Rethinking Traditional Power in the Workplace
About this Episode
In this episode of DEI Will Not DIE, Dr Bree Gorman sits down with academic and researcher Dr Judy Lundy to explore what happens when organisations fundamentally rethink how power, decision-making, and accountability work.
Judy shares her journey into DEI, from early experiences of gender-based exclusion to leading research and teaching in the DEI space today. The conversation dives into her work with Chorus, an organisation operating without traditional hierarchy, and what that reveals about creating workplaces where people genuinely feel valued, heard, and included.
Together, Bree and Judy unpack how structural design, not just intention, shapes inclusion and what leaders can start doing right now, even within traditional systems.
What You'll Learn
Why giving people a genuine voice is one of the most powerful drivers of inclusion
How traditional hierarchies often limit equity, even when intentions are good
The connection between autonomy, belonging, and employee well-being
Practical ways leaders can create safer spaces for contribution without overhauling their entire organisation
Resources Mentioned
Keep Learning & Connect With Bree
Want practical strategies for navigating resistance and building real momentum in your DEI work? Access my free webinar on evidence-based DEI strategies here. It’s packed with tools you can start using today.
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Bree: Hello and welcome back to another episode of DEI Will Not Die. I'm tuning in from Wadawurrung country, the land that I live, work and play on that always was and always will be Aboriginal land. I want to acknowledge elders past and present and also call out to any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who are listening in, or perhaps some First Nations people from other places around the globe who might be listening in.
I had a little look at the analytics because many of you who know me know that I absolutely love data. And there are some listeners now from jurisdictions outside of Australia, which is really cool. So thank you for listening in and for subscribing and supporting the podcast.
I've got another guest episode today, which I'm quite excited about. We've tried a couple of times to make this conversation happen, and it feels like now's a good time to have it. For me it's a Wednesday afternoon, but I know for Judy it's a different time zone. Judy, I'll get you to introduce yourself and tell the audience how you find yourself on a podcast about DEI.
Judy: Thanks, Bree. I'm really delighted to be here with you. We're only a couple of hours time difference now that daylight savings is over.
I'm Judy Lundy. I am an academic working at Edith Cowan University on beautiful Whadjuk Noongar Boodja in Boorloo, or Perth, in Western Australia. I'm not a Perth girl though — I come from Gunaikurnai country right across the other side of Australia, and that's the country of my heart. But Whadjuk Noongar Boodja is a very beautiful place to come from too.
I'm lucky enough to work at a university where we really take inclusion seriously. We're certainly not perfect at it. We are one of the few universities in the world named after a woman, which I find pretty extraordinary given that there's probably more than 10 universities just in Australia named after men. So it's kind of nice to have ended up working here. I'm sitting currently in our beautiful new city campus, which has been built right in the centre of Perth on Whadjuk Boodja. The University asked Whadjuk Elders for permission to use this site, and they were really delighted for our campus to be built here because it was a very special place for women — so they were really happy to have a university named after a woman built on this site.
I'm a baby boomer, and I've tried to think about how long I've been interested in this broad area of diversity, equity and inclusion. The earliest I can remember, two things happened to me when I was 14. One was that I was really passionate about being a guide dog trainer. I was visiting Melbourne and a favourite aunt took me along to the guide dog training centre to show me what might be somewhere I could potentially work. And they said, no, no, no, we can't consider you for that sort of work because you're a female.
I was shattered. That was a very personal experience which made me realise there was not a lot of equity in the world for somebody like me at that stage thinking about what I might want to do as a career. And in about the same year, I wrote a poem which had a fairness and equity theme to it. I still share that poem quite regularly, and it just reminds me that this stuff has always been important to me — and how incredibly lucky I am to be finishing my career working with postgraduate students, teaching a diversity, equity and inclusion unit, and doing some research in that space too.
Bree: I'd be interested in the poem. Can you?
Judy: I can recite it if you want me to, it's very short.
