Title: Continuous Improvement Manager

Company: Aviation Security Service

Location: Auckland, New Zealand

Julee Browning believed that by following her heart and pursuing what really interested her, her background as a social anthropologist and psychologist would compliment her professional business skills as a leader from new and different perspectives.  Joining  Aviation Security Service in a national role as Continuous Improvement Manager, based in Auckland, New Zealand in February 2015,  after an eight year career with the NZ Police, she leads a national team in new initiative development, idea management and project management.  This work involves strategic change management, stakeholder engagement and joint inter-agency projects to improve the operational business processes for departures security screening and emigration across Aviation Security and NZ Customs.  Having attained her five year goal to become a national manager, Ms. Browning  is intent on ensuring an expansion of both skills, experience and stretch challenge to grow her own potential whilst building the capacity and capability of her team is at the forefront of her goals for the next two years.

A highlight of Ms. Browning’s career has been being acknowledged as an internationally published author and  invited to launch a monograph book for Massey University publication series.  Her publications, although focused on her Master’s Degree thesis from 2005, and the application of the method of inquiry used in Anthropology, this has been a method that Ms. Browning says, has put her in good stead for how she approaches her business life in leading teams, mentoring, engaging staff and stakeholders reflecting upon the design and development of strategic transformation projects and customer and partner agency insight and collaboration.

Ms. Browning became involved in her profession because she wanted to feel as though the career she undertook contributed to change and enhancement of the human condition.  Also, she never underestimates the opportunity to give something a go and take specific learning from every experience.  Ms. Browning maintains the mantra offered to her by her post-graduate supervisor, “life is ethnography”, “it is experiential, you have to have skin in the game and there is always an opportunity to grow, learn and expand from both the highs and the lows”, she says.