Saturday, March 30, 2024

Huge gains to be made

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The inaugural Dairy Women’s Network Leader of the Year is passionate about helping people learn. Her background in teaching fits perfectly with her role. Gerald Piddock reports.
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GREAT leaders are people who can bring out the best in others and use people’s strengths when working towards a common goal.

It’s these core leadership principles Dairy Women’s Network’s Regional Leader of the Year winner Tania Burrows hopes to share with other women in the industry as she looks to establish a new mentor programme to help them develop their leadership capabilities.

“You’re on the same journey together and everybody wants to be on that boat with you,” she says.

“My goal is to be able to support regional leaders with a mentor programme to grow themselves as leaders in their community and in the industry.”

She believes a big thirst for growth exists in terms of mentoring in the network’s membership around strong leadership and communication skills.

“There are a lot of farmers out there already who are doing a really incredible job of working into that space but I think there’s still huge gains to be made and I think that’s identified in the Dairy Tomorrow strategy.”

It is a strategy the network partners with other industry groups such as DairyNZ.

Burrows says it is a huge honour to be the first winner of the award. She was chosen from the 70 volunteer regional leaders throughout the country.

Four finalists including Burrows, Sue Skelton who farms southwest of Whangarei near Waiotira, central Southland sharemilker Jessica Goodwright and North Canterbury contract milker Rebecca Green were chosen.

Burrows says it was pretty special to be selected from that group.

Network chief executive Jules Benton says these leaders are their organisation’s lifeblood.

“It’s so important to acknowledge their efforts and celebrate their leadership in the dairy industry and their communities.

“All four finalists showed a real passion for leadership and for making a real difference, not only in their farm roles but for the network and in their personal lives as well. All are committed to ensure the dairy industry thrives.”

Crombie Lockwood key partnerships head David Rayner says Burrows demonstrates a real strength in connecting and helping other people in her community to thrive. 

“She received some very strong recommendations for the award from DWN members and everyone commented on the way in which she lives the DWN values.

“Apart from the effort that she makes within her region she also provides assistance to other regions and the wider dairy community. There was clear evidence of leadership and Tania is a very worthy recipient of this award.”

Her background in education gave her a solid base for her leadership development. 

Burrows says she chose a career in teaching because she wanted to make a difference in the world.

She enrolled in training for early childhood teaching straight out of school and worked in that industry for 12 years while having her children.

That profession exposed her to a lot of leadership training and work when she was a full-time teacher and managing up to 150 children, their families and a team of seven staff.

It also exposed her to a lot of studies around how people learn.

“There’s so much information out there around how people work well together in groups and how people learn and I feel that those are areas that if we understood more about ourselves – what we value and what makes us tick – that can be quite powerful when you’re working with other people.

“I’m really passionate about helping people learn, how to learn and learn about themselves in terms of building that awareness and emotional intelligence. It really helps them relate and work well in a group.”

She began her career in dairying in 2010 when she and husband Johno entered into an equity partnership on a North Otago dairy farm where they also sharemilked under their company name Alpine Dairies.

They were fortunate they could take a lot of ownership over the day-to-day management and some of the big picture decisions on that farm.

They sold their share in the partnership in 2017 because they wanted to move back to Canterbury and be closer to a teaching job Tania had at the time in Geraldine.

Today they are at Valetta in Mid Canterbury where over the past two years she, her husband and three children lower-order sharemilk a 255-hectare 1000-cow farm.

“We’re pretty lucky. It’s a relatively new conversion and it’s really well designed with a good lifestyle,” she says.

They also run the farm’s runoff block which holds 1000 younger stock, meaning they manage a combined 2000-cow operation with their four to seven staff.

The shift to Mid Canterbury coincided with Burrows’ decision to train as a coach with the International Coach Federation.

That training helped her bridge her leadership learning between teaching and dairy farming.

“It meant I could use a lot of what I had learned during my teaching career around how people learn and how people communicate with each other and how to get groups to get together to work effectively and apply a lot of those skills into the primary industry in supporting dairy farmers.”

Burrows says a lot of the skills are easily translatable from teaching to farming.

“When you’re managing a business and working with people at the end of the day, people are people and it doesn’t matter whether they are farmers or parents.”

Coming into the dairy industry from education, Burrows says there is a missing link in the industry in terms of people’s own development and how they effectively run teams.

While there are tools available it is not something farmers are readily exposed to.

Farmers also often train as they transition through the dairy industry whereas in other industries people are put through leadership programmes in the lead-up to when they take up positions where they have to lead large teams.

“Farming’s a unique journey in that respect.”

One of the beautiful things about being a regional leader is that it supports women taking up and developing leadership roles, she says.

She became involved in the network because she wanted to reconnect with the community after she took a more hands-on role with the farm and parenting when they moved to Mid Canterbury.

She is now into her fifth year in the role.

“I’ve always been heavily involved in community through my teaching roles so when we decided I’d be more of a full-time mum and got more involved in our own farming business I missed that connection and being with the community and being able to give back some of those things.

“It helped me make that transition from working off the farm to how I could support the community and have some connections with some women and men who understood what my life looked like.”

As the 2020 DWN Regional Leader of the Year winner she receives registration for the Women’s Leadership Symposium in Auckland in late September that includes travel and accommodation and two mentoring sessions.

Burrows says it will be exciting to be in a room with women who are doing incredible things in a wide range of different industries.

“The learning that will come out of that will be pretty amazing.”

Burrows says it is great how the network works with partners like Crombie Lockwood and DairyNZ to help fund and support the different opportunities it has. 

“There’s a lot of collaboration and I think that’s a pretty special part of being involved with the DWN.

“The relationships you build with all sorts of different people doing what you are doing but slightly differently all around the country is a huge asset.”

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