Expanding Comfort Zones with Curtin University’s Student Success Team
5-8 minute read
The Curtin Student Success team provides career support, volunteering opportunities, and other services to Curtin University’s 65,000 students. With rising cost pressures and complex student needs, the team realised they needed a more human, innovative and adaptable way of working together.
Dr. Alan McApline, Deputy Director of Student Success, took over a team that most of us would love to be a part of. Long tenured, committed employees. Alan could tell immediately that they were “clearly dedicated to doing good work for students,” and “comfortable within their expertise.” Best of all? “No problem children.”
Solid foundation. Alan’s job was to get his team to the next level.
Setting a vision
Alan recognised the complex challenges facing the University sector. High-touch individualised support, like 1:1 career counselling, wasn’t scalable. An increasingly diverse student body meant that frontline staff needed to be more culturally aware, flexible, and adaptable. Students also needed a more cohesive, connected experience that crossed departmental functions — students don’t care about operational silos.
Alan’s team were dedicated and up for the job. They knew they needed to collaborate better to meet this complexity. This meant three things: Firstly, setting a vision for what the area as a whole should be doing. Secondly, restructuring the team so that the reporting lines made more sense. Finally, the team needed relationships with players from other teams, particularly data analysis, to plug technical gaps.
Stuck in the comfort zone
Alan set the vision, restructured the team, and got the external help he needed. However, the collaboration he wanted still wasn’t happening.
“The team had a better vision and a better direction that they were going in, but I still wasn't seeing them collaborate across teams as much as I would have liked. They weren’t stretching out of their comfort zones, thinking about what they can do together, and pushing each other’s boundaries.”
Everyone was standing on the edge of the pool, but nobody was taking a dip.
Alan’s work getting the vision and the organisation chart right was critical. However, organisation charts specify boundaries, and cross-functional collaboration means Alan’s team needed to cross boundaries. They needed the rules, and to know when to bend or break them. They needed the clarity provided by the org chart, but also the courage to step outside it.
Vision and Direction
Alan’s team had a new vision of what they needed to do, but not how they needed to work together. As a leader, Alan tried to close the gap by modelling different ways of working:
“Prior to me arriving, the team was used to a directive leadership style. It was as if they were waiting for commands: asking for permission to do X, Y, and Z. Then I arrived. Suddenly, I’m telling them: ‘Make your own decisions. Try it out. See what works.’
I was transparent about my style and why I work in this way. I want them to be more autonomous in their thinking while also knowing that I have their back.”
A challenge for leaders who value autonomy is that, by definition, you can’t force your team to take independent action and collaborate. Modelling leadership is a great first step. However, for many team members, they’ve spent their whole life following the rulebook, and acting without explicit permission feels risky.
The challenge for Alan was to demonstrate to his team that self-directed, experimental and collaborative ways of working aren’t something to be feared. It’s not just a business imperative on a slide-deck. It’s a more fun, delightful and human way to work.
Alan, meet Aden
Alan reached out to me because he knew his team needed to experience a new approach to working together:
“Sitting in a classroom with somebody talking to us wouldn’t work for my team. It would only reinforce the problems I’m trying to solve. I needed something interactive, discussion-based, and enjoyable that would help my team get out of their comfort zone.”
We landed on a half-day workshop before a team planning day. His Senior Leadership Team (SLT), plus a data analyst who works closely with them attended. Our focus was on building stronger collaborations by leveraging the close, connected relationships already within the team. Given my unusual background and approach, resistance wasn’t just expected. It was a part of the process.
“I knew that we would have had some individuals that would be a bit resistant. However, I thought your approach would actually break down that resistance. The feedback definitely demonstrated that. The ones that I thought would be cynical were actually like: ‘Oh, it was actually engaging, and I actually learned from it.’”
I recognised that Alan’s team needed not just to talk about collaboration, but to actually experience it. When a team experiences a concept directly, rather than through a presentation, it gives them an opportunity to connect it to their work. Alan said this was key to the workshop having an impact, rather than just being a fun afternoon:
“There were activities and reflection. We related what we were doing back to workplace behaviours. That's where the richness in the conversation came out.”