When all the nations cease to fight, When all the tribes together unite, When all the different races say To hell what colour our faces, When everybody's kind and fair, Surely magic is in the air.
There's a whole bunch of different things in there about the fairness concept, about the fact that we shouldn't be judging people based on the colour of their skin or other components. I was 14. I typed it out on an old typewriter that didn't even have a corrector ribbon, so the typed copy of it is full of mistakes, but it's still pretty special to me.
Bree: And you were 14 when you wrote that. Wow. So it really has been a lifelong journey in the work. Thank you for sharing that.
I'd love to hear a little bit about — you currently teach people about diversity, equity and inclusion at the university. What are you noticing is really different now as opposed to when you started working in this space? How has this work changed over time?
Judy: Look, maybe it's more me that's changed. I'm not a career academic. I've had three non-linear careers. I had a lot of time in the hospitality industry, I've been in and out of business schools in Australia, the Netherlands and Canada, and in between I've been doing lots of consulting — from micro consulting in my own business through to working with one of the big four consulting firms.
Whilst this stuff has always been important to me, I've only actually been teaching it since joining ECU. In fact, we didn't even have it in any of our programs when I first joined ECU in 2019. One of the first projects I did when I joined was a bit of research here in Perth about what was missing in our Masters of Human Resource Management. In this town the two big employers are the energy and natural resources sectors and government. So I went and spoke to HR people in those sectors, and three things came out that we didn't currently have and that we knew we needed to build in: the DEI piece, the employee wellbeing piece, and people analytics.
If you think about those three together, they're so important. We've got to make all of our decisions based on good quality, both qualitative and quantitative data. And if we do that, we can actually help create more equitable and fairer workplaces where people's wellbeing will be enhanced. That's been our focus since I did that little piece of research, and we've embedded that into our Masters of HR.
I've then threaded that with my other big passion. Way back in the 1990s, I read a book by a Brazilian manufacturer called Ricardo Semler about his company that he'd inherited called Semco, and how he radically transformed it from a traditional hierarchical manufacturing organisation to a much more empowered one — where people could work in ways that suited their own needs and styles, with much greater flexibility, much more democracy. At the time I got really excited thinking, wow, a revolution is about to happen. We're going to really move to more healthy and more inclusive workplaces where people can genuinely feel valued and add value.
I waited, and the revolution didn't happen, so I got a bit disappointed. Then when I was working in Europe, I connected with people through a small startup called Corporate Rebels — a community of people who were really looking at these more innovative ways of designing and leading workplaces. I had them along to a leadership conference I organised in Amsterdam, and I've continued to have a relationship with them since returning to Australia. Through them, I've really developed a sense that that sort of work — about democratising organisations, creating radically decentralised or liberated corporations, or self-managing organisations, whatever you call them — and this more traditional DEI, there's a sweet spot right in the middle that can really help create thriving workplaces. I'm trying to sew that more and more into my teaching now.
I had the great privilege of doing a research project with a West Australian based community sector organisation called Chorus, which has really had my brain exploding with possibilities about how this more participative way of working can really enable people to bring their true selves to work, and create a much greater sense of inclusion and equity for diverse employees.
Bree: You've told me a bit about this work with Chorus and I'm endlessly fascinated and curious. Can you tell us a little bit about what this looks like in practice? What is different about Chorus compared to a typical hierarchical organisation?
Judy: Almost everything is different. I'll start, Bree, by saying I didn't initially start to look at Chorus with a DEI lens. It was actually later on, when I started swimming a bit more in my data, that things started bubbling up. I went, there's stuff here that I didn't go looking for.
Chorus doesn't have a hierarchy. Now just because you don't have a hierarchy doesn't mean you don't have a structure — in fact, you have to have a structure to help people work most effectively together. What Chorus has is small self-managing teams, locally and geographically based. Chorus operates across the southwest of Western Australia, both within Perth and in the southwest region. These small self-managed teams can make all their own decisions, but they are supported and guided by what Chorus refers to as an enabling function. It's probably what you would have traditionally seen as those more corporate functions, but they don't tell the self-managed teams what to do. They provide guidance, support, coaching.
