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Show Notes

Wendy Quinn lives in Hobart, Tasmania. Wendy began her career in Sydney and started in Occupational Therapy. Occupational Therapy consists of broad skills and provided a great launching pad for the subsequent stages in her career. Wendy spent 15 years as an occupational therapist, mainly in Tasmania. She has focused her experience on children with developmental disabilities and teams.

Most of these transferable skills lead to her beginning her leadership management career. Assuming leadership was like putting on a stack hat and riding the rapids.

The “R” words in this context include Restructure, Reinvent, Reorgansie and Resizing. Leadership is about learning how to work with leaders and managers. It's about learning to begin again and reinventing yourself as the organisation evolves and the needs for the leader change. An example of the broad scope within the human services space are aged care, mental health, juvenile justice, correctional health services

After 28 years as a leader, Wendy found herself moving into her encore career using the work from Marc Freedman. Her life now is not about working hard and focusing on what she loves to do, giving back and supporting the next generation.

As part of this life and career transformation, Wendy was offered a role at the University of Tasmania to teach a program on leading and managing change for leaders and managers working in the health and human services space.

Occupational Therapy is not a career that was quickly discarded. Wendy enjoyed it because she is a generalist and does not consider herself to have a clear area of excellence. Occupational Therapy is excellent for generalists. The discipline covers many areas, including science, anatomy, physiology, genetics and health, and what happens when things go wrong. On top of this, there is scope in Occupational Therapy for art and music.

Wendy brags that she knows everything and a whole lot about nothing. The Occupational Therapy program and career opens up a vast treasure trove of opportunities and experiences. Pipe bending, weaving and pottery were some less familiar aspects of Occupational Therapy.

When she moved from being a therapist and starting a team leadership role, she had to assess what was occurring now and what was needed in the future. There is a need to engage with the internal systems before rearranging them.

Job titles can change a lot, but the core skills required from a leader remain the same. Health and Human Services is a broad remit, but you don’t have to know everything about an area before being able to make a material contribution. In each area you move to, there seems to be the same plot but different characters.

At some stage in a career, pausing, contemplating, and reflecting on the next phase of life and work is beneficial. At 57, Wendy did not want to keep working in a high-stress environment. She heard Marc Freedman talking about an encore career, which resonated with her.

Advice to a young graduate: don’t think about the first job as the career you are having. Most of us will have different positions and career lines in our life. If you approach your career this way, your perspective changes to think about what you are learning at any one time and how it can be used in other roles.

Frederick Buechner: “Vocation is where your deep gladness meets the world’s great hunger.”

In Summary:

Others: Have an interest in people, how they work, and how they experience life, not just your own perspective. What are their problems, and how can we help them solve their problems?

The environment: Riding the Rapids and the “R” words. The environment changes quickly. We must be aware of the context between people and the world we work.

Self as a person: Within the work environment and a leadership role, there is a lot of learning. To stay relevant, we need to become more than we have been in the past by working on ourselves and our personal and professional development.

Learning: Balance in life, what you know and don’t know, what interest you have, and taking time to contemplate and reflect. Seeing common threads and using these themes can benefit outcomes.