CEOs are the public face of many of these essential policy issues. What I enjoyed most about being CEO was being at the centre of the action and the constant variety that each day brought. I loved being at the centre of a team of competent, committed, strong people, all working together for the good of the company. I enjoyed seeing things that we’d thought about and planned come to pass and be successful. If I could rewind the tape, I’d do it all again in a heartbeat although, knowing what I know now, I’d do it a little differently.
(One thing I would have done differently, which is a small thing but potentially powerful, would have been to have Telecom executives pay for their own phone and internet, even though it would have been reimbursed. Because phone and internet were provided by the company it was very easy to have every new gadget and service going and to become somewhat disconnected from what customers would perceive as value for money, which would have become blindingly obvious if you yourself were paying for it. Of course, you can get that information from looking through reams of research, which I regularly did, but it’s not the same.)
The job definitely came at a cost: the cost of my relationship, the cost of being out of balance as a person — only having time for people who were functionaries in my achievement-oriented universe. I switched off my ‘feminine’ side years ago in order to get to the top in a man’s world, then I found some difficulty in switching it on again, although I’ve been told that I’m more relaxed and easier to be around now than I have been for years. I’ve certainly enjoyed being a free agent.
Still it wasn’t just that job that made me so single-minded. If I’d been more talented and learned to ride earlier, I might have channelled my energies into being a competitive horsewoman. And I would have been just as focused and bordering on being obsessive about that. At the end of the day, you take yourself wherever you go!
The hardest thing I found about being CEO was constantly being judged. I had no problem being on top of the material on the issues but I found it very hard to deal with the relentlessness of being watched and dealing with people’s different agendas, which drove them to take stances that might have nothing to do with what I’d meant. At times it was hard to avoid sounding defensive.
There was no such thing as a typical day, except that I always got up at 6am, did my swim training, had my hair done at a salon on the way to the office to deal with post-swimming ‘pool hair’, read and responded to emails when I got in, and generally never started meetings before 8.30. When I was first CEO I could count on not getting very many emails over a weekend, but by the time I left, email traffic had become a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week phenomenon.
When you’re a CEO you’re never not working. It doesn’t matter whether you’re at your desk, in transit somewhere or at home. For the last few years everybody has had a BlackBerry or similar PDA device that continually brings emails to you, no matter where you are or what you’re doing. That’s just part of the job.
A CEO never has a minute to spare. That is the truth of the matter. You’re always working on intersecting cycles: the daily cycles of meetings, the weekly cycles of receiving reports — indicators on key numbers and other important information, the monthly cycles of getting full monthly data and preparing and reading board papers prior to board meetings, and the three-monthly cycles of reporting to the market and presenting to analysts. And then there are the media cycles that you are both generating or getting caught up in inadvertently, as part of other people’s cycles, be they political, competitors or changing consumer tastes. At the end of the day it’s about people interacting with people, all of you striving to do the best you can.
I’ve made lifelong friends in every work situation I’ve ever found myself in. You go through a range of emotions together, celebrating successes and achievements and supporting each other when things don’t go so well. And you don’t leave that behind at the end of a day or the end of a job. That camaraderie is one of the things that has made my business career to date so enjoyable.
I have also learnt from all the bosses I have had in my corporate life and from many of my colleagues. From my first boss, Murray Higgs at Fisher & Paykel, while I was still a business school student, I learnt to feel comfortable about being challenged by someone who was smarter than me — and knew a lot more about the subject matter. From Murray McKinnon, my boss at TVNZ, I discovered the sheer power of a manager who works so hard that you feel you need to work hard alongside them, and experienced the huge joy of working for a man who was not at all threatened by female managers who were not just strong and intelligent but quite lateral and spontaneous. Also at TVNZ I met Cindy Mitchener, which was the start of a lifelong friendship. During our years working together there we were quite a dynamic duo, staking out the jobs that we thought needed to be done and writing our own position descriptions by broadening our roles as we went.
