WEDNESDAY, 26 AUGUST 2008

Hear it from the BOSS Resilient Leadership (Melbourne)

Transcript

This is an edited transcript of the Hear it From the BOSS forum in Melbourne on August 26, 2008.

The panellists were Owen Hegarty, a non-executive director of Oz Minerals (the successor to Oxiana); Liz Harman, vice president and chancellor of Victoria University; John Denton, partner and CEO of Corrs Chambers Westgarth; Paul Gardner, Australian group chairman of Grey Global Group; Ninotschka Titchkosky, principal of Bligh Voller Nield. The ABC’s Geraldine Doogue moderated the event.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: We have a great range of people of different talents but also a very broad understanding, I think, from what I have read, of what leadership and resilient leadership might mean. We will hear from two of our guests’ keynotes, which is five- minute address and then a chance for us to have a bit of a conversation and then we will throw it open to questions. So could I ask Owen to address us now.

OWEN HEGARTY: Thank you very much for that, Geraldine. In terms of the leadership behaviour in adversity or difficult times, well, we have had a fair bit of it in the resources industry. People say you've been from famine to feast type of thing at the moment but I can tell you it is still pretty hard out there. Now, in terms of what you actually do under those circumstances when things are challenging or difficult or going to get difficult one way or the other, well, you have got to do many things the same, you have got to do many things even better, more of the same, and you have got to do a lot of things different.

To us, one of the core values that we have is very much openness and honesty and good strong communications. We call it openness. It is a value that we have, everybody knows where they stand inside the company and good, strong communications internally and externally. In difficult times, in challenging times, and I suppose in a way the merger of the two companies has created some challenge internally, you have actually got to get out there and do that communications in spades.

One small example, Geraldine, was when we in Oxiana took over a base metals mine in Western Australia called Golden Grove, about five or 600 people or thereabouts two or three years ago, a very difficult operating environment in the west. It is a nightmare out there getting people, getting resources, getting equipment, getting contractors and so on. So we were scrambling for people. One of the things that I did and insisted that our senior management did, and our board in fact did, was actually be there, talk with people, communicate, demonstrate that we actually care. So I was turning up there on a very regular basis, talking with people, listening to people, having the barbecues. So it was the leadership by barbecue there. As I say, we got points for just turning up, we got points for talking to everybody and, particularly, getting points for listening. In other words, listening to what they've got to say, taking the bullets. You have to put your hands over your ears from time to time in terms of some of the bullets that were coming our way, but that was a very important thing to actually get that communication out there. And actually showing people that you care for them.

Over there in the west they're all football mad, a bit like they are here in Victoria. Tragically they're mainly West Coast Eagles and Freo supporters. But on one of the visits over there we took over football identities Ron Barassi and Michael Long. And we did the same thing - the barbecue, the talking with people - and they are still talking about it over there. It was an overwhelming success simply because we were showing people that we actually cared about them and cared about their interests.

So that mine, when we took it over had a turnover rate I'm sad to say of about 60 per cent. 60 per cent. We were turning the work force over about every 15 or 16 months or thereabouts. Now it's got a turnover rate probably the lowest in Western Australia, about 10 to 12 per cent or something like that. One of the main reasons for that is that we actually put in and increased that communication, listened to people and showed and demonstrated in spades tender loving care and attention. I know it's not rocket science. In fact, it is very elementary, but it was such an important part of lowering that turnover, raising value for the company and all of its stakeholders. Thank you very much.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: I want to pick up that business about communication It is one of those catch-all phrases and I want to get all of you to talk about it. You did leadership by barbecue. Did you really care about everybody or did you just persuade them that you did? Do you see what I mean? You can't care about everyone, can you?

OWEN HEGARTY: Well in my position at the top of the tree it is absolutely mandatory and compulsory to care about everybody and I try to demonstrate that in spades on a daily basis. That is very much part of one of our core values there, Geraldine, of respect. Respect for the individual, respect for the team, respect for cultures, respect for all of our stakeholders. And that way we were able to demonstrate that we cared, demonstrated that we respected, and from that grew our whole culture of safety, of training, of development, of coaching and getting the best out of people and ensuring that they were trained and developed to get the best out of themselves type of thing. So definitely.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Would you say that, John Denton, in a big legal practice like yours how much can you keep your own self together while demonstrating a care factor?

