture? There's a recognition in the business and you feel it, it's palpable when you join that this culture that they have is a real superpower for them. And it is going to be the thing that helps support this really interesting growth ambition that they've got. But it's a real challenge to kind of take that, and the work that I'm hopefully going to do in the future and that we're starting to think about at the moment is again, how do you distill this feeling that is around this business into core behaviours that are going to be able to be specific enough to influence how we make decisions going forward? Because I think, you know, you can talk a lot about having a family culture, but unless you really know what that means in terms of how we behave and how we make decisions and how we look after our people through times that might be challenging or through transitions or through change, then you can't really start to protect what that culture means. And so the interesting piece that I'm looking at at the moment is what does that mean for everyone? What does that show? How does that show up in terms of behaviors for the people that work there that have started recently? that have worked there for 20 or 30 or 40 years.

Yeah.

And how do we use that then to help define the decisions that we make going forward?

Yeah, that's definitely a lot to think about. I would also love to know, I guess, carrying on from that, what are some practical things that leaders and CPOs can do to understand and define the culture and make it more tangible?

Yeah, look, I think it is that definition of the culture that's really key. I think it's one of those things that you can't set and forget. There's plenty of examples out there of organizations who have had these amazingly articulated set of company values, but you scratch the surface and you see the way that executives within the business or people within the business are behaving, and you can pretty clearly see the disconnect between what they're saying and what they're doing. And I think that's the really piece for me is whatever organization you're in, you need to keep checking in on, are our behaviors in line with what we're saying our behaviors are and how are they being received? And you can't do that without talking to your people. So I always start with that, whether it's through surveys, whether it's through face-to-face, whether it's in focus groups, whether it's in listening posts, however you can get that really open and honest feedback. about how your behaviors are showing up as an organization and where the points where employees kind of go, oh yeah, we say that, but we do this.

Yeah.

So as soon as— as much information as you can gather around that and keep checking in on it. The other piece is that's really helped me in any of these times that I've been working around culture and businesses is that definition of the culture in really strong behavioral terms. So we might say we care, but that might look something very different in a hospital situation than it does in a winery. So how does we care show up in terms of specific behaviors? And I think that's the— if you can distill your culture down to some specific behaviors of what we do and we don't do around here.

Yeah.

That is the, the gold that lets you then work out how you're doing, but also gives you a language to continue to moderate and maintain that behavior going forward.

Yeah, I absolutely agree because every workplace is so different. So you're absolutely right, like what might matter to your current role may not— the staff might not even be thinking of that, you know, as they're conscious.

Exactly.

So yeah, that makes so much sense. And I would love to touch on now, I guess, a topic that I feel so many people probably listening to this, but also I know our members go through, is leading through change and uncertainty because it's not even just, you know, huge global change, but it can just be change within the business and, you know, things that they are facing. So in your career, I know that you've supported CEOs and leadership teams through the Ansett collapse, the GFC, SARS, major transformations including large-scale downsizing, and of course COVID. And I hate saying that word.

But it's true.

It's just, it happened, we can't ignore it. And now the rise of AI as well. So how do you manage yourself during these moments of uncertainty? And how do you show up as a leader for teams that are relying on you?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a really good question. And it's something that particularly in the people and culture space, I'm really conscious of now, because I do think people take the lead from the leaders in the people and culture space. It's kind of like, I go back to an airline analogy, and when my kids were little and we went through turbulence, I'm just like, you look at the flight attendant's face and if they're not worried, you don't need to be worried.

I love that.

It's kind of the same thing when you're leading the people and culture function or when you're leading in any big role in a business is, you know, what you're projecting is gonna send much more of a stronger cue to the organization and the people you're working with than anything you write in an email or any corporate communication. that go out. I mean, I had the, I guess, challenge but also privilege really early on in my career to go through a major disruption. So when I was working at SkyWest, it was part of the Ansett Group, and before Virgin in this country, there was Ansett as the second airline, and it unfortunately did collapse in one of the big spectacular kind of early corporate collapses in the country. And I was working for them at the time, and I was still probably only about 2 or 3 years out of uni in an HR role working over over in WA, and I got the call at about 4 o'clock in the morning from my general manager to say the airline's just been put in administration, you need to get to the airport, we don't really know what's going on, but we're going to need your help.

Wow.

And so I had at that point in time a 20-minute drive from my house to the airport, and I was on the phone to my general manager pretty much the whole way there, and he gave me some of the best advice of my career because he's just like, you are in this, but we also need you to lead through this. And so you're going to need to think about in the next 15, 20 minutes before you show up at the airport, what do these need from you and how do you want to show up for them? And that's something that was kind of incredibly challenging at the time to do, but it just reframed my approach and it took me out of that, well, this is happening to me as well and I'm worried about my career and what does it mean for me and put me in that space of actually, no, that's not what these people need from me at the moment. They need me to be calm. They need me to try and get as much information as I can to relay to them.