From Roger Oly, my boss at National Mutual, I learnt the power of praise and in particular the power of a handwritten note — the power of making an emotional connection with the people who work for you and support you. From Lindsay Pyne at the Bank of New Zealand, I learnt the power of being deeply challenged while simultaneously being given a lot of autonomy. Lindsay also taught me the strength and fun that come from being part of a powerful team. And from Roderick Deane, I learnt the power of disciplined processes, deep analysis and acceptance that everyone is different and executive diversity is to be valued.
As my CEO, and later as the chairman of the Telecom board, Roderick was good to me. He is a wonderful mentor to talented people in all walks of life and was always very encouraging. He gave me a huge break, promoting me from general manager – marketing to running the wider New Zealand business, and then was instrumental in my becoming CEO. I believe that my total focus on becoming CEO of a large company and my determination would have got me there eventually, but I absolutely have no doubt that his support got me there faster.
Wayne Boyd was good to me at the end of my time as CEO. A lesser man, on becoming chairman in the eye of such a storm, would have wanted to visibly stamp his leadership on the situation, fuelled by ego. The obvious way for a chairman to have done that would have been to have swapped out the CEO. Given that he was no doubt under pressure from some quarters to do just that, his decision to work quietly with the existing team in shaping the choices he made is testament to the person that he is.
These people were all mentors in one way or another. I also had a good external mentor during my Bank of New Zealand years in Dr Sharon Lord, an American who became the highest-ever ranked woman at the Pentagon. She lived in New Zealand for several years after she married Tom Burns, who was from Bell Atlantic and was the CEO of Telecom for just under a year before Roderick Deane. She consulted widely on women in management across Australia and New Zealand and was a very helpful sounding board in those times, helping me to navigate the pathway from middle to senior management. Over the years I have found many senior people, even very busy, committed ones, enjoy being sought out for the value of their experience and the wisdom that comes with it.
I have never had any formal CEO or executive coaching. In fact, I find the whole idea slightly bizarre, as most of the people who I’ve seen offering those services have never been in those roles themselves. I’ve always felt more comfortable talking to people who have trod a similar path themselves and who can therefore see a bigger picture, such as Kevin Roberts, who has long been a mentor of mine.
A big difference between being a senior executive, even one with a large team of thousands of people, and being the CEO is, of course, the public profile. But a second big difference is interacting with a board. I found every Telecom board meeting different. Most I enjoyed, a few I dreaded, occasionally I was bored. But I think I made a mistake of not interacting more with the whole board outside formal meetings. I think most first-time CEOs make the mistake of focusing on their relationship with the chair of the board because they see that as the natural extension of the relationship they’ve previously had with a boss in a corporate setting. You go from being, for example, a general manager reporting to a CEO, and now you’re a CEO reporting to a chair.
I have seen every permutation of what happens with boards when trouble descends upon a company. I have seen boards, including the chair, turn on CEOs; I have seen chairs dump CEOs before the board could dump them; I’ve seen boards turn on CEOs and chairs together. I’ve also seen boards totally hang in together in bad situations. And now, being on the other side of the fence, I have more empathy for the position of board members, who come at things from a different perspective to that of a full-time executive who’s living, sleeping, eating, breathing the company every minute of every day. On a board you can sometimes see when a CEO is not quite seeing the wood for the trees, or missing something that’s happening in the wider world that’s very relevant, because they’re immersed in their own situation. But of course you also lack a lot of detail, and I believe a boardroom is a very poor place to make judgements about senior executives in particular. Roderick occasionally carried out surveys of the board to judge satisfaction with governance matters, including board–senior management interaction, and I was stunned when in one of these surveys the board indicated that they believed they could judge an executive’s performance on the times they saw them in front of the board. But in a way that’s what we all do — judge on that which we see.
I think CEOs make a mistake if they rely on the chair to manage the board. It is certainly true that it’s the chair’s role to manage the meeting, to focus it on the right issues in the right order, to set a standard of respect and to manage the mechanics around setting the CEO’s performance targets and specific coaching. But nobody wants to feel that they’re being managed, and the whole point of a board is to have a diversity and variety of experience and background that will lead to better overall decisions and outcomes. Sometimes that is not comfortable for the CEO.
Having both been on several different boards and a CEO, I can see that the basic tension is around the epicentre of power. Information flows in a company centre on the CEO, media attention centres on the CEO, and yet directors and therefore boards have strong legal duties to do what’s in the best interests of the business. That may not necessarily be what management thinks is in the best interests of the business or indeed what’s in management’s own best interests.