JOHN DENTON: It's an interesting issue. Underlying the way in which you deal with your people and your colleagues is really this whole concept for us of respect. It is interesting because I think I have tested this on a number of occasions and I have tested it in a turnaround situation and a getting together situation and then well, that's not enough, you have got to push on harder. Which means that along the way people will leave you sometimes because it's me-induced or it's a consequence of me or decisions or whatever. But the critical thing is dealing with people with respect on a continuing basis and I think that that is a very critical value I know for a professional service firm. And ours of course is not a command control culture. It is actually a different kind of culture. Lawyers hate being managed by email. You actually have to spend a lot of time one on one. Which means there's a lot more jawboning going on in law firms. They like being special.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Paul, what do you think about this?

PAUL GARDNER: Look, I think it is all well and good to have the theory of caring and sharing but I guess if you look at the environment, the economic circumstances today, the fact is that a lot of firms, especially listed companies, are being driven by stock analysts. So short-term profits often equal long-term career prospects, and it is a really big concern. So whilst we all hope that a good leader is one who can care for their people and nurture them, the fact is that a lot of people, and especially in overseas companies, are driven by what are the results going to be this year. Yes, we strongly believe in supporting our people and training our people but I don't think that is necessary the reality. I think it is a really sad problem we have found ourselves in, where stock analysts are driving the need for income which in turn is driving the need to worry about money above all. It's a really big issue.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Ninotschka, I know that your firm is actually going through gangbusters times so you're not going through difficult times. But have you been through times when you have actually been led by bastards but they have actually led you places?

NINOTSCHKA TITCHKOSKY: I have learnt resilience through various people I have worked with. We have had tough times. last year for us was quite difficult and we came off the back of doing the billion-dollar bid for the children's hospital and it actually sucked a lot of life out of our Melbourne practice. So last financial year we did stare down the barrel of the gun for a while and it was a huge lesson and it was a huge learning curve and I think you're right, you do need to have a vision and you also need to be able to communicate really well with your people about what that vision is and you need to give them a sense of stability.

A lot of people talk about respect, and we do a lot of work with a whole lot of different organisations through our workplace projects, and there is a lot of respect being used and I don't know that there is that much actually being practiced. I think it is really about being authentic. Communication has got to be a two-way street, and it is not just about you talking to your people but it is about you hearing what they have to say and trying to take that on board and trying to bring that into your vision as well. So the vision is actually a shared thing.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: I heard a wonderful line, that a leader is the bridge between people and their potential. I just wondered, Owen, if that rings true to you.

OWEN HEGARTY: I don't think there is any doubt about that. The key leadership characteristics that I look for in my team, was to actually train and develop their people. Particularly because in our industry we are going to have to grow more of our own, so to speak, but to get that potential out it's one of the greatest things you can do, is invest in education, training and development. Whether you are a corporation, individual, parent, grandparent. So it is almost innate.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: But in the mining industry at the moment where you are so short of labour can you afford to take people out of work to do that?

OWEN HEGARTY: Well, you are always trying to balance that but in fact we do. One of the biggest things we do around the whole group is training. I suppose up in Laos and offshore you would expect that to happen anyway, where you don't have a shortage of untrained people, put it that way. But here we put a lot of work into our leadership training courses and that's a way of continuing to instill our very strong culture we think that we have in Oxiana and Oz Minerals. We think it gets you loyalty, we think it gets you competitiveness, we think it gets you a stronger culture to be able to compete. I mean, we are still Mighty Mouse Oz Minerals here. We are not BHP or Rio Tinto or those, so we just have to go harder at it.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Let's welcome Professor Liz Harman to talk.

ELIZABETH HARMAN: I'm not going to talk much about Victoria University in these opening comments at all, a little bit right at the end because I can't possibly give away the opportunity. But there is a little bit of a Western Australian theme running here. You will find that I am somebody who lived for 26 years in Western Australia and has been at Victoria University for the last five.

When I was asked to speak a little bit about resilient leadership I decided to tell a very personal story. So in my experience resilience is something which can be learned. I grew up in New Zealand. I grew up in a bit of a menagerie of a household. My mother had seven children, there were lots of cousins who came around, in the school holidays a couple of my siblings turned up that usually lived with my father. There wasn't a lot of money in our house and the quality of the dinner table depended on what my mother called whether we were in the week of feast or the week of famine. It was a time when I was, at least for most of the year, except for the school holidays, the oldest in the family. When I was my most uppity my mother called me Duchess. The younger kids resorted to calling me Bossy Libby. You can hear in these labels some of the early signs of the leadership that ultimately I hope I've come to show.

But it was a very flawed leadership. I had a crippling fear of failure and tended to cave when the pressure got too much. That meant that when I faced my first examination in any real sense - the end of school, when I did my PhD - I did cave. The problem persisted periodically throughout my working life until I was about 40 years old. In each case I would be in tears, I would be distressed, I would be incapacitated. I was bailed out by a lot of people around me but it made me very vulnerable and very fragile until I guess I was about 40 years old when I began to see the pattern in the episodes.