Yeah.

They need me to tell them when they can get more information. And that's something that I've taken with me throughout my whole career is just checking in on those moments when emotions are high, you're about to do something really challenging, or you're dealing with a heap of uncertainty. It's what do my people need from me? What does my leadership team need from me? And how can I just pause in that moment and be a bit mindful about how I want to show up?

Yeah, I feel like I'm going to remember that for the rest of my life. I love that tip. That is such a great leadership tip. And yeah, I guess speaking of leadership and, you know, the role of a CPO, it's definitely, as we were speaking about before, it has changed and it's definitely become more complex. There's so much to balance between everything from strategic leadership and governance to being a trusted advisor and also employee advocate as well. So how do you, or I guess, the better way of asking this is how have you seen the CPO role evolve over time? And yeah, what does it take, would you say, to be truly effective in that seat today? That was a really long way of asking that, but I hope that made sense. That is a big question.

I know. I mean, I think in terms of the evolution of the Chief People Officer role, it is constantly evolving. It's one of the things I love about working in this space But I do think it is really having a moment right now. I think as you know, as we learnt through COVID, you know, people and culture and the care we showed for our people and navigating businesses through that uncertainty, which was really had to be a people-centric approach, really put the CPOs at the forefront of running their businesses and being that strong partner at that senior leadership table when nobody had. The SME experience to manage through this and nobody had the textbook and nobody had been through anything like this before. And I think it's again the same with AI. Like nobody knows how this is going to finish. Nobody knows where this race is going to land. But we know that it's going to have a huge impact on the way we work, on the way we think about structuring our organisations and on all of our people. And so I think the, you know, the role of a CPO has become much more strategic. over the time that I've been working in this space. It's become much more effective when you have CPOs that aren't just stuck in their subject matter expertise.

Yeah.

You have to know your stuff. You have to have the governance right. You have to have the legislative compliance right. And you have to know, you know, the disciplines that fall within HR. But that's just your license to play right now. And actually where we add the most value is where we understand the impacts across the whole business and we can create those linkages for senior leadership teams and organizations that kind of say, if you play with this element over here, it's going to have an impact over here, and we need to be conscious of that impact and, and careful about that and mindful about that. I think in support functions, we often, particularly in larger organizations, we have that privilege of seeing across the whole business and not just looking at our silos. And I think that's where we can add a real amount of value as well as businesses navigate through you know, this constant cycle of change and uncertainty that we're in now and probably never gonna get out of.

Yeah, absolutely. There's, and it is forever changing, like you mentioned, like especially with AI, you know, it's reshaping the world. It's reshaping as we're speaking in real time. I feel like every day there's something new that I'm finding out about it. And especially, yeah, marketing and HR roles, it's reshaping so many roles. So yeah, and then I guess I would love to talk about navigating career, careers in HR. So looking back at your career, what guided your decisions when choosing new roles and how have you approached shaping your career over time?

Probably not as structured as I maybe should. But look, I mean, my approach to my career has been do interesting stuff that you enjoy. basically at its core. And so I've always had a, a bit of a future plan about where I want to go and what experiences or what skills I want to build, but I've never ended up following the exact path that I thought I would.

Interesting.

And I've had a much more interesting career because I haven't been singularly focused on this exact role is going to be my next role, because it's left me open to kind of different moves that have come up and different opportunities that have come up that I've been lucky enough to be able to just say, actually, that sounds really fascinating, I'm gonna go try that for a while. I think with HR careers, it is such a broad profession and getting, you know, gathering as many broad experiences as you can is a really great way to build your expertise as an HR practitioner, but also, you know, build that transferable skillset that's gonna set you up for changing industries or changing into different disciplines of HR as you build your career.

Yeah, I love that you followed, you know, what I guess essentially what lights you up and what you were interested in rather than going— because HR is so diverse and there's so many different industries or different areas you can focus on. So I think that's such great advice for anyone listening or even just starting out. So across all these organizations that you've worked in, what core values or principles have guided your leadership style and how have those shaped the way that you lead people and culture today?

Look, I like to articulate my values as being around integrity, honesty, and kindness or empathy, depending on how you want to, you know, sort of describe that. And I think it does really show up in terms of the career choices I make, but also the way I try and lead my teams and the way I try and have influence over organizations. The only times I've ever actively left roles is where I felt that those values were being challenged within an organization. I think HR can do some really amazing things. HR often has to do some really tough things as well.

Mm-hmm.

I have, you know, probably done way more redundancy conversations than I'd ever want to do in my lifetime. We've, you know, I've led businesses through major change and transformations that are impactful on individuals. But I've always wanted to and stayed in roles where I was able to do the difficult things in the way I wanted to do them, in terms of with empathy and with kindness and with a view to doing the right thing even when the decision is difficult.

Yeah.

And I've found that where I get to a situation within an organisation where I can no longer do That's a good sign for me that it's time to go.