Board composition is a subject that has been written about at length. One of the tensions within a board can occur around whether the members are thinking primarily of the company’s interests or those of the individual stakeholders. I personally have never been part of a board where I thought that anything untoward was happening, but natural tensions do emerge. As Bob Jones once said to me, ‘The theory of a public company board is very good, Theresa, but the practice can be awful.’
It’s an interesting dynamic being a woman CEO managing an executive team which is largely male and, let’s face it, most women CEOs are managing groups of men. You do need to be quite strong but I also found it was important to have a light touch. If a woman can stay balanced between being authoritative, which tends to be a male characteristic, and empathetic and communicative, which tend to be female characteristics, then the men she is working with can feel relaxed in her company, but it’s not always an easy balance to strike. In my experience men in a corporate setting are more likely to share their vulnerabilities and worries and concerns and honest appraisals of a situation with a woman rather than another bloke. But the pressures on a CEO are such that you tend to get pushed into not having the time to tune into your empathetic side and end up being in authoritative mode most of the time.
I was treated as an equal by my male colleagues in the corporate world. That’s what women want of course, but for me in a way it reinforced my being in a ‘male’ mode. This was not the case with my immediate team, however, where the relationships were much more nuanced and I felt able to be more my ‘complete’ self.
My executive team and I went away for occasional off-site meetings to increase relatedness within the team. Carefully constructed, I think these do work — at least they always have for me. I believe that the time we are living in now is all about authenticity, and that the most important thing a leader can be is authentic. When I was younger I thought leadership was largely about personality and determination and desire, and because I am an extrovert I tended to see leaders as more likely to be extroverts than quieter, more reflective types.
Over the years I’ve come to see that personality has very little to do with it. Leadership is about character; it’s about courage and steadfastness, about not asking anyone to do anything you wouldn’t be prepared to do yourself. It’s about passion and belief in the goals of the organisation and the team that you are heading, an acknowledgement of everyone’s effort to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts.
The other thing I enjoyed about being CEO was being able to make a difference. When the Film Archive went into its new home in Wellington, I remember driving past it every day on the way home and feeling positive about enabling that to happen through the BNZ’s sponsorship of it when I was head of marketing. Fifteen years after we helped set up the Kiwi Recovery programme, I am delighted that the BNZ is still supporting this effort to protect and preserve our national bird.
From my days at National Mutual presenting workshops to women on taking control of their financial affairs, through the many speeches I’ve given to groups of women, from schoolgirls to professional women — female accountants, female lawyers, female farmers — I have often received feedback that something I’ve said switched on a light bulb for them, which helped them wherever they were at the time. I feel proud of the work I did with colleagues in Media Women, an informal group of feminist women who worked in the media and at TVNZ 25 years ago, on the portrayal of women in advertising, raising consciousness of that issue in the media and among advertising agencies.
As part of my CEO’s role I launched video conferencing between schools to support education in far-flung communities, worked with Starship Hospital to launch a medical diagnosis service for regional hospitals around New Zealand using broadband technology, and led the dawn ceremony on Takapuna Beach for the lighting up of the Southern Cross cable, enabling telecommunications capacity for New Zealand for the next decade.
Being a CEO is a bit like living the life of a high-performance athlete. You’re on the go and you’re travelling so much that you need to have strategies for managing your rest and getting enough sleep and exercise. You need a dedicated pit crew: a fantastic executive assistant who you can trust to be efficient and well organised and to make appropriate judgement calls, and a supportive home structure, however that is configured. Through all my years at Telecom I was lucky enough to have had one of the best executive assistants anywhere in Chris Woodwiss.
There’s definitely something quite selfish and rather unbalanced about being a CEO. You can only maintain the necessary pace if people around you work almost equally hard to support you. But making these sacrifices is all worth it when you receive the adrenalin buzz of those moments when everything is in flow.
In my middle years as CEO, I often felt this way. I had recruited or promoted an outstanding team and although we were often under pressure, we had a lot of fun together. I used to read business books, having always been a voracious reader of many different genres, and distil them in an interesting way for the team.
