The Entertainers with Peter Baines interviewed by Terry Burgan
Welcome to Real Time, today I am speaking with Peter Baines.
Peter can we start by asking you give us a brief description of who you are and what you do?
Sure Terry, I spent 22 years with New South Wales Police and in that time I was in the forensic services group, I did a science degree and a law degree.
I was deployed into Bali after the 2002 bombings and Thailand after the tsunami, my roll there was the identification of the people who died. I was leading Australian and International teams in both responses and from that I started sharing stories of what we had done, the challenges we had face and why the Australians ended up as Leaders when there was 36 other countries present.
Then I worked for Interpol in Lyon in France, on a counterterrorism project for 12 months following that i was seconded on to work with the United Nations in the Office of Drug and Crime around capacity building and leadership. Then I worked in Saudi Arabia after some floods, the government asked me to go over and have a look at their response and then recently worked in Japan after the earthquake and the tsunami there. That is the kind of professional work I was doing around the crisis and disaster response and leading the large teams in to those events.
What services do you offer in terms of keynotes and workshops and maybe go little bit into some of the other services that you are offering in Asia.
Yes sure, so the stories I started sharing were around leadership and one of my Keynote's is "Leadership Matters" in that I focus on leadership which is basically true leadership is defined by their actions and reactions so what people do to put them into leadership positions as opposed to just an organisational chart that says people leaders. This is very clear from what I saw occurring in these disaster areas both in Thailand and Bali and in Japan.
A real key to that was the presence of leaders, being seen and being present with your team, it conveys a number of things, that you care and that you understand. With those experiences that I had overseas I am now able to share those stories with different organisations who are looking at Leadership. It doesn't have to be that the Leadership Matters" keynote is for an organisation which is struggling, the key messages are universal and apply to all organisation no matter where they are at.
It's about having a real clarity purpose around why you do what you do as an organisation and as an individual and it makes a decision making so much easier if you are clear around that.
You alluded obviously to the work I do now, a lot of my time is spent that running an organisation called Hands Across The Water which is a charity that I set up after the Boxing Day tsunami. I met some kids who are living in a tent and had all lost their parents, I couldn't change what had happened but I thought I could change what happened next for them.
So I set up the the charity with the aim of building a home fast forward on since that time and we have raised AU$7 million dollars, we have never spend sent a cent of the donors money on administrational fundraising and we are now running seven projects across Thailand. We run a HIV orphanage, we are now working in the Hill Tribes of North Thailand theres a lot of work thats been going on around there.
When I looked at why we were successful there, what became clear to me was the value of experience and Terry that's the second and latest Keynote that I have developed which is around "Experiences Matter" I looked at why Hands Across The Water has grown and that what made us successful and very clearly for us it's about providing experiences, if we provide experiences we get engagement, if we get engagement then we get commitment and then it's about results.
For leaders theres a responsibility to build a legacy and the legacy might be in that the team that you formed a project you run or something on a grander scale to look at that on the legacy might be in T form the project you Rhinall or something on a grand scale. So I looked at that and again package that up into into a new keynote which are touches very nicely and has a real flow on from the initial keynote around Leadership Matters.
You have a range of services that you offer could you run us through them?
Again we looked at why were successful, what the lessons were. There's a couple of different options and because I run the facilities over there we just custom the trips to whatever the clients needs are. I run a program called "Journey of Change" where we take small groups away and spend 3 or 4 days with them in a real leaderships space and we visit different projects and spend time with the kids and seeing why we have bee successful.
Something else we have just done recently, I have just returned from Bangkok where I took 103 delegates into the slums of Thailand I gave a keynote in the morning and then we spent a day painting the kindergarten inside and out. Terry I have spoken at a lot of conferences, I have never had an experience as rich as that. One of the delegates summed it up when he said there are 50 odd business owners here and not one of them has checked their phone once!
The talk about legacies is that you plant a tree and walk ing away knowing that you will never sit. They did this work completely selflessly knowing that they will never go back there but the richness of the experience I have never had such genuine acknowledgement of the experience that lasted for as long as it had.
So those are the offshore experiences, I also run half and full day programs I run a unique program called operation Delta and what we do is I do a keynote in the morning at the start of the session Then I break the group up in to teams, then I run a simulated disaster exercise so that basically they are tested on all the leadership lessons around decision-making, communication, team building and leadership, that I have discussed in the hour previous they get to roll it out and it's a simulated exercise they run of iPads, news broadcasts come into to interrupt their thinking. it is a pretty cool experience to see how people respond. At the end we have a de-brief, look at the way it rolled out and revisit the leadership lessons again
Thanks for taking the taking the Time to talk with The Entertainers and being part of Real Time Peter Baines.
Thank you Terry
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