I love that. I think that's really good advice because it's also not ignoring the, I was gonna say little voice in your head, but that sounds a bit funny. But, you know, not ignoring that and not ignoring, you know, your gut on things and going against your values. Because yeah, I think in any profession that really does matter. So I think that's such good advice. And then speaking of advice, I love asking these questions at the end of all of these podcast interviews because I think people just get so much out of listening to all of it. But I think it's a great way to sum up or end the podcast. Not that I want to end this podcast because this is a great episode. But what's one piece of advice that you would give new emerging HR leaders who are really looking to make that meaningful impact in their career?

Yeah, can I make it 2?

Oh, you can make it as many as you like.

My first piece of advice to anyone, not just in the HR profession, is be curious. I mean, organisations are fascinating, human behaviour is fascinating. Be curious, ask all the questions, understand the why behind people's behaviours, don't just take it at face value, and set yourself up for ongoing learning throughout your career because nothing that we learn today is going to be probably as relevant in 5 or 10 years' time as it is today. So constant learning and curiosity is one. And the second one, I would be more specific to HR careers, is know your business. So you're a business person as well as an HR subject matter expert. And as you're growing your career, learn everything you can about the businesses that you're in, how they operate, what are the financial drivers, what are the operational imperatives for that business. Because the better you can understand the way your business works, the better you're able to tailor your HR advice or your strategies to have an impact on what matters to that business.

So looking ahead, what excites you the most about the future of work and the role HR leaders will play in shaping it?

I think it's the unknown. You know, I think it is that, you know, we're standing on the edge at the moment of this massive, again, another transformation led probably by AI, but also about a whole heap of other macroeconomic trends that are gonna impact us around climate and where geopolitical issues are centering. and all of that kind of stuff. I think, I think, yeah, HR is having a bit of a moment right now about being a real strategic partner in that. You know, it's often been said that over time work has moved from work of the hands to the head, and now it's moving from the head to the heart. And I think that's where HR and people and culture divisions play a really strong role. We're going to have to help our organisations navigate through a heap of uncertainty. We're going to have to remind ourselves to humanize AI, both from the technology and how we're using it, but also on the impacts it has on our people and on our workforces and on our next generations coming through those workforces. And I think we're moving from an age where there was a reliance on technical skills and being the best engineer or the smartest supply chain expert or the best finance person to having tools that are going to create a whole heap of that knowledge in everyone's hands. And so those— what's traditionally been called the softer skills, I think, are going to be what's needed going forward. And that's where really people and culture plays a huge role in terms of coaching leaders and coaching organisations to build those skills, to be able to act with empathy, to be able to humanise the messages and the impacts of this, and to be able to overlay that personal touch on the technology because we all still crave human interaction and genuine connection. And I think that's not going to change.

Yeah, I absolutely agree. I think that it can benefit a business, AI, but I definitely know that we're still going to need humans and, you know, that have heart and soul and—

Yeah, yeah. And we need to build those skills in the generations coming through that have actually grown up up interacting with each other in a really different way online and interacting with technology in a really different way than I did growing up.

Yeah, yeah, I know. I think of that as well. Gosh, this generation now, it's— yeah, like I was just thinking of your daughter just then. Yeah, absolutely. And lastly, and I mean, I could always— we could always add more to this as well at the end of the podcast, but I would love to know some books that you've read or even just one book that you would recommend anyone, you know, I guess within the HR space, but it could be in the leadership space as well that you would recommend?

Yeah, I've actually just reread Simon Sinek's The Infinite Game. And the reason for that was, as I'm coming into this new role at the Brown Family Wine Group, I'm thinking a lot about legacy. I'm thinking a lot about this is a business that is in it for the long term that wants to be successful for future generations of the family, but also for future generations of employees and for future generations of consumers. And so, yeah, I reread that book recently again, and I think there's just a lot of gold in there regardless of whether you're a Simon Sinek fan or not. This concept of moving organizations past just focusing on the next quarter or the next half-year financial results or the next 12 months financial results and thinking about how do we create organizations that are sustainable, infinite, Or for the next 100 years is a really interesting piece to start to think about at the moment.

Amazing. I have heard of that book recently as well, and it's funny you're saying that now. So I think that's a sign to pick it up. And is there anything else you would like to add before we do close off?

No, I think thanks for the chat. It's been my first podcast, so hopefully this is the start of many more. But I also just want a big shout out to Mentor List. I think for creating these opportunities for HR leaders to connect. I think sometimes HR can be an interestingly kind of isolating role at times, and having the ability to connect in with peers that are going through similar challenges and that are leading thinking in this space is, is often needed in HR roles.

Oh, well, no problem at all. We're so happy to be creating it. And I know by the time this podcast is out, you know, our new HR Connect membership will be available. So it's super exciting. So thank you again for being on the Mentorless Podcast, HR Connect Leadership Series. And yeah, it's been amazing chatting with you.

Absolute pleasure.