‘I don’t need to bang the table’: Brady’s velvet glove smashes glass ceiling at Telstra

Vicki Brady’s appointment as Telstra’s next chief executive is corporate Australia’s #methree moment. She joins Macquarie Group’s Shemara Wikramanayake and Woodside boss Meg O’Neill sharing the rarefied air of women that govern Australia’s top 20 businesses.

If one includes Fortescue’s chief executive Elizabeth Gaines, who is in the process of stepping down from her role, there will be never-before-seen 20 per cent of women at the apex of Australia’s most elite companies.

It is a sad indictment that this is what counts as progress, but it is interesting that all will be running organisations in the male-dominated sectors of finance, resources and telecommunications.

Telstra’s chief executive-elect Vicki Brady.

And Brady has a message for female executive aspirants - you don’t have to mould your management style on the male bosses who traditionally served as your role models. These women usher in a new strategy to smash the glass ceiling using a velvet glove.

“I don’t need to be aggressive, I don’t need to yell, (and) I don’t need to bang the table,” Brady told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

The history of gender inside corporate ranks suggests that until recently the small number of women that made it to the top over the past 20 years often tended to parrot the style of more aggressive male executives.

They also had limited form in advancing the interests of other women inside the organisation despite expectations to the contrary.

Brady says she has a strong focus on diversity and now has a megaphone or as she describes it - “a louder voice in the conversation”.

Brady, who landed at Telstra six years ago, having missed out on the top job at rival Optus, has been groomed for several years to be in contention to take over from the outgoing chief executive Andy Penn.

While Telstra chairman John Mullen said a global, local and internal search was conducted for the job, most in the industry believed that Brady has been viewed as the heir apparent.

She played a major architectural role in Telstra’s two large strategic overhauls - necessitated by the need to reshape the business after losing $3 billion in earnings thanks to the creation of the NBN.

Brady arguably faces a far greater challenge than those of her fellow female chief executives. Telstra has what it calls a roadmap - Brady needs to ensure her GPS remains switched on and that she is able to adapt to rapid changes in the digital landscape.

She says she will break the template of chief executives she has observed in her formative years. “Senior leaders were largely men who had a certain style of operating back then ... it was a loud voice, a more aggressive style,” Brady says. [These were] characteristics that maybe didn’t resonate with the way strong female leaders tend to lead and operate.

“In early moments in my career I thought that that is the way I have got to be and it took me a while to work out that diversity is good … what I bring to the table is something different.”

She believes that as more women join the table at senior levels the definition of what it takes to be a senior leader starts to change in people’s minds and this will play a role in the acceptance and understanding of what women bring to management.

“No, [I] definitely wouldn’t characterise myself as loud and aggressive but can guarantee my team will tell you they know when I disagree, or am not happy or we are not delivering to the level we need to,” Brady says.

“I can absolutely be decisive, I can be tough on people - you have to be to get the right outcomes at times.”

For Brady, who has two children and a stay at home husband, leading one of Australia’s largest and most important companies is a long way from growing up in the Riverina hamlet of Holbrook.

She acknowledges the strong influence of her grandmother, who she says put great value on education and encouraged her to follow her dreams. Having watched her father run his small business in Holbrook, Brady says that from an early age she knew she wanted to be in business.

Running a business capitalised at $46 billion has outpaced those dreams.

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