I faced real pressure in the 1980s and this was the fire in which I think now of the resilience that I now have. I think I have. At that time my husband Frank and I were both academics in Perth at Murdoch University, juggling classes with raising our two young children. It was also the era of the Burke government in WA. I left the university for a few years to work in ministerial offices, firstly for Mal Bryce and subsequently for Brian Burke, before launching out in partnership with a colleague in a small export trading business. I had a taste for the private sector at that stage. Frank stayed on at Murdoch and became the mainstay of the household as I travelled.

The company was undercapitalised and it grew too fast. We were breaking new ground with some of Australia's first containerised foreign exports into Japan and we were developing a start up coal mine in the jungles of Western Sumatra. The exchange rate moved against our contracts, written Australian dollars and not hedged. Interest rates you may remember at that time went to 18 per cent on our loans. Long story short, I applied for a new position back at the university when the pay cheques from the company stopped.

By 1990 the company was in liquidation. I had given a director's guarantee against our personal assets. The guarantee was called in by creditors, some of whom were rightly or wrongly feral in their pursuit of Frank and I at our home for what the company owed them.

I went back to rebuilding the academic that I thought I had left forever in the mid-1980s. My gut was in a turmoil for months. I don't think I talked about this period for a decade. I never spoke to those around me at Murdoch about what was happening in our private lives. I coped with classes and creditors in different parts of my brain. The WA Royal Commission was called at the same time and I spent two days on the stand and in the media, giving evidence on the Argyle Diamond venture. I'd kept good records when I was in the offices and I was one of the few people who came out of those events pretty well.

At home Frank and I settled with our corporate creditors under a part 10 arrangement but we lost everything and we moved to a rented home. Our marriage survived. Our children moved from our old swimming pool to the one next door and said it was better anyway, there were more kids to play with.

But over the 1990s I took on leadership roles at Murdoch, I enrolled in a course in commercial law, I went on a raft of overseas study tours about all aspects of universities. I was appointed to various State and Federal boards and I became a deputy vice chancellor in the late 1990s at another university.

I have become a life-long believer in emotional intelligence. Frank and I now know the warning signs when I am becoming intense, obsessive or depressed, and no laughs from that second row; I can see them down there. And we roll out our various coping strategies when any of these signals come along. It was he who encouraged me to consider the position at Victoria University and pushed me again when I faulted momentarily during the process of 2003. I am forever grateful that he pushed.

I wouldn't be a good fit as a vice chancellor at some institutions but there is something really wonderful about Victoria University. It is a 45,000-student institution serving a culturally diverse and low socio economic community out in the western suburbs. We're a university playing a very special role, not only in that region but also on the world stage. As an organisation we are growing in our sense of direction, our confidence and our own institutional resilience. So watch our space and thanks for listening.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: It is a great story, Liz. You say you have become a life long believer, as I have, in emotional intelligence, which is that whole argument that you learn to identify your emotions on the run, not when you actually can retreat and in a nice little quiet room identify. Is it something that can be learned, that whole idea that you get quicker and faster at naming what it is that you're feeling? How do you describe that skill?

ELIZABETH HARMAN: For me I think it is partly recognising emotion. Even now my voice is shaking slightly at the whole recounting of that history. And then facing it. There was a long time where I didn't face the fear. Now I do. I have been through enough to know that I can get to the other side and, more than that, there are opportunities, there are some good things that come out of it. So yes, now I do suggest to people who I see around working with me that if they are having trouble with a situation that we do sit down and talk about it, that we do put the emotion on the table and we try and deal with the emotion. Whether it is terrific or whether it is sad. What I also find is that it does not deflect me from making hard decisions either for myself or for other people. Once you have actually faced the fear it becomes much easier. And once you know some coping strategies.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Ninotschka, there is a lovely story in your notes that the day after you were appointed principal everyone went out to lunch and you weren't invited.

NINOTSCHKA TITCHKOSKY: Yes.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: This was an incredible reminder of where you had helicoptered to.

NINOTSCHKA TITCHKOSKY: It was a bit of a shock. I guess one day I was part of everyone and the next day I suppose the reality was I was their boss and actually nothing had really changed in terms of the physical kind of environment or whatever. And we had obviously been going through a long period of discussions to get to that point but from the outside looking in it kind of happened overnight. And I just remember seeing everyone piling out to go to lunch and I'm like where's everyone going. Anyway, they all went for lunch and I wasn't invited. I realised at that point I guess it was a shift and I suppose it made me, I guess, maybe respect the position even more and gave me a greater level of understanding of what that actually means from all our people looking towards me rather than me looking out towards them.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Have you got a moment, maybe it is not as dramatic as Liz's, when you know you did fail or certainly not achieve as much as you liked and how you worked your way back out of it?

