Love your work!

By Milissa Deitz

The new CEO of the Cerebral Palsy League of Queensland, Angela Tillmanns says the days of being able to get by on personality alone in the not-for-profit sector have long gone. She says business nous is vital. “The Cerebral Palsy League is an organisation with a turnover of $65 million annually. You need to be able to manage the corporate world, to set up long-term, sustainable partnerships and talk about what’s in it for them and how it will impact on their bottom line.

“We’re after much more sophisticated support these days: pro bono assistance, reviewing certain parts of our business, or it could be around how we help them attract new staff. It’s about us trying to align, working out the pressure points on both sides of the equation and how we work together.”

Married with a six-year-old daughter, Tillmanns spent 31 years in the Commonwealth Government in a number of different agencies, “mainly in service delivery organisations, such as taxation. My last position was with the Child Support Agency, for 13 years”.

With a milestone birthday coming up – she recently turned 50 – Tillmanns started to think about what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. She recalls feeling she had done all should could in the public sector, and was keen for a more hands-on, direct role.

“What excited me was the idea of creating a better Australia, and that was becoming harder and harder in the public sector. Leaving wasn’t a quick decision by any means, I had been thinking about it for a couple of years. I had a plan.”

Tillmanns wanted to leave the public service while she still loved it.

“I thought the next step, to formalise much of the work I’d done informally with the public sector, was to get an MBA. My intention was that it would be my stepping stone to somewhere else.

Tillmanns finished her MBA in October last year and the position at the Cerebral Palsy Association of Queensland came up in December. She has been CEO since March.

“I was attracted to the not-for-profit sector because you’re making a difference but you can also bring about change much faster. That’s what I was after.”

Ironically, one of the biggest challenges Tillmanns had to face in her new position was the reliance on government funding. “I discovered that 80 per cent of funding was from government. One of the changes I wanted to make was to work much more with the corporate community, because the government will never be able to afford to do all the things needed.”

Tillmanns points out that it is still difficult for people with physical disabilities to get the access the rest of us take for granted; to public transport, many workplaces, and holidays. The other major change she wanted to bring about was community awareness, “societal change to get that social inclusion that the government talks about. To get society to see past the wheelchair and start considering how to include this person. It’s also about making the community feel as if they’re also making a difference.”

According to Tillmanns, working in the not-for-profit sector brings out enormous creativity in people. “You need to stretch every dollar into three. I used to think we didn’t have many resources in the public sector, now I look back longingly on my resource-rich days!”

This is a challenge, however, that fits neatly into her leadership philosophy, which she says focuses on creating a vision for people “and making sure there are good plans in place to help them achieve that vision. Motivating people to help them see what’s possible. We employ over 1000 people and a lot of them work part-time, in people’s homes, so we needed to ensure they saw their work as valuable.”

The change she can already see in the working culture is something Tillmanns is proud of, as she is of clients becoming more willing to be involved in lobby strategies. “We run Lifestyle and Learning Centres. Designer Nelson Malloy donated a wraparound skirt pattern, and some of the clients made prints on fabric, designs based on their artwork, and then sewed them into a skirt. Every skirt is a unique piece of art.”

Her long-term goals will continue to focus on financial viability and building on the capability of the people who work in the disability centre, who she says have enormous commitment but until now have not been offered the development in leadership and management skills needed.

The advice she has for women in similar roles or organisations is twofold. “It’s about being resilient and having a vision of creating a better society. And remembering that it is their world we’re trying to improve, so listening carefully and challenging them not to settle for second best.”

http://www.cplqld.org.au/