From the day I joined Telecom I had seen the possibility that I might be able to become CEO. In Roderick Deane I recognised someone who valued intelligence and a person’s ability to get things done highly, perhaps above all else. And those have always been two of my hallmarks. I also realised, being one of three women on his executive team and observing his desire to find a woman to join the Telecom board, that he was someone who valued diversity and was not sexist, unlike the cultures of my two previous employers.
Like everybody else at Telecom, I had no idea that in February 1999 Roderick was going to announce that he would succeed Peter Shirtcliffe as chairman of Telecom in October that year, and that a search would begin for his successor as CEO. I had been at Telecom for nearly five years by then, and from the moment this move was announced I went into ‘Project CEO’ mode.
The other internal candidate was an American, Jeff White, who had been Telecom’s chief financial officer for several years and was very highly regarded. Jeff and I had always got on well and continued to work together effectively during this period. It was rather a long time for the company to be in a leadership transition, with the board running an exhaustive search process, interviewing both myself and Jeff as well as other New Zealand candidates and searching both the UK and North American markets.
A global recruiting firm was appointed to undertake the search, and I met with the US-based recruiter in New York while on a business trip to talk to investors. Telecom had and still has a high proportion of US fund managers on its share register. When Bell Atlantic and Ameritech paid some $4.25 billion for the business in 1990, an unheard-of sum at the time, there was great interest in America about the company and from the early 1990s it had a high proportion of North American investors, which necessitated regular trips there.
The interviews with the board, however, took place in New Zealand. I got a whole new wardrobe from Adrienne Winkelmann — black skirt and trouser suits and silk shirts — for the interview process, and practised my interview skills with eight discreet, intelligent people from outside Telecom role-playing each of the directors who’d be interviewing me. I had them ask me the sort of questions I thought the directors would ask (and indeed, in the real interview I did get asked one or two questions that were exactly as I had practised and practised in the role plays). I felt quite excited during the process as I had nothing to lose — few commentators picked that I would get the role, and many thought it would go to someone outside Telecom. I felt slightly nervous being interviewed by the whole board, but quite comfortable during the one-on-one interviews with individual board members as I had presented to them and worked with them for several years.
On Thursday, August 12, 1999 it was announced that I would become the chief executive officer of Telecom New Zealand on October 1 — the first woman to head such a major, multibillion-dollar company in this country. I was so excited, I rushed home to discuss the draft contract with John and nearly sideswiped several cars on the way. I am not a good driver at the best of times and that day I was a long way from being in a calm and steady state! This was my dream come true, the moment I had worked towards for nearly 20 years since I had sat in my room in Hamilton, reading Helen Place’s book and setting my goal. I had been brought up to believe that anything was possible and now, at the age of 37, with a couple of years to spare, I had proved it.
My joy that day and the next was indescribable as friends and colleagues contacted me and rushed to my office. In the five years I’d been at Telecom I’d formed very close bonds with many of the people who worked with and for me, and many of them were extroverts who weren’t slow to communicate their pleasure, first of all that it was an internal appointment and secondly that it was me. I got a fax from someone who was with the consumer marketing team when the announcement came through, who told me they’d jumped out of their seats and cheered when they heard that I had got the job.
The response that first day and for the next couple of weeks was completely overwhelming. I received literally hundreds of letters, emails, faxes and calls from people I’d worked with over the previous 20 years, but also many from complete strangers. The common theme was that my appointment was seen as inspirational because I was a woman, reasonably young and a New Zealander, and because I had achieved my dream. I received many, many letters from women who said they felt if it could happen for me then they, too, would be able to achieve their dreams. This came not long after Hewlett Packard in the United States had named Carly Fiorina as its new CEO. Women know that women have a more difficult job climbing the corporate ladder than men, so there was a lot of collective tapping together of heels when it happened for me.
The media coverage of my appointment was extensive — wall to wall — and the pictures showed how delighted I was. While many in the telecommunications community had speculated privately that I could be a contender for the job, it was only a few months earlier, in May 1999, that a small profile of me had been part of a story called ‘Ten Powerful People You’ve Never Heard Of’5. In the wider world it was an absolutely unheralded move, and the surprise of it made it very newsworthy.
I felt a funny mixture of exhilaration and nerves during the media conference to announce my appointment. I was totally unprepared for the flash bulbs going off in my face and the microphones being thrust at me. And as Adrienne Perry, a journalist who was there later commented, some of the questions I was asked were utterly astonishing.6 I was asked about my marital status and if I intended to have children. Adrienne said that the men in the room seemed gobsmacked by the appointment, and the novelty value of having a woman at the top of corporate New Zealand was huge. And of course it complemented the wider story about leadership roles for women in New Zealand, with Jenny Shipley as Prime Minister and Helen Clark as Leader of the Opposition, Dame Margaret Bazley having run the largest government department and Sian Elias being recently named Chief Justice. Interestingly, Jenny Shipley sent me flowers and a note of great warmth but Helen Clark did not contact me.
Adrienne wrote that I was very direct and could be off-putting, but if I had been a quiet, polite and measured woman, I would not have got to the top. And there in a nutshell lies the dilemma for women in leadership roles. Nobody follows a person who doesn’t have confidence in themselves and a clear sense of where they’re headed. And yet, if a woman is too strong, she can come across as aggressive and off-putting. Adrienne also predicted that the obsession with my gender was likely to remain.
My appointment also came as a profound surprise to the financial community, who had been backing Jeff White to get the job. At best they were neutral about my appointment, although I realised quite quickly that actually most were negative. However, Telecom’s share price hardly moved on the announcement, so clearly my appointment didn’t faze the market too much.
The six weeks between the announcement and my actually becoming CEO were filled with interviews and messages of wonderment, surprise and congratulations. It was truly a halcyon period: getting all the glory for getting the job, but not yet actually doing it. Once you are CEO, as a fellow CEO and friend remarked to me, you never want for company, and this was certainly the case during this period. All sorts of people came out of the woodwork claiming to be my long-lost best friend. I tend to trust people until it’s been demonstrated that I shouldn’t, and there’s no doubt that during this period I was inundated with a mixture of people who were very genuine and those who were simply positioning themselves in the best possible light, often would-be product or service suppliers. Even though it was possible to discern between the two groups, I am only human and I remember one day realising how easy it would be to have all the attention go to my head.
I’m very plain speaking, I’m very straight talking — perhaps to the point of rather too much bluntness — and I made a decision there and then that I would continue to surround myself with people who told it to me like it was, which had always been my own style. After swimming one morning, which I do every day as a combination of exercise and meditation, I resolved to always try to be true to my spirit and not be captured by ego. It’s impossible to get to the top without a strong ego and I believe that to achieve you need to have a strong sense of self, but I wanted to stay grounded and real.
Over the next eight years, there was a week-in, week-out constant barrage of reports on Telecom and on me, some of it positive, some of it negative, some of it neutral. All through those years I assumed that because Telecom was New Zealand’s largest company by market capitalisation on the stock market, it and whoever was its CEO would receive that much coverage. But in the two years since I left, the profile of my male successor, Paul Reynolds, has been so much more muted, I’ve come to the view that Adrienne Perry was right — that the intense scrutiny I faced from the minute my appointment was announced was at least partly to do with my gender.