NINOTSCHKA TITCHKOSKY: Yeah, definitely and I think it partly taps into the emotional intelligence thing. The first time I did emotional intelligence I was pretty low on the empathy scale and it is a bit confronting because you're thinking no, I'm not, I'm pretty empathetic. I think the thing about all of these situations is they are quite confronting and having to confront these situations does take courage and you actually have to be prepared to be vulnerable, I suppose.

I think for me one of the big sort of points in my career about that was related to the children's hospital project. It was a huge project, it was the biggest PPP that's been delivered in Australia and I was leading the architectural design component of it, far bigger than anything I had ever done before. And I guess for me I had the end goal in mind and just wanted to push through to that point no matter whatever the costs were. And I guess there was a few casualties, to be honest, with our people along the way. It was OK for me but it wasn't OK for some of the other people on the team and I guess it was a big learning curve for me.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: When did you realise that there were some casualties?

NINOTSCHKA TITCHKOSKY: Not until the end although you could kind of recognise it along the way. I think the pressure was so great to get to the end that it was all put on hold until the end and then really we unravelled the whole situation in quite a lot of detail. So in that fact that became fantastic learning because we were willing to really analyse the entire situation and spend a lot of time rebuilding after that. So although it was difficult and it was confronting for me personally, it was also a really rewarding experience.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Paul, what would you say was a low moment that you worked your way out of?

PAUL GARDNER: I've got a lot of them. I think by the very nature of being perceived as a leader, whether you are or not, you traditionally fail a lot. If you are not trying to do something different and running that risk, I mean, no one ever appoints a leader and says we would like you to come in here, it is going fantastic and just maintain it. Don't do anything, just relax. It doesn't happen like that. Which is why I think CEOs have such a short tenure of recent times. They're paid to take risks, they're paid to grow our businesses and they're paid to manage it and create a different culture, and that means that you fail. I fail regularly, I fail in a lot of areas. I fail as a person, I probably fail as a father, I fail as a businessman. I go to a football club that has won I think six games or seven games in the last 2 years, many of which I could have played in a lot better.

So you look at these things but you have to come out of them and say what are we trying to do, what is the end game here, what is the big picture and why are these failures going to help us, as Liz says, to recognise the signs and when it comes up again to learn from those mistakes and to build on them? If you don't fail you're not a leader, you're a follower.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: If you keep getting low achievement what do you take from it? Do you self audit and come up with some unpleasant conclusions?

PAUL GARDNER: Probably the first lesson you need to learn is you can't do it all yourself, which I think is a critical lesson. Too often you are appointed there, to a business, and your first reaction is I have been appointed because I know everything, therefore everyone else here must leave and I must bring in my own people. I honestly believe that a genuine leader's job is to create an environment in which people can be their best. It takes you a long time to realise that.

That is why human resources recruitment has become some sort of dark evil. We go through these things. I mean, do handwriting analysis. People are doing psychometric tests. We hire these people and then we put them in this closet, we don't let them be leaders. We hire them as leaders, we train them as leaders and then we say just follow me, I know what I'm doing. It is just very archaic. And it's very western. I think we can learn a lot from the way the Eastern businesses set themselves up in a cultural sense to genuinely nurture leadership.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: But they're copying us.

PAUL GARDNER: Some are. The last couple of weeks it doesn't look like China is copying anyone. Some are and I think they are coming to learn from us. It's a shame, and Liz might jump on me, it's a shame that so many people are running down and doing a lot of rogue courses. I really can't see that a lot of bright Eastern kids are running over learning MBAs. Why are they doing case studies on areas that are basically Western American case studies? This is just ridiculous.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: John Denton, When did you learn a great deal about what you think amounts to good leadership?

JOHN DENTON: Actually I was very touched by Liz's journey. It was quite a tail of recovery and motivation and it did draw me to think a little bit about some of the things I have experienced in my life. My first career actually was not in the law, I was in the foreign service and I joined relatively young, I think I was one of the youngest at the time. Even younger than our current Prime Minister, who was always the first at everything he did.

I wanted to go to places I couldn't normally go to so I happily went off to Moscow in the fag end of the Cold War. And then I thought I want to go to a really difficult place where I can get my head around development assistance. And I went to a very complicated place, Dhaka in Bangladesh. It was exactly what I wanted. It was seen as a golden career at the time and it was basically a case of be careful what you ask for, you might get it.

