Leadership: Perspectives from Ron McCallum

Leadership: Perspectives from Ron McCallum

Braille MonitorNovember 2016

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Leadership: Perspectives from Ron McCallum
by Ron McCallum
From the Editor: There is no better way to introduce this speaker to an American audience than his Wikipedia entry: “Ronald Clive ‘Ron’ McCallum AO [Order of Australia] is an Australian legal academic. He is an expert in labor law and has served as a professor and dean of law at the University of Sydney. He is the first totally blind person to be appointed to a full professorship in any subject at any university in Australia or New Zealand, as well as the first to become a Dean of Law in these countries. He chairs the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in Geneva.” He spoke on Monday afternoon on the topic of leadership. Here is what he had to say:
Well, I know Charles is here, so hello, Charles. Hello, everyone. Hello to those listening on ACB Radio, and I’ll let you in on a little secret: some of the delegates are listening to this on their iPhones as they sit by the pool [laughter]. Can I say, guys, stop splashing and concentrate.

I’m a little diffident about speaking about myself, but I have to say a few introductory words; then I’ll say something about leadership in two forms, being dean of a law school, and chairing a United Nations committee, both taking different skills. Then I want to conclude by asking why are there not more blind people as leaders, and why not more blind women?

I was born a long time ago, I think I’m perhaps the third-oldest person here, perhaps not as old as Lord Low or Euclid, but getting there. I was born in 1948 in Melbourne, Australia. I’m a retrolental fibroplasia child, that is, too much oxygen destroyed my vision. I went to blind schools and to an ordinary high school, and then I studied law both in Australia and in Canada as a post-graduate student, where I got great help from the CNIB—I have a great soft spot for the CNIB. It was the first time I’d come across a truly national blind organization.

I ended up being an academic in Australia. My specialty was and still is labor relations law. In 1993 I found, to my great surprise, that I happened to be the first totally blind person at any Australian or New Zealand university to be appointed to a full professorship in law [applause]—oh no, don’t please. From 2002 until 2007 I was dean of the University of Sydney Law School, one of the two oldest law schools in the country, more than 150 years old. Then in 2009 I became an inaugural member of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which monitors the CRPD [Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities], and my friends are still there. I finished my mandate in December 2014. I chaired the committee from February 2010 to April 2013, when my successor—who we’ve just heard from, Maria Soledad Cisternas, took over. I also had the honor between 2011 and 2012 of chairing all of the meetings of the nine chairs of the nine human rights committees of the entire United Nations, and that was perhaps the highest and most complex thing I’ve ever done at a time of treaty body reform.

Being a dean of a law school is rather different from being a chair of a UN committee, and therefore I want to look at them separately and look at some of the techniques I used. The first thing is, if you’re going to be dean of an academic institution—or any institution, for that matter—you need to be able to do the jobs that you’re asking people to do. No point in being a leader and saying, well I can’t do this, I can’t do that. You can’t do everything. But I had been a relatively successful labor relations lawyer; I’d also practiced law as a special counsel in the law firm of Ashurst, which goes around the world now. So I was able to do the jobs of teaching, researching, and practice that I wanted my staff to do when teaching young women and men to be lawyers.

Second important thing is—I know it’s a phrase often used—deep listening. Every leader needs to be able to listen to every person on their staff. How do I work out what people are made of if I can’t see their faces? Well I think we blind people are pretty good at that. I follow one of my great heroes, Jacques Lusseyran, who died in 1971. He was a blind leader in the French Resistance who vetted people by using the techniques I have tried to learn: by their voices, by their breathing, what they say, and what they don’t say. And I’ve found it very easy to get a rapport with people. My labor relations training taught me the value of conciliation and putting myself in the shoes of the other person.

The second great assistance was technology. Email made my life so much easier. If I had been dean of a law school in the 1980s when there was no email, I would have been confronted by bombastic, handwritten notes from my staff! I would have had to find someone to read them. But now, for good or for ill, they emailed, and I could read them instantly. I had so many folders I could find the latest email from any of the hundred staff in less than a minute. I learned when it was important to email and when it was important not to. I had one staff member who was concerned about an issue of leave. So I said, “Instead of having email trench warfare, perhaps we could meet?”

