Doug Aberle’s interest in what motivates people has been a big driver in his approach to management.
DOUG Aberle deliberately didn’t rush things after accepting the top position at Western Power in 2006; instead he took a step back and observed the organisation around him, watching the state of play.
He had been with the ‘powerhouse’ since before graduating as an engineer and knew it well, but the new chief executive took his time, recognising just how large the challenges that lay before him were.
He wanted to be clear about the direction he intended to steer the organisation.
Today, propped up against a wall in his office lies a board reminding him of what he saw when he arrived at the top – on it are words including ‘cringe’ ‘arrogance’ and ‘underinvestment/ageing network’. He remembers that ‘movement’ in the organisation was ponderous.
“That was how it was and I knew that we needed to change,” Mr Aberle says.
Three years on from the development of a new vision, direction and a new identity, things for Western Power are going well, according to its chief executive.
Key performance indicators are being met, major projects are on time and budget, safety is improving, money is being saved and the lights are still on.
Things have changed, but how do you go about creating that shift within an organisation that has 3,000 staff, $5.3 billion in assets and myriad stakeholders?
Technical skills are handy – something Mr Aberle has thanks to an honours degree in engineering and a masters in engineering science – but he says the real understanding of how to manage people developed from his interest in psychotherapy.
“Psychology and engineering really have been interests that have existed in parallel for most of my life,” Mr Aberle says.
Going as far back as his early days at the State Energy Commission (which later became Western Power), he recalls his (then) wife was studying psychology. Being surrounded by psychological concepts and discussion groups piqued his interest, which was later compounded by his own personal experiences with counselling.
“After a while as I moved up the ladder in engineering, we got some counselling around our marriage and I had a really powerful series of experiences during that process,” he says.
Mr Aberle’s understanding and self-awareness grew alongside his experiences at work, and that has been integral to the development of his people-management skills.
“I remember a distinct moment where I was challenged by a person I was working with who said that I was afraid. I kind of said as a young man, ‘I’m not afraid of anything’,” he recalls.
“But I came out of the session and I remember sitting quietly thinking, ‘actually, I am’. It dawned on me I was afraid and it didn’t have to stop me doing things. That served me so well and it continues to serve me every day.”
At the time of this ‘personal realisation’, Mr Aberle was fresh out of university and working in Collie, starting as an electrical maintenance engineer before being promoted to maintenance manager, and then power station manager at the Muja power station.
Mr Aberle’s self-awareness, combined with understanding the importance of communication and inclusion, helped him to deal with what was a difficult time in an industry where unionism dominated employee relations.
He went about slowly transforming the inner workings and culture of the power station in his management role; and the lessons resulting from those experiences at Muja are reflected in the changes he is making in his current role.
“That whole journey involved a lot of personal interaction, we appointed new people into every layer. I let a lot of people go and we changed the working patterns dramatically,” Mr Aberle recalls.
He incentivised efficient work with pre-paid overtime, changed the structure of the working week dramatically and came to a mutual decision with unions on annualised pay arrangements.
It sounds simple but at the time making such changes was groundbreaking and working willingly with unions was unusual.
“That took a lot of getting alongside, working with and understanding what drove people there and getting their interests aligned with ours,” Mr Aberle says.
‘‘The background I had by that stage was really helpful in understanding what sat underneath.”
He continued to study psychotherapy in his spare time and, since 1991, has been a qualified and practicing psychotherapist.
Ten years study in this field provided him with a comprehensive understanding of himself and others. It is evident just how influential those studies, specifically his understanding of fear as an impediment to realising one’s full potential, have become in his management style.
“What flows from that (fear) is there is actually a choice in most decisions that we make. You can work from vision or you can work from fear,” Mr Aberle told WA Business News.
“I use it every day. It is not a matter of artificially pretending you’re not scared. It is more a matter of acknowledging the fear and the visionary opportunity and then making a conscious choice.
“I have tried not to be scared, I have tried to be bigger than I am, but being exactly the size that you are can be very powerful.
“I am aware that unless we learn to do that, we waste bucket loads of energy trying to impress other people and make ourselves be things we aren’t. The real strength lies in being vulnerable and being exactly who we are. The capacity that comes from doing that is immeasurably powerful.”
These are not concepts that float too easily in business, a world often typified by pragmatism and traditional approaches to management that sometimes undermine communication and interpersonal understanding.
So how does a new head honcho implement a new direction with a very new management style?
For Mr Aberle, it was all about getting the other executives on side.
“I realised that it was going to be really important to spend a lot of time with the top couple of hundred people to get them to understand it,” he says.
“It is a matter of getting a critical mass of people who see how powerful it is and then continue to reinforce each other. If you persist for long enough and you get a critical mass, that is how you get it to persist.
“The challenge I see is now cascading what has got into the top three layers of the business and taking that all the way through.”