ONE might expect that the job of directing South Australia’s supreme planning authority would go to a planner. You might also conclude that the director of the State Library would necessarily be a librarian. Bronwyn Halliday is here to confound that kind of linear thinking. And as a change-management specialist, persuading people to change their attitudes is her stock-in-trade.

Later this month, Halliday will depart her job as Director of the State Library to take up her new position as Executive Director of Planning SA. Having overseen a radical restructure of staff and administrative procedures and a $50 million building program at the State Library, Halliday faces even greater challenges at Planning SA. It will fall to her to implement the State Government’s plan to wrest control of development approvals from local councils.

“It’ll be an interesting job,” says Halliday, with some understatement. “It’ll be controversial and there will be lots of opportunity for reforms in respect of local government planning.”

Naturally, there will be plenty of resistance but that’s all part of the change-management process. Those skills, rather than her proven ability to oversee a significant building program, were her springboard into the job at Planning SA, Halliday believes.

“When you look at the exent of the changes we had to make here at the Library,” says Halliday, “… not just the building and the staff – we had to look at changing the way in which we provided services to the public. That required consultation and negotiation, and I think in the new position there’ll be a lot of negotiation.”

Halliday took up her position at the Library in February, 2000, with a brief to implement the restructure and the building program. After three and a half sometimes harrowing years, in which she laid the groundwork for a profound change in staff culture, Halliday had her moment of triumph in early July when the new Spence Wing opened to the public.

“It was definitely the high point,” she recalls. “People came through the doors clapping and cheering.”

And that was before those first visitors had even reached the library floor built entirely with their reading pleasure in mind. Natural light floods into the once-windowless building and halogen lights dim or brighten in response to available daylight. The roof has been raised and the windows frame vistas of the North Tce cultural precinct and Government House, letting in the light and also, Halliday hopes, inspiring a more outward-looking culture within the library.

Tall, blonde, bespectacled and wearing little or no make-up, Halliday has the look of bookish innocence of the fantasy librarian. With an MBA from Columbia University in Washington, and an MA in education (she’s also working towards her doctoral thesis), her career experience includes time as a senior education bureaucrat, a four-year stint at Ernst & Young and several years as private consultant specializing in change management. But she’s no librarian – a fact she was always quick to point out.

“It’s something I always liked to make clear, because there are some people in the profession who think that the Director of the State Library should be a librarian,” she says. “I’ve gone from being a non-librarian library director to being a non-planning director of planning.”

One of her first tasks at the library was to secure Cabinet approval for “separation” packages for 40 positions which were offered to all 190 staff. All were taken up.

“One of the things I learnt from consulting was that you could always find a 10 per cent improvement just by looking at the way you were doing things,” says Halliday. “I wanted to get rid of at least (20 per cent) of staff, and because I was recruiting 10 per cent back again I knew that it would be about right. And that’s proved to be correct.”

Her next step was to approach the University of South Australia, which runs undergraduate and post-graduate degree courses in Library Studies.

“I said ‘OK we’re going to be your major employer for your graduates, what are you going to give us in return?’.”

There are now 18 graduates on the Library staff, and UniSA has donated a significant artwork for the foyer.

“They’re smart, they’re keen, they’re young, they’re customer-focused,” she says of the graduate recruits. “They’re all the things we were looking for in our staff.”
With the graduate intake, Halliday brought staffing up to the magic number that can have a ripple effect on the entire organisation. “Once you’ve got about 20-odd out of a staff of 150 you can start to change some of the culture,” she says.

Slashing a long-entrenched workforce by 20 per cent presented considerable challenges. Staff resentment was eased by the generosity of the packages, says Halliday, but the nadir of the restructuring period was reached when a staffer committed suicide.

“You can’t get much lower than that,” says Halliday. “Any time you lose staff is very low, and we’ve lost a number and we’ve had some very sad times.”
With the restructuring under way, she was free to focus on the infrastructure. She confesses to “Machiavellian” planning to bring the building program in on a substantially reduced budget.

“It’s been mooted since the 1970s and the original view was that it was a $70m project, so it’s come down quite a bit,” she says.

As difficult as the staff restructure was, Halliday is under no illusions about what element of this radical rebirth will make the greatest impact on the public. In its first week after reopening, nearly 20,000 people came through the sun-dappled entrance to the new Spence Wing.

“The changes to the building will do more for the library in terms of its image than the staff will,” says Halliday.

As well as stimulating renewed public interest in the library, the new building has done much to improve staff morale after the restructure. That, and intensive training conducted during the four weeks that the library was closed to the public for the move.

The most sensitive part of the redevelopment, the renovation of the library’s two heritage buildings, is now complete. The Institute building opened in October, the café opened just before Christmas and the Mortlock will be ready to receive visitors within the next month or so.

Since building work began, Halliday has kept a hard hat stowed in her Library office for her frequent site visits. As she packs her boxes in preparation for her departure later this month, she might consider tossing in the hard hat. It could be a useful accessory in her new job.