Redirecting.work

hours x a daily rate” felt brittle. “A tsunami is coming,” he said—not in fear, but with the realism of someone who has implemented technology long enough to know when incentives won’t change until leadership retires. Waiting it out wasn’t his plan.

 

So he chose to pivot, deliberately, not under duress. For a year he scanned the relatively small Australian market for the right organization. He wanted one already past the plumbing stage of people analytics with a consistent investment, a mature tech stack, dedicated resources, big ambitions, and day to day dashboards in place. He wanted one ready to do the next level of analytics: run experiments, measure program value, build predictive models, drive decisions and create impact. He kept his network warm, told the right people he was looking, and watched LinkedIn. When the right role surfaced at a former client, Rio Tinto, he took it.

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A self-described “gypsy pivoter,” he and his equally curious spouse have crisscrossed New Zealand, Australia, England, Brazil, Singapore, the U.S., and now back to Brisbane. That willingness to move with kids who now ask, “Could we try Singapore again?” comes from curiosity, consistency and trust at home. It also underpins his career redirection: change is an experiment, not a life sentence. Pull the rip cord if needed.

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Current Direction
Today he’s a Principal People Analytics Partner at Rio Tinto, a 55,000-person global mining company with a 28-person people analytics team, Australia’s largest. He describes the role as “the jam in the sandwich” between an exceptionally capable analytics/engineering group and mature business stakeholders spread across mine sites and functions. He is not there to build pipelines or do the math himself; he is there to translate: eliciting real requirements, reframing vague problems, and turning technical capability into business value.

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The biggest shift? From playing five or six client “chessboards” at once to a single board he owns over a much longer game. In consulting, engagements end; here, choices compound. “At Deloitte it was a lot about ‘making babies’—fast, exciting, attention-getting. Now I’m raising them.” That continuity raises the bar on relationships. Short, transactional meetings give way to foundational “how are the kids?” chats that knit trust. He expects it will take three to five years to fully rebuild the high-performance internal network of his predecessor and he’s okay with that while still aiming to create a visible impact in the first few months.

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Two more intentional choices define this pivot. First, he chose the individual contributor path on purpose with no headcount and minimal performance-rating theater. He wants interesting work, not a title ladder. Second, he chose a sector that pays for hard problems and that offers relative stability. Matching his ethics was also important: fortunately no coal mined at Rio. 

Underneath it all is a throughline from his TrustSphere years: trust and relationships are the substrate of execution. You cannot see them on a balance sheet, but they determine whether anything sticks. Inside a company, trust is the multiplier that makes analytics matter.

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Advice to Others

• Chase impact, not artifacts. If you crave seeing your work land, move closer to the decision. Look for teams already past foundational plumbing and hungry to run interventions and measure value.
   

• Assess people, not posters. Company cultures are abstractions. Managers and their managers set the lived culture. Meet them. Ask how others describe their team—HR, IT, internal customers to get a 360° read.
   

• Audit for trust. You’re signing up for long games. Notice whether people invest time in relationships. If every meeting is “straight to slides,” impact may be constrained.
   

• Own the experiment. Treat the move as validation of a hypothesis with success criteria you’ll measure in a year. If the experiment has failed, pull the rip cord. A job isn’t a life sentence.
   

• Bring translator superpowers. The partner role is about making hard things simple and making simple things happen. If you can’t explain it plainly, it won’t travel.
   

• Expect an identity dip. Many feel “rockstar to groupie” when moving in-house. Counter it with a fresh eyes + broad toolkit mindset. Respect the institutional memory of lifers who “know where the bodies are buried.”
   

• Network intentionally. Keep your external network active, but build your internal network intentionally. Three to five years is a realistic horizon for a high-trust web.

 

For Greg, the pivot is less a title change than a reorientation: from proving there is a problem to staying long enough to solve it. Curiosity opened doors. But trust—earned patiently, practiced daily—is what will keep them open.