I had been in complicated places. I'd been in Moscow, I'd been in Kingston, Jamaica, I'd been in Georgia, I'd been in Tbilisi, I'd been in lots of really complicated places. But I ended up in Dhaka and my life changed. I was confronted with extraordinary complexity mixed with poverty, corruption, good intent, bad intent and irrelevance. Because in the end, even though Bangladesh at one stage was the second-largest recipient of Australian development assistance, it was actually largely politically irrelevant to Australia. And having been in the pressure of the big jobs to actually end up in a place where you are suffering relevance deprivation, plus going through all the other complexities, it was a deep dark night of the soul. I thought my God, my wife who has a separate career, she wasn't that keen on joining me in Bangladesh. We had a child. I was commuting. It was like my God, what have I done here.

I must say that was a moment for me that I really grappled and I didn't know what to do. I didn't have a mentor, I didn't have anyone who really understood the situation I put myself in. And then I actually was just really lucky. I found something. I actually found a thing called self-motivation. I actually discovered that the most important thing was - I suppose I was on my own for so long in a strange place - deep self knowledge and the ability to motivate yourself became something that I just found totally liberating.

And once I was able to discern that and actually find that I had within me this ability to motivate myself I got myself absolutely engaged. And I thought I'm going to be here for two years. I am going to discover some of the most interesting aspects of south Asia. So I managed to convince the foreign service that I should spend time in Calcutta, in Kathmandu, I got involved and got appointed to the World Bank to oversee the Bangladesh economy. I got this deep involvement in south Asian culture. Twenty years later I was giving a speech in Mumbai and I knew all this stuff which for these people was just extraordinary.

But for me it was the self-motivation that actually came out of it and I think that is something for a leader because guys it's lonely up here on these pedestals. It's cold. But the ability to motivate yourself and you actually have to give off a lot of energy. And nothing made me prouder than when I discovered that my elder son had it within him. Because he was facing a particular challenge he had and I thought, that's the gene. Whether it's a gene I don't know; that's it.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: I think that is a great story. Egocentricity in leadership in big groups like yours is something you have to be wary of. I just wonder whether it is something that you make explicit or is implicit.

PAUL GARDNER: You know, we talk a lot about the firm, we talk a lot about the partnership. In a way there is a danger you start abstracting things too much. On any brochure about the firm there cannot be a model. There actually has to be a Corrs person. And everyone said why do you worry about things like that? I said because it smacks of inauthenticity. You have to be authentic. And you actually have to establish a relationship which is more than a transactional relationship with people. And in a sense they have to believe and you have to help them believe in the perpetuity of that which they are actually part of.

And I know that sounds a little weird but to be a great professional service firm you actually have to believe that what you are delivering or what you are part of you will deliver on to the next generation. Because we are not listed, we are privately owned. It's a partnership and it actually builds itself on mutual trust and respect. In fact, that is a key part of any partnership deed, it's in there. But we are a partnership and a business, not but a business and a business. We have mutual respect and we're accountable. You actually have to get that as part of the discussion, part of the DNA discussion of the firm. And, frankly, if a person who is elevated or admitted to the partnership can't believe in that then they don't belong.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Owen?

OWEN HEGARTY: I think you mentioned egocentricity and some of those things and personal ambition in leadership. I think there is a relevant point here. There was a book recently, Good to Great I think it was called. The author was talking about the very good companies becoming great companies and what are the characteristics. And one of the characteristics is what he called this so-called level 5 leadership. In other words, leaders who had this, what he called, paradoxical combination of professional will and personal humility. In other words, they were subduing their ego. They still had all of the absolute drive and passion and commitment to succeed, to build the structure, to define the strategy, to live the culture and hire and train and develop all the best people. All of these things, but at the same time they were looking into the mirror to apportion blame and they were looking out the window to apportion credit.

It really taught me something about the sort of leaders that we should be encouraging. We don't want the egocentric, we don't want the razzmatazz leaders. We want them to be ambitious, we want them to be hard working, but we want them to be ambitious not so much for themselves and for their personal gain, but for the corporation, for the people, for all of the stakeholders. And when you look at some of the leaders I have got a lot of time for, like going back into the olden days of CRA, people like Sir Maurice Mawby and more recently John Ralph.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: One of the things that I wanted to raise with all of you was the business again in tough times about handling anxiety, one's own anxiety and the anxiety of your team or your broader team. Now I wonder Ninotschka , how do you carve your way through it?

