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Thomas Liddle speaks with Victorian Police Commissioner Christine Nixon about corporate transformation.
When Victorian Police Commissioner Christine Nixon’s contract was renewed earlier this year for another three years, it sent a strong signal to the community that the Bracks Labor government is committed to the continued transformation of the force.
For the past five years the country’s first woman commissioner has presided over the remodelling of the force into an organisation that looks more like streamlined, modern corporation than a government bureaucracy.
The Harvard-degreed Nixon, 53, has brought a business-like rigour that has raised the bar on policing in Australia. With a budget of $1.5 billion, she manages 14,000 staff who operate out of 550 work locations, including 330 police stations. Victoria Police is opening four or five new police stations a week across the state to deepen community involvement, and Nixon encourages her top managers out into academe and industry to learn business and leadership methods.
At a time when low-skilled Australian jobs have been offshored to China and India, her up-skilled managers have been working as paid consultants to those countries, advising their police and traffic authorities on processes and systems developed in Victoria.
Her diligent study of policing and management includes two years in the US, where she travelled to 30 states and completed a degree in Public Administration, a period with the Metropolitan Police, London, and extensive practical experience in processes and management.
Nixon counts ANZ CEO John MacFarlane and Coles Myer CEO John Fletcher as colleagues and advisors, and sends her leaders to training programs run by those companies.
“We learn how to manage the process of how businesses run and how they develop their leadership systems,” Nixon says in an exclusive interview with Monash Business Review. “It adds to the professional knowledge that we’re developing.”
Victoria Police under Nixon has also established leadership programs of its own which it sells to several countries – as well as the Australian Cricket Board, several AFL teams, soccer teams, councils and local government organisations.
While the leadership modules are a small revenue stream, bringing in around $500,000, Nixon has not embraced proposals raised in the 1990s to turn Victoria Police’s technologies and systems into a profit centre. She is happy to sell ‘booze bus’ technology to South Africa and send experts to China, but has made some hard decisions about the core business of Victoria Police.
“We are working with 12 provinces in China on road safety and on family violence – they are interested in technical solutions in things such as how you reduce the road toll. We are also transferring knowledge and in some cases the technologies we’ve been using, such as breath-testing devices, which we developed with private industry,” Nixon says.
“But further work is up to the manufacturer. We have backed off a bit because you have to decide what business you’re in. We could get taken over by China in terms of how much effort we could put in, how much training, how much development because they are just out there searching. How do you move the People’s Republic of China towards a more modern justice system? The size of the problem is just incredible.”
Re-skilling Victoria Police is a big part of Commissioner Nixon’s beat. She places promising people into various areas to learn others’ skills and sends one or two people a week overseas to look at other police and justice organisations in areas such as road safety, counter-terrorism and criminology.
Nixon herself was encouraged to pursue overseas and academic studies by Commissioner John Avery early in her career. Avery was one of the first degree-qualified commissioners, with an MBA from Macquarie University. Nixon studied at night for a TAFE Certificate in Personnel Administration, went on to gain a Diploma in Labour Relations and Law from the University of Sydney, a Bachelor of Arts, Philosophy and Politics from Macquarie and a Master of Public Administration from Harvard.
The stint at Harvard was on scholarship, and allowed her to travel throughout the US looking at different approaches to policing.
Monash University is looking at providing an entry-level degree in policing. The university’s education faculty attracts many members of Victoria Police, about 50 of whom have done a master’s degree in education and leadership-related subjects.
For Nixon, modern policing management is about strategy, planning and putting systems into place that fix problems that have remained unresolved for years.
“What policing has had to come to terms with over the past 10 years is an understanding that it is now a really big business in terms of the amount of money involved from the government … You are now seeing the adoption of a far more business-like model in policing than ever before. This is underpinned by a broader education for senior management to understand that they need to have better approaches and knowledge about budgeting, planning, strategic planning and so on. Then we need to bring into policing people with sets of skills, I don’t mean police officers but special staff with a lot of skills that would support an organisation this size.”
“Our budget this year is $1.5 billion and the return on investment, for want of a better description, has become far more significant. Police forces need to identify just what it is the government is buying from them.”
When Nixon arrived at Victoria Police in 2001, the performance metrics, or key performance indicators (KPIs) “ran into the hundreds”. In her words, “they were invented by people who suggested that we had a model where you could buy services of a particular type.”
Working out what the KPIs actually meant was the issue. Nixon set about trying to get the indicators to fit more closely to the strategic direction of the organisation. She came up with a strategic five-year-plan which started in 2002 and goes through to 2008 with four key metrics:
• Reducing crime. Victoria Police offered a cut of 20 per cent over five years, but the government accepted 5 per cent. It has achieved a 22 per cent reduction.
• Reduction in deaths and serious injuries on the roads. Victoria Police committed to a 20 per cent reduction. It has achieved a 24 per cent reduction.
• Increased customer satisfaction. The target was 83.5 per cent, as measured by the Council on Australian Governments (COAG) national survey on the last contact people had with the police. Victoria Police has achieved 84.6 per cent.
• Safety rating based on the percentage of people who feel safe in their neighbourhoods. The target was 90 per cent. Victoria Police has achieved 90 per cent.
“These metrics are used to drive our strategic plan and we also use it to determine resource allocation with our organisation,” Nixon says. “Having this strategy made it easier for us to understand what we were trying to achieve. So if we do something like three million breath tests, we break it down into what categories we are delivering on, and what outcomes we are achieving.”
Nixon’s academic rigour and businesslike approach also helps Victoria Police in its relationships with government.
“We have improved our capacity to work with Treasury and other government stakeholders, which facilitates our ability to bid for resources. We’ve done a lot of that by bringing in external consultants as well as running our own education programs,” she says.
“We are much smarter about how we go about purchasing – we have to make sure we get the best value for the dollar and I think we’ve done really well on that. We have a big fleet, 2,500 cars and we do well on that fleet in terms of managing it. With the price of petrol going through the roof, we go back to Treasury and we say you didn’t take this into account when you budgeted for it. You go back and make the case. We can’t say that we’re going to cut the work by 10 per cent because of fuel prices.”
Victoria Police works closely with a range of businesses – in particular, banking and retailing, around fraud and other matters. Other businesses provide knowledge and expertise in leadership development.
Nixon believes in consulting widely for answers. It’s her leadership style. On taking the job in Melbourne she met with 60 of the top executives and more than 8,000 members to identify their critical areas for change. “You have to trust that the people doing the work have the answers,” she says. “Good leaders should accept they may not always have the answer and should seek answers from their people.”
She says leaders should also listen to their life partners – not that they always follow their advice. Nixon married late in life to John Becquet, who had a long career in the airline industry. The couple has a property in Victoria, running a few Clydesdales and a studio where Nixon works on her mosaic pieces.
She believes in “having a good stable base” and keeping a sense of reality. “You can’t take yourself too seriously. You do the best you can and you don’t have grand designs on how wonderful you are supposed to be – and you just get on with it.”
Thomas Liddle is a former Saturday editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and founding editor of Spectrum. He launched Australia’s first daily online news service for msn out of Microsoft’s Seattle campus and now consults to media organisations and corporates on magazines and thought leadership publications.
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URL: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/MonashBusRw/2006/43.html