There's a group of people who would have been the traditional executive team, but again, they don't refer to themselves as the executive team. They just refer to themselves as strategic coaches. So if a self-managing team is having some challenges — looking at innovating with some of its service delivery, or they've come across something they're not quite sure how to handle — they can reach out to those strategic coaches or to people within the enabling function for guidance and support and coaching.
The whole decision-making process has some really clear structure behind it. In fact, it's probably more clearly documented and understood than in most organisations, where you just assume that all the decisions are made at the top and they just filter through. Chorus have a playbook which is co-created by all members in the organisation — employees and volunteers who make up the Chorus organisation working across three highly regulated sectors.
This decision-making matrix tells people which type of decisions individuals can make on their own, which they need to make with their team, and which they should be making cross-team — so decisions which have broader impact. It gives guidance on how to make those decisions and uses what's referred to as a consent decision-making process. Anybody can put forward a proposal to these collaborative decision-making groups called forums, and anybody can raise objections to that proposal. Once those objections have been worked through, there's a process of agreement — saying, okay, we consent to that decision being made.
There is a CEO and he does have ultimate veto power on any decisions, but as of the time I've been conducting my research — and I engage with Chorus regularly — he'd never used that veto power. Because the system has been built to trust people to make decisions.
Bree: Fascinating. The question that pops straight into my mind is how does KPIs and performance work in an environment like that?
Judy: Teams have dashboards. There's complete transparency in the organisation. All the information that a team needs to be able to make decisions is available through dashboards. There's a very good education process to help people understand what's there so they can draw upon it to make these decisions, and of course there are coaches who can dip in and help if people are struggling.
It's a very relational organisation, and those relationships are supported by agreements. Those agreements are what helps really hold people to account, because you can't have freedom to work in the ways you want without accountability. That's all baked into the system, baked into the design of the organisation. Within a team there'll be team agreements, and those team agreements are co-created. There's a template available that they may or may not wish to use, but it guides them through the sort of conversations they should be having. There's also support given, because it can be really difficult to hold yourself and others to account if agreements aren't being honoured. That's where some coaching from enabling coaches is provided to help people work through those challenges when they occur.
For example, you asked about performance management — this is something Chorus have found one of their challenges is often explaining their way of working to different regulators. They work across three highly regulated sectors, and those regulators say, we want to see your performance management system. And Chorus will say, well, we actually don't have a performance management system. We have peer reviews. We sit down and have a conversation about how we're going in honouring our agreements. All of those things that are needed to hold people personally accountable and responsible are absolutely there. They just look very different to what you'd find in a traditional top-down organisation.
Bree: So it really is a completely different way of running an organisation. And you said that you'd noticed, as a consequence, some really important diversity, equity and inclusion outcomes. Can you talk to that?
Judy: Absolutely. It was quite interesting. A lot of my work also — I worked with a couple of other researchers and we developed a diversity, equity and inclusion maturity model some years ago. We've been using that in a couple of different sectors. We've run some projects in the mining sector and some projects in local government using our maturity model. It's a four-by-four model going from a compliance level through to what we call level four, a transformative level, across four different dimensions. Most of the organisations I'm using it with are sitting at around a level two, which we call a managerial level. They recognise there's strategic gain to be had by investing in this, and that's where they're sitting. They're doing that quite well.
I didn't actually take our maturity model to use within Chorus, but a colleague of mine was presenting our model in class. I was watching as he was presenting it, and when he got to the highest level — the transformative level — all of a sudden I'm going, well, I've seen that bit of evidence within Chorus. I did interviews, observations and document analysis within Chorus. I haven't actually gone and used the maturity model to measure it, but there was all this evidence bubbling up to show that in many ways, Chorus is more advanced at this transformative level than any other organisations I've been engaging with.