By this time, I felt I had successfully achieved a culture change at Telecom. In a work environment, most people will adopt the prevailing culture of the situation they find themselves in. A certain proportion will try to act in a harmonious way in whatever situation they find themselves, and a minority will have a tendency to throw a pebble into the pond just to see what ripples it causes. By my middle years as CEO I felt we had achieved a very cohesive working environment. Effecting such a major change is a very enjoyable process for those who are part of it, although there are inevitably some casualties. I do believe that sometimes you need to refresh the gene pool. It’s very difficult to see yourself as others see you once you’ve been in the same place for several years.
I felt fantastic about the culture I’d put together at the top of Telecom in my last four years as CEO. We had almost no turnover in the top 100 leaders and a real sense of working together across the company. That’s one of the reasons why I could never have led the company in an environment of operational separation. I just don’t believe in warring tribes. I think there are so many pressures on a company from outside that you cannot maximise outcomes for customers or shareholders if you have division internally, especially following a government-mandated division with someone else pulling the strings. That would have been a living hell for me.
While I was CEO I always felt highly supported by my team and respected by the board. People say it’s lonely at the top, but I never felt lonely until the end. At that time those close to me were dealing with their own stress, confusion and dismay about the turn of events, and at times I felt isolated and unsupported.
The good times never last, of course. The world shifts on its axis, the product that was ahead of its time is now behind the game, the government changes, the policies for the sector are under review, a major shareholder enters or exits and has a different vision of the future … you never know what’s going to happen next.
Succession planning is a key part of any CEO’s role but many do not do it well because their egos do not allow them to think that anyone could do the job as well as them, or they go for a ‘lite’ version of themselves because they think only someone like them could do the job. I took succession planning seriously and over several years developed and nurtured two internal candidates who were quite capable of following me as CEO: Marko Bogoievski, the chief financial officer, and Simon Moutter, chief operating officer. However, as things turned out, when the then board chose a strategy of complete capitulation to the government, neither of them was suited to the job and neither of them wanted it then anyway.
Marko in particular advocated strongly for a full structural separation. He believed that operational separation, with all its inherent contradictions and hugely embedded costs that would add no value, was doomed to not deliver for either shareholders or customers. He felt it could only ever be a transitory model on the way to somewhere else, so you may as well get to the somewhere else straight away and have a chance of a clearly transparent method of delivery to customers. Recently he has commented publicly about this, saying, ‘Operational separation is an unnatural, large market idea imported from the United Kingdom with zero analysis and will be exposed as an unstable and disappointing transitory regime in the New Zealand context.’44
Given that Telecom’s profits have halved in two years under operational separation, I am surprised that line of logic hasn’t surfaced more strongly yet with investors. Profits are profits. ANZ Bank in New Zealand reported a profit of $1 billion and no one batted an eyelid. Telecom made profits around $800 million and it was seen as grand larceny. It can only be because people believe that those profits were unearned, the result of a windfall arising from the original public nature of the infrastructure — even though the company was privatised in 1990 and hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in the infrastructure every single year subsequent to that!
For a long time after I left Telecom, I beat myself up. What did we miss? What did I miss? How did Telecom suddenly become treated more like a political party than a business? And now that I’m long gone I, along with the rest of the country, wonder about the propriety of a company making half the annual profits it did a few years ago but paying its executives considerably higher salaries.
Since leaving Telecom, I have come to understand that I am too direct for my own good and some people are just not comfortable with that. But I like myself and I’m not about to change. I have also come to see in a very painful way that only those closely involved in a situation ever know the full story. Everyone is looking at it through their own filter or a partial lens. That doesn’t stop spectators in the stands rushing to make a judgement — or me, for that matter, making judgements on other matters on which I have only a partial perspective. It seems humans are hard-wired to be able to take in only peripheral information about things that we are not closely connected with. We tend to filter out a lot of stuff and hear only ‘the facts’ that support the story we are already attached to in our own heads.
This explains why I cherish those people who have been around the block with me and why I don’t make new friends as quickly as I used to. People can be a lot more complex and multi-layered than they appear and I feel I can only really get to know someone over many years of closely interacting with them.