Sarah Cornally talks about her alternative approach to the corporate world...
Sarah Cornally has been a leadership adviser for the last 20 years, working with top executives in companies in Australia and all over the world. She was a clinical occupational therapist for over 17 years, and still considers herself one, but finished clinical practice in 1992. Her pragmatic, no-nonsense approach to problem-solving has produced amazing results in the corporate world, but her background and approach come from a very different place. Most people understand that an Occupational Therapist’s (OT) job is to bring someone back to the workplace after illness or accident, but it involves a vast number of factors. The role of an OT is to restore, reinforce and enhance performance, to teach skills and functions essential for adaptation and productivity, to diminish or correct pathology, and to promote and maintain physical and mental health. Sarah’s background in occupational therapy has allowed her to approach the corporate world in exactly the same way. The results are astonishing.
SARAH’S STORY
I have been practicing occupational therapy and rehabilitating people since 1978. After a period of time I began to specialise in ‘impossible’ cases, with very complex industrial relations and psycho-social issues, which became my strength and my discipline. What I learnt quite quickly was that it was not so much the technical knowledge of the body that contributed to a person’s successful recovery, but rather, the human perspective. I have achieved a 70% success rate of getting people to go back to work - and these were people who were sent to me only when their cases had been judged as complete write-offs.
One case I remember was Steven, who had a range of problems: heroin addiction, alcoholism, an amputated leg, a fused ankle and a partially fused elbow and failed treatments stretching back 6 years. Together, we got him off drugs, off alcohol, walking functionally with his artificial limb, playing guitar again and then into a retraining program in aquaculture, a dream from his childhood he had given up on.
In my personal life, I have had two major events that really affected me and how I work. First,
when I was growing up, my mother was crippled, and the doctors said that she would never walk again. But after tremendous persistence over two years, she miraculously walked - not because anyone helped her, but because she decided that that was what she wanted to do, and no-one was going to stop her. I have never forgotten the will, determination and sheer courage my mother showed. It gave me faith that amazing things are possible. It also taught me that you have to face reality to make things possible.
The other event was when my brother was killed in a boating accident. Before he died, he and I had a premonition that he was going to die. He said (he was 33 when he died) “no regrets, I’ve spent my life doing what I’ve loved, so I don’t feel like I’ve missed out on anything”. When he died, I started to question if I was living my life doing what I loved. I looked at the work I was doing and realised it was the people I loved. I loved enabling people to achieve what they didn’t believe they could achieve. Going through the experience of my mother’s recovery, then my brother’s death - combined with my experiences at work, showed me how to ‘connect the dots’ in my job. I could see that if leaders could see a situation in a different way, they would be in a new position to prevent problems. I could see clearly that they could achieve so much if they only incorporated more about human beings and human behaviour into their approach. This thinking (and a job offer) lead me to the corporate environment, where I could not only solve one person’s problem at a time, but a whole company, affecting hundreds, sometimes thousands of people at a time.
SARAH’S APPROACH
"The way I conceive of the work I am doing now is that I am healing peoples consciousness."
The medical profession’s approach to a problem is - how do we make it better? How do we fix
this? How do we make it ‘normal’? An occupational therapist’s approach is - ‘how do we enable the person to have a meaningful life, given his or her situation?’
My approach is - “how can I enable this person to do what THEY WANT to do”.
It’s about facing reality, being clear about what you want to create, and then making it manifest.
People used to say to me ‘oh Sarah, you’re such a Pollyanna, you think you can fix anybody’.
People just didn’t understand my philosophy. When I see someone I see everything that’s going on. I see all their assets and limitations. I see all the pragmatic practical realities around that, and then I look for possibilities.
Activity, directed towards a meaningful goal, is fundamental to the health of our soul. In my case for example, my job alone is not who I am. It is something I ‘do’, but it is important to realise that it is through that ‘doing’ that I discover who I am. So what we ‘do’, our work, is vitally important. The thing that essentially stops us achieving what we want to do is, essentially, fear. We don’t call it fear, we don’t experience it as fear, but if we unpack it, then we see that it is fear. But once we face the reality of that fear, we can move on.
An example of how this manifests was in a company who called me in to help with two warring factions. They refused to work with each other because the tensions between the divisions had become so great. I was asked to evaluate if this could be remedied and then design an experience to get them working effectively together. After interviewing everyone (15 people, all relatively senior professionals) it was obvious what was going on. Everyone was misinterpreting everyone else’s motives and building misrepresentations on top of misunderstandings. It took one morning of sharing the whole picture with them and decoding the whole mess with them all together, some very honest conversations and a few short activities for everyone to discover how much they had in common. Crisis over. They couldn’t believe how simple it was! I know we can do more than we imagine. I have just witnessed it so many times. The inspiration came from my mother, but I have seen so many people since then do it, achieve more than we can imagine, what we do not think possible, over and over and over again. So knowing that, you simply say, ‘here’s reality – but let’s go for more.’ What excites me is what happens to someone when they discover they can do more, and achieve more than they thought. They become a “bigger” person. When we experience the best of humanity, it is awesome.