NINOTSCHKA TITCHKOSKY: A lot of our cients are working in situations where they're in very high anxiety. They're often moving into completely different kind of environments, they're dealing with a whole cultural change program that usually is driven from the CEO or the leaders of the organisation and they're not sure what that means for them. And we are sort of brought in to bring in the meaning, I suppose, and make that a reality, make that physical environment a reality.

I think the really big part about that is moving people from this idea about scepticism to belief and a big part of doing that is actually working it through with them, creating a solution together. I think when you just try and stamp on the solution it's always going to fail because you never get away from the scepticism. So it really is about creating solutions together and ensuring that you're communicating in a way that again is quite meaningful and you are hearing what they have got to say.

For our business most of the time when we are taking on challenges, and they might be criticisms about certain things, they actually inevitably make the solution much more robust. So I think if you can look at those things in an opportunist way it actually becomes a much better outcome.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: One of the things I am going to move to is adversity because you all say you learn in adversity. Again, I am pretty sceptical about this because I think adversity is shocking. What do you think?

NINOTSCHKA TITCHKOSKY: Personally for me I think it is does work because the more challenging the more engaged I am, the more interested I am.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: The more on the edge you are.

NINOTSCHKA TITCHKOSKY: The more on the edge I am. Maybe that is unhealthy, I'm not sure. But for me it kind of ramps up the opportunities. One of the project managers said to me at the end of a project, ‘You know, I just wish you were a bit more vanilla.’ But I think it is the hard bits that I think are really exciting. Everyone is always quick to put all the obstacles in your way and I think if you can actually navigate those obstacles and come out with something that maybe no one even thought could be that great at the end, for me that is really rewarding and that drives me.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Paul, how do you deal with anxieties?

PAUL GARDNER: There is one amusing anecdote with football. We have had some tough times where we actually lost a player to the tsunami which was quite difficult and confronting and we have been at the bottom of the ladder and decided somewhere along the line we'd part company with the coach and the CEO, and it has been difficult. I get up quite early in the morning and I got up one morning and turned the phone on. It said you have one new message received at 4am this morning. So I listened to the message thinking something terrible has happened to my mum. And it was one of the footballers who’s not now with a Melbourne club but doing quite well with the Brisbane Lions. All you could hear in the background was sort of dud-dud-dud-dud-dud-dud-da. ‘Paul, Paul, it's me, it's me. Listen, I'm out having a drink. I know you live in Brighton. The party's here, why don't you come and join us?’ This is during the football season, Thursday morning.

So I waited until about 5.30 in the morning, rang him at home and I get this ‘Hello’. I said, ‘G'day’ - let's use the name ‘Travis’ for the sake of ease. I say, ‘Travis, look it's Paul. I'm sorry I couldn't come to the party but if you're still awake I'll come around and talk to you.’ He said, ‘Oh, did I ring you?’ He apparently has another friend called Paul in Brighton. So we had at 6am in the morning a very strong discussion about my view on drinking while at training and the fact that I was the chairman, and he left us not long after. That was an anxious moment for him.

What it shows, I think the real anxiety for a leader, for me anyway, is when you see things have to change that others don't necessarily see. That really causes me a great deal of anxiety.

QUESTION: How do you deal with people you don't respect in your organisation? How do you drive down the passion? How do you keep the enthusiasm to those who are not on side?

ELIZABETH HARMAN: In terms of people whom I have not got great respect for, in terms of whether they aren't committed or they have poor values or whatever the issue is, I don't hide it very well and I do have people around me who moderate my behaviour, which is great.

We all need to look at what it is that you're not respecting and see if we can't work together in terms of trying to change behaviours. Sometimes I do let people go and we sit there and have a discussion about what is not working for them in the organisation and what is not working for us. So a decision has to be taken at some point.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: John, how do you make sure that you don't approach work colleagues as a psychiatrist would, which is really not your brief, is it?

JOHN DENTON: Well, I certainly don't approach them as a psychiatrist. But I do actually have, and I think it is something that I didn't realise was so important, I do actually have a real interest in the human condition, how people interact. I think that is a critical piece of dealing in an organisation. People sometimes call it politics or they call it managing by Maurice Byers or all sorts of things but in the end for me it is really about the human condition.

And one of the tragic sort of leanings I have, and unfortunately having spent a long time in the cold in Moscow, I became a devotee of Tolstoy. And if there's a lesson or a learning that Tolstoy was one of the great tellers and recounters of the human condition, and it is a terrible thing that he discerned, which is that in the end the fundamental failing of the human condition is that all men are weak. And it is actually that weakness that is part of that organisation, it is built into the DNA that as a leader you have got to see and you have got to push. It is within all of us as well. That's part of it. I must say I am really interested in the anxiety issue as well. I like a bit of anxiety.

