Welcome to a new era: Hudson ready to take the controls at Qantas

Newly appointed Qantas boss Vanessa Hudson has been involved with decisions that are not for the ‘faint hearted’. Now she must buckle up for one of Australia’s most high-profile corporate roles.

Former Qantas boss Geoff Dixon is full of praise for Hudson’s appointment.

When Qantas finally announced its new chief executive officer to replace Alan Joyce on Tuesday after 15 years at the helm, it was the notoriously humble chief financial officer, Vanessa Hudson, who was promoted to the top job.

Described by those who know her as a selfless leader, her low profile will be transformed in November when she takes on the nation’s most public and highly scrutinised corporate position.

After all, before Joyce became Qantas’s $80m CEO in designer suits, with perfect teeth and a reputation teetering close to self righteous, he was a humorous and self-deprecating aviation boffin seen at least once in sandals with socks.

Humility goes to the heart of great leadership, according to the head of global executive think tank The Leadership Circle, Mark Burrell, who says these kinds of leaders are consistently rated as decisive, visionary and purposeful, with a “connection to something bigger than the personality of the leader”.

“Leaders lacking humility are often invested in their own sense of rightness, although this can be hard for them to acknowledge,” says Burrell.

Newly appointed Qantas Group chief Vanessa Hudson.

“This kind of leadership has pay-offs to be sure, but the downside is the inability to take in disconfirming information (and) the tendency to create a culture of certainty and arrogance.”

Mind you, the job of running Qantas – which always seems to involve the CEO’s personal life becoming public spectacle – might just force people to jut their chins in the air and apply a dinosaur hide.

As former chief Geoff Dixon is want to say, the role certainly involves the glare of the spotlight.

“There always has been this public-ownership view of the airline despite the fact that it was privatised,” he says.

“Everybody has a view on Qantas, Everybody has almost a personal ownership.”

Qantas was privatised in 1997 and now for the first time in 103 years, the airline will have not only its first female chief executive – chosen from a field of two extremely strong female candidates – but also the first boss to have been promoted from the finance chief role.

Dixon beat former numbers man Gary Toomey for the top job back in 2000; and Joyce toppled former finance head Peter Gregg and airlines boss John Borghetti in 2008 to take the reins at the nation’s biggest airline.

An ex-Qantas colleague, Maxine Jaquet, who is now the CEO of listed pathology giant Healius, described Ms Hudson as an “extremely decent” person who tackled the near shutdown of the airline during Covid-19 very well.

During that period, Joyce axed 9000 jobs, something Hudson told The Australian “wasn’t for the faint hearted”.

Hudson’s small team was responsible for a $1.4bn equity raising at a time when investors were fleeing the crippled aviation sector and organised $4bn in borrowings, many of this secured against aircraft.

“Everyone’s got their spirit level and she has dealt with some pretty tough things,” says Jaquet.

“She is a talented, intelligent and highly capable executive, but what’s more, she is a humble and measured individual. She is the perfect person to lead such an iconic business that touches so many Australians. The fact that she is a woman is just a bonus.”

Jaquet agrees that females often face more hurdles to get to the top in corporate Australia, but says once they are there the job and the challenges are the same regardless of gender. “The hard bit is getting that appointment in the first place,” Jaquet says.

Former Qantas boss Geoff Dixon.

This is certainly borne out in the statistics with women leading only 14 companies in the ASX 200 by the end of 2022, according to a report by Chief Executive Women, which also reported 18 CEOs in the ASX 300.

It’s a disappointingly low figure for gender equity, but Australia is not alone in failing to even up the run rate.

In the UK, as of 2022 there were only nine female CEOs in the FTSE 100, and only 19 in the FTSE 350, according to British executive diversity group The Pipeline.

Lynas Rare Earths boss Amanda Lacaze says it should not have to be remarkable when women are appointed to lead major companies.

“However, the fact that it is serves as a reminder of the importance of organisations growing their internal pipeline of women executives,” Lacaze says.