The Chorus team collectively are very, very humble. When I've had conversations with them around my observations, they've said, we know we've still got a lot of work to do in this regard. But when I get quotes from employees within the organisation — without having interview questions specifically designed around DEI — where I've got quotes from employees saying things like, making people feel valued is just a great way of working and I wouldn't want to work anywhere else — that's saying a hell of a lot to me. When I'm hearing people feel that they genuinely have a voice — you know how important that sense of genuine empowerment and autonomy is to being able to thrive, because we all need to be able to work in different ways.
I get cross because I keep hearing organisations talk about how we empower our employees, and then I go and I look and I go, no you don't. No you don't. You put one barrier up after another to people being genuine. And yet I've sat in meetings — Chorus bring together these wonderfully eclectic groups of people from across the organisation. You'll be sitting around a table and there is no hierarchy. The three sectors they work in are aged care, disability support and mental health. I'll be sitting next to a gardener who supports Chorus clients with looking after their gardens, and I'll have an enabling coach on the other side of me, and we'll all be exploring really interesting things like innovating service delivery. It's just wonderful. It's something I haven't witnessed before, even in organisations which have been investing quite significantly in trying to lift the maturity of their DEI.
Bree: Literally before you said that, I'd just written down their voices are heard. Because just by the nature of the structure that you're describing, it prioritises that ability for people to share and have autonomy and agency over the work they're doing, and be involved in the decision-making process — which is absolutely such a key contributor to having a sense of belonging in the workplace, which is what we're seeking to achieve.
So maybe as a final question from me — listeners might be like, well, this sounds like utopia, but I don't have the ability to reshape the entire structure of my organisation. What have you seen in Chorus that people could apply within their own organisations to see some traction?
Judy: I'll do a little plug and say I had a practitioner article published in the HR Online magazine a couple of weeks ago, and that's got quite a few practical tips. I'll ask if you can possibly put a link to that.
Bree: We'll put it in the show notes, yeah.
Judy: Recognising that giving people a voice is probably one of the greatest gifts you can do. I've seen so much waste in so many hierarchical organisations I've been part of, where the only people in a room who speak are the most senior people, because nobody else dares to speak. And then you sort of think, my goodness, the missed opportunities here.
So what can an organisation do to make people feel safe to speak up? There are so many simple little things. I really think the most senior person in a room should speak last, not first.
Bree: Agree.
Judy: Because all too often, the moment the most senior person in the room has spoken, everybody else thinks, I can't contradict that or I'm going to look — you know. We talk about there being no such thing as a silly suggestion, or you won't be punished if you make mistakes, but people don't believe that, because they haven't seen it. Just little things that really focus on creating that safe space where people feel their voice does matter.
There are lots of wonderful DEI committees in organisations, but again, people so often feel it's tokenistic and their voices don't matter — that it's there to tick a box. So you've got to make sure that you are genuinely empowering those voices, and that means you actually have to give up some power yourselves. That's tough, I know, but that's my call out to any managers listening. Be courageous and be prepared to give up power, so others can really feel that their voices matter.
Bree: Give up power. Yeah, which will in turn come back to generate the results and the staff satisfaction and the engagement that you're seeking. Love it. Thank you so much for coming and sharing that. I will definitely put the link in the show notes to your article, but also to your maturity model — because I don't personally use maturity models, but when people have asked me for one, I've often sent yours through. I think it's quite a good one. It's not fluffy and it's easy to use. So I'll definitely put them both in the show notes for listeners.
Where can listeners find you if they want to hear a bit more about your work?
Judy: Just jump on the Edith Cowan University website and pop my name in — you'll find my staff profile, and that'll give you my contact details. I am pretty active on LinkedIn, although as we know, Bree, the algorithms don't always enable us to amplify our own voices or the voices of other people we want to support, which is pretty sad.
Bree: Yeah. So if you find Judy on LinkedIn, go and hit that little button that says give me notifications from Judy — then you'll actually get the stuff. Thank you so much. Thanks everyone for listening in again, and we'll catch you on the next episode.
Judy: Thanks, Bree. Thanks, everybody.