QUESTION: In times of resilient leadership, where there is a lot of pressure on all leaders in organisations, how do you actually balance your work/life equation?

PAUL GARDNER: It's very difficult and I think the sad thing for me was the realisation that your families suffer. Even now they're suffering while I'm here. You do things. And I think what starts out to be altruistic - this will be great, I've always barracked for Melbourne, I love Melbourne, I want to help them - it actually becomes quite selfish and it takes you a long time to realise that. It took me a long time to realise that. And then I worried about who will take over.

So I think you balance things, you do things because you think it makes you a rounded person and for a while it does I think. But after that there is definitely a use-by date, there is no shadow of a doubt, where you can say I am just doing this for purely selfish reasons, I should move across and let somebody else do it.

I fully subscribe to the company director's view for the length of term for directors, for chairmen. I think that should be enforceable by law. We are talking about group of leaders here, if you hire them, let them lead, move out of the way, let someone else have a turn.

OWEN HEGARTY: I was going to say this business of balancing work and home is very difficult, somewhere between very difficult and impossible in fact. And very few business executives go to their grave saying I wish I would have spent more time at work.

You need 24/7, it's 365 a year. You have got to go very hard building the business particularly in times of adversity. It is very, very demanding. As Geoff Dixon said the other day his famous quote: This is 24 hours a day, this is 365 days a year, we have got planes and people in the air all of the time and I have got one of the few jobs in the world that just about everybody can do better than me, they reckon.

Anyway what you do need is a very supportive, understanding, cooperative family.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Have you done that, Owen? Did you take time out for your family?

OWEN HEGARTY: Never without the BlackBerry firmly to the ear type of thing.

ELIZABETH HARMAN: We can all say that the business, the company, the workplace needs us, but the reality is we all love it too. I think it becomes very seductive to say that I've got to be there all of the time. I do think that I'm dangerous at work if I don't get a break, if I don't have some family time. I make poorer decisions, I get too stressed, I get too intense. I need to back off a little bit.

But I am particularly lucky because when I did take up the position here at VU one of the deals that went in our household was that Frank said I'll retire if you bring in the pay cheque. So he now looks after me. Now that means that my home life/work life learning balance is a good one, it is working for both of us

JOHN DENTON: Can I just touch on the balance issue. I am kind of intrigued because I suppose I am in a relationship where both work. In fact I am privileged to be married to a showgirl, an Aussie icon. And my wife has a completely separate and one would say a brilliant career and we have three children and we kind of make it work. We still have childcare frenzy. We have all the kind of complications and yet neither of us can kind of stop wanting to keep doing what we're doing but the integration of the two, which might sound weird - I'm a lawyer, former diplomat married to a showgirl. It is unusual. But in a way there is like a symbiotic nature to it all. It actually does work. We don't make a lot of choices. We actually work our way through messes a lot.

NINOTSCHKA TITCHKOSKY: I was just going to say I did read that article and there was a great story in it. It was about this American banker, top of his field, came to speak to a group of people. And he said you know, you have got to think about life being like a four gas burner. There's work, there's family, there's friends and there's health. Now, to be a good banker you have got to turn off one of those burners. To be a great banker you have got to turn off two.

QUESTION: It is easy to manage in the good times and more difficult in the hard times. Are we destined to repeat these cycles forever so that the new leaders get a chance to put the notch on the belt. Or are we actually as a race of people ever going to be able to sit back and say we have learned from that and we now have the capabilities and the skills and the technology to actually predict some of these things and ease out of some of those peaks and troughs?

OWEN HEGARTY: In terms of the cycles and so on, I actually think that this time it's different. I think we're in for a long time of economic expansion, led by China, followed by India with every other developing nation around the world revving its engine to chip in from the edge of the green in terms of growth. So I think we are going to have that long-term growth. Bound to be humps and bumps and cycles along the way but the direction and the force are absolutely clear where it is coming from, where it is going to. It is textbook, unbridled economic growth on a scale never, ever seen before.

Anyway, having said all of that, in terms of preparation of your assets, you have got to get your assets prepared. In other words, your long-term thinkers, planners and investors. You have got to be, like everybody else, be in the bottom quartile of cash/cost producers. So you have got to have good, quality competitive assets. You must have that, good times, bad times or what have you. And in this environment, with particularly the people factor, the growth factor, the scramble, the snatch and grab for resources factor going on out there, you have got to consolidate. Which is exactly what we have done at Oxiana and Zinifex, put the two companies together and that gives us such a greater power in terms of market power, in terms of financial strength and in terms of people strength and availability to be able to take on the competition out there for the next 20 years.