“It was great to see that Qantas had two internal candidates who were women and I congratulate Vanessa on her appointment as CEO.”

Other recent female CEO appointments include Leah Weckert, who became CEO just this past week after holding several senior roles across the Coles Group.

At Qantas, Dixon points to the fact the airline had a female chair in Margaret Jackson when he was CEO and that Joyce was one of the first openly gay leaders of a major company in Australia.

Healius chief executive Maxine Jaquet.

“In the diversity stakes Qantas is right up there with one of the best companies in Australia,” Dixon says.

While diversity is “definitely important,” he adds, it’s not the most important thing.

“I think the most important thing is that Vanessa is highly competent,” Dixon says. “She’s got a really broad based skill set and has been in the trenches with them during the good times and the bad times. I think she is ideal.”

As for the fact that she is currently CFO, and the airline faces a massive $12bn to $20bn fleet hurdle in the next six years, Dixon doesn’t believe the talk that only a CFO could sort out the “hospital pass” that is funding these new aircraft.

“Vanessa has such a broad background in aviation,” Dixon says. “It’s close on 30 years in the same company and she has gone through so many different areas.”

Hudson has worked for Qantas since 1994, and worked for Dixon’s team when he ran customer service.

He credits her with playing a big role bringing Australian chef Neil Perry aboard to provide in-flight meals and eventually the menus in the airline’s first-class lounges.

Dixon says he also dealt with Hudson frequently when she ran the Americas for Qantas and he was chairman of Tourism Australia.

Lynas Rare Earths chief Amanda Lacaze. Picture: Bloomberg

There’s no doubt Hudson’s financial skills will need to come to the fore though.

There are certainly many who question whether Qantas has been deferring capital expenditure to boost profitability and boost the share price. Its other decision – while understandable – to write down the value of aircraft parked in the desert during Covid-19, has also given it an unusually depreciation expense-free period.

Three months ago, Qantas announced a record underlying half-year profit of $1.43bn and analysts expect a record full-year profit to follow as it benefits from the pent up demand for travel post-Covid, lower expenses, and a lag in competition following international border closures.

But beyond the full year, demand for travel is likely to normalise and at the same time, most competitors are likely to have returned.

She will also need to tackle Qantas’s 14 separate unions, with the Transport Workers Union saying it will be an “uphill” road to get the company back on track.

Dixon believes the unions have struggled to understand the company has to look after shareholders as well.

“That’s been the biggest issue I think that has faced Qantas for 20 years, the unions have just never accepted the fact that the airline is no longer government owned,” says Dixon. “There are a lot of other stakeholders involved.”

It may test Hudson’s notoriously even personality as she tries to deal with all the conflicting stakeholders at the nation’s most watched company.

The mother of two adult daughters, Hudson is a Qantas lifer, rising through the ranks over nearly three decades after graduating from the University of Technology Sydney with a business degree in 1991,

Close friend and former flatmate Robyn Howard remembers when Hudson, then an auditor with accounting giant Deloitte, got her first job at Qantas in 1994 as an internal audit supervisor.

“She was really chuffed about it,” says Howard. “She loves cars and she loves planes … she was very excited about it.”

Howard has no doubt she can manage constant shock syndrome that befits the aviation industry and tells a story of scuba diving in Mollymook when the weather turned and Hudson had to help the dive team come into shore amid a seemingly endless horizon of rips.

“She is just very calm and measured and always has time for everyone,” Howard says.

As for whether Hudson will need to a flak jacket to survive the constant professional and personal attention, Burrell says that if she maintains strong personal disciplines it will enable her “to process this constant pressure” in line with her values.

“Whether it’s their exercise routine, time for reflection, or contemplative practices, the best leaders have usually incorporated something along these lines into their sense of who they are,” says Burrell.

“The ability to withstand the slings and arrows and inevitable mistakes perhaps comes more down to these underlying practices than a thick hide.”