“Well, Ron,” he said, “I like to copy people so they’ll know how unreasonable you are.”

I said, “Well, why don’t we meet, and after the meeting you can write to your friends, copy me, and confirm my unreasonableness.” We settled it (talking) within sixty seconds.

All organizations these days, for good or for ill—I think some ways for ill—run on finances, and the law school is no different. My budget was quite small; I think it was only about 17 million, part of a university budget. I worked very hard with Excel spreadsheets in learning the finances. Sometimes I would bring in the head of finance with a—what do you call it, a text tape recorder? Not a tape recorder, you know what I mean, a text recorder—and I would go through some of the key financial systems. I had arguments with the university central people about making finance websites accessible. One of the problems I still find when I talk to people about making websites accessible is they say, “Oh, yes, yes yes yes—I have no idea what it means,” have you ever struck that? But I kept the law school in the black for five of my five years and got commendations from the president of the university, not an easy thing to do. I think it took up more of my time, but it taught me the value of financial literacy, and I think so many of we blind going into leader positions ought to think about learning financial literacy.

I had my ups and downs. My wife, who is here today, Professor Mary Crock—who has vision—she and I had been married then for twenty years, and she was a member of the staff. On occasions in academic trench warfare some of my colleagues would sort of tip a bucket over her, knowing I couldn’t get at them for that, and that made life a bit complicated. But nevertheless we both stood firm and got through it. It was a great advantage having Mary in the building, even though I think my time as five years of deanship made her “the invisible person.” Now I’m a professor emeritus, which means a has-been. I’m not about, and Mary is the only fulltime professor in the family, as she will tell you.

It was a relatively successful time: I began building the new law building which now stands wonderfully, finished by my successor; I achieved the only law school exchange—staff and students—with the Harvard Law School of any Australian university law school; we won three Rhodes Scholarships, which has never been done before or since; and we won the world championship of mooting in 2007 in the Jessup Moot [court competition]. I was very honored to play that role.

Chairing a United Nations committee takes different skills. There are, on the committee, eighteen persons from all around the world who are all elected. I couldn’t fire them! And they had just as much right as I had; we were equals. I never applied to be chair—for that matter I never applied to be dean; the president asked me; I wasn’t that interested at the time. I never applied to be chair, and at the second meeting, where there was discussion and no one could agree, a group of my colleagues came to me and said, “Look, we think you’re the only person we could agree upon.”

Why? I’ve never been employed by a disability agency. I’ve always worked in the public and in the private sectors. I’m not in the disability industry per se; I was not seeking to enhance my career by being chair. It wasn’t going to affect my career one way or the other.

What I brought was being a lawyer; I saw my job as getting the business done and following the rules. That’s what I did for three years. Because we were all equals and I had no more power than anyone else, you really needed to be deep listening and to recognize that people have different backgrounds and different thoughts. The notion of conflict of interests, which is taken very strictly by Anglo-Saxons, has a totally different meaning in Africa, Latin America, and in the Middle East. I don’t know that my view of conflict of interest is any better or any worse than the other views. But my job was to coalesce them together.

When chairing the nine human rights treaty-body chair meetings, that was the first time some of these senior people had run into a senior disabled person, and that was quite extraordinary because we were doing, if you like, reform of the treaty-body system.

Well, why aren’t there more blind leaders? Well I think the first point to note is that our level of employment is not high—certainly in Australia and Canada, the two countries I’m familiar with. We need to increase education levels, and we need to increase employment, and we need to increase the confidence of we blind people, and we need to have more role models out there to show how it can be done. My role models were Rupert Cross, a blind person who taught law at Oxford in the 50s and 60s. I’m a bit diffident in saying this, but after teaching labor law for forty-four years, there are now three blind persons at three different universities who are university lecturers in labor law. I wish they’d go to property law or criminal law; it’s my field! [laughter, applause] But nevertheless it shows the value of role models.

Finally, I think we need to establish courses to help blind people with leadership, to help them with deep listening, and to train them with financial literacy. I’m often told: blind people aren’t financially literate. I say, “Well we could train them.”

It’s been a great honor for me to speak here today, particularly next to my close friend Maryanne Diamond, who I went to school with. Can I say that, as a teenager, she was just as feisty as she is today. Bless you all, thank you.

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