ELIZABETH HARMAN: David Morgan the former head of Westpac is an interesting example of someone who has learned. Who absolutely learned about having been there when the bank nearly fell over, and I watch him with a huge amount of interest. I have got a lot of respect for David Morgan because he came out with treasury and was there when it just about fell over and absolutely came out with some total convictions about where the bank must never go again. And he pulled it off. I mean, he really did. I think it is a hugely important story in Australian business life actually.

QUESTION: You have given us wonderful stories about your own resilience as leaders but what I'd like to hear you talk about is the kind of work you have done to build resilience in the people in your organisations and, through doing that, building resilience into your organisations.

JOHN DENTON: I try to encourage people to grapple with uncertainty and doubt. We talk a lot about this. I am delighted to hear the way in which Owen talks with certainty about where the world will go, because I actually know in an organisation you need to put out a clear plan, a clear direction. But it's all shrouded in a lot of uncertainty as well. And getting our people, particularly the leadership team of the organisation, to embrace the fact that doubt, uncertainty, compromise, these are not weaknesses, these can actually be strengths is a way of building resilience in an organisation.

There are lots of surprises out there for all of us all the time and that will have a direct impact on certain elements of geostrategic theory which might impact upon the price of the dollar. So there are lots of things that will change. But over a period of time there will be that level of consistency I think that Owen was talking about, the economic conditions. Things are kind of improving as globalisation kicks in, as open markets keep pushing on. But there are so many things that we didn't have to deal with before that actually require us to think and push the organisation

ELIZABETH HARMAN: In our case building the resilience in the organisation follows some of the comments that have already been made around sharing the challenges and sharing and developing the vision. But part of it I think we have also embraced recently is to actually work with every one of the 3500 staff in terms of what innovative things they have been doing which contributes to how we're going forward. So we're building both a digital database and some documents that we can hand around which are the 10 best examples and the hundred best examples of things that are going on and have been going on throughout the organisation but unshared. So it is no longer just my vision or the senior team's vision, it is what is happening out there

Many organisations in Australia have got an aged work force. And I am watching the X generation, some of our younger managers, but the Y generation entering the work force now. There is a lot of discussion in the literature about whether people born between 1980 and just over 2000 or 2005, the Y generation, are in fact resilient, because those of us who were what was called helicopter parents tended to look after them so much, we looked over their shoulder, we've been helping them. They're seen as very bright, inventive but technologically savvy. How resilient are they?

We might believe that we could invent leadership on the basis of the past but I am not sure the generations coming behind us have got the same experience and will treat it the same way or with the same skills. They are going to have to invent leadership themselves.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Top tips for people to take away? Owen.

OWEN HEGARTY: Very quickly three quotes. John Paul Getty, Secret to Success: ‘Get up early, work hard, find oil.’

I will only make it two quotes. Indira Gandhi, who said, well I think it was actually her grandfather who said it but she was telling the story, ‘There are two types of people in this world. Those who do the work and those who take the credit. The idea is to be in the first group because there is less competition there.’

NINOTSCHKA TITCHKOSKY: See the opportunity in difficult times. It is actually a great opportunity to reengineer certain things that you have become complacent about, and I think if you can see the opportunity it can be very rewarding. And the other thing I was going to say was don't be afraid to admit where the situation truly stands with your people and don't be afraid to ask.

JOHN DENTON: Two. Doubt is good. And the second to pick up the Gandhi theme, but perhaps this time Mahatma: ‘Be the change that you want to see.’

ELIZABETH HARMAN: For me I think that I had to learn to listen to people around me. And I make much better decisions, I know I do, and we do when we do it as a team. It is always a different decision from what I might have made originally. So I have learnt I have to have the humility to actually listen.

PAUL GARDNER: I've lifted a quote which is quote by Napoleon, which says: ‘Ability is of little consequence without opportunity.’

And I think if you are genuine leader and you spend your time nurturing leaders and finding leaders, then you let them lead. They'll make mistakes but we all make mistakes.

GERALDINE DOOGUE: Mine isn't a quote but it is what I have watched, particularly in hard times. My general manager is an historian by training, who is currently leading Radio National. And she brings people together often to explain very difficult things that are facing us, and she traces the history. She is extremely skilled at it. I have learned such a lot from watching her and I realise I have never been exposed to it before really. She just goes and says now we began here and then we moved to there and to there and to there. And you end with this beautiful description. I urge you to think about doing it because we have all got short memories, we all think we are in the middle of a crisis and she just traces where we have come it invariably holds the key to a lot more optimism than you might imagine.