One simple exercise about failure led to a robust conversation about cultural differences. Another exercise about trust helped the team realise that as far as they had come, they still had further to go. Alan’s team brought their full, big-brain intelligence into the room, which is essential for experiential learning to have an impact.
Unexpected Collaborations
All workshop attendees agreed that the workshop helped them connect and collaborate and that insights from the workshop would positively impact their day-to-day work. One team member shared the feedback: “Thanks for your time and energy, I was a bit of a sceptic coming in but was really pleasantly surprised and gained a lot from it.”
That’s feedback you can take to a tattoo parlour.
After the workshop, Alan saw immediate changes.
“My SLT started connecting with one another outside of our fortnightly meetings, having meetings together. They would reach out to one another and collaborate on small projects. That’s the funny bit: Lots of good things happened, but I can’t tell you the specifics, because for once I wasn’t a part of it!”
Over the longer term, the biggest win was around a data dashboard project. I gave a little squeal of delight when Alan shared this:
“We worked for a year on building data dashboards so that we could visibly see how we were going against our KPIs in our operational plan. This resulted from them working more closely together. They brought in technical expertise. The idea was brought to me not to ask for permission, but as: ‘This is what we’re doing.’”
This is a perfect example of how self-managing teams work best. Leaders set the boundaries and the vision, but the team executes independently within that frame. No running things up the ladder asking for permission. No escalation due to indecision. Ideas and problems are solved within the team, rather than by leadership.
These changes weren’t created by a half-day workshop. Alan’s leadership style, the team’s commitment to the vision, their existing cohesion, and a willingness to do things differently all made this work possible.
A Bolder Team, Bigger Challenges
Alan and I kept talking after the workshop. We found our conversations gravitating towards AI (how 2025 of us!). However, we recognised that AI is sometimes just the pointy end of a bigger issue: How do we prepare our teams for the unprepared? What does it mean to plan for the year when we don’t know what’s coming next quarter? Alan described it like this:
“The big thing that's impacting the university, and society and workplaces in general, is AI. How do we walk into that space when we don't know what it's going to look like? What is that unknown going to do for us?”
Alan intuited that the leadership challenge of 2025 isn’t AI. It’s what the AI-era speed does to people. I cracked my knuckles. Because Alan’s team was more connected and cohesive, and because they trusted me, I knew they were ready to be challenged further.
Our second workshop was a full-day experience blending traditional facilitation and Applied Improvisation (the other AI). The brief from Alan was simply to challenge the team. He didn’t feel I had challenged them enough during the first workshop.
I designed a workshop which explored complexity and adaptability. The workshop ended with practical takeaways: Team-wide experiments as a tool to supplement traditional planning. Alan reflected:
“This workshop really pushed some of them. It helped us understand how we knit together. We learned about how to deal with the unknown, because on the day, you threw us into the unknown and we dealt with it as a group.”
The Impact on Alan
Alan recently finished up his contract and is taking on a leadership role at the University of Wollongong. Honestly, I’m not happy about it. It’s a good move for Alan, though, and with a more self-directed team, he’s leaving with confidence that they’ll be able to handle whatever comes their way.
His interviewer, as part of a rather rigorous evaluation process, spoke to every member of Alan’s team. Hearing this feedback from his interviewer helped Alan realise the transformation he’d led:
“I've spoken to your team about how you work on the ground, and they said then you give them autonomy, you allow them to make their own decisions, you allow them to experiment. You let them try things out. They like that about you.”
Alan’s team hasn’t just learned to be more autonomous. They’ve developed a taste for it. The team, initially reluctant, now embrace Alan’s leadership approach.
As for Alan, he’s found the sweet spot of leading more self-directed teams:
“I’ve recognised when I do need to lead from the front and say: ‘This is where we’re going.’ From there, the team has a clear vision, knows what needs to happen, and has the trust and courage to work together, they can solve issues and problems themselves. This allows me, as the leader, to focus on the work that matters most.”
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