Even bosses are having second thoughts about how they work

How board directors and CEOs are demanding more before they join.

Top executives are arguing they they can work from anywhere. Picture: Istock

Anna Whitlam is an executive recruitment expert with extensive experience in Australia and the region. She is CEO, People Advisory, Asia Pacific for the global CEO advisory firm, Teneo.

Your experience is that CEOs and board members are becoming somewhat picky about which roles they accept, which firm they work for. It’s the C-suite version of the Great Resignation. But why?

Part of it is around individuals, particularly the C-suite, wanting more of a choice, post Covid – which was quite a disruptive period. The desire to be working for an organisation that’s more purposeful or where they’re aligned more purposefully, has become even more important. So the trust gap is around whether an organisation is actually doing what it’s saying it’s doing and therefore can they work for them? Then there’s the reflection around, “well, we’ve proven we can work more flexibly, who says I can’t live on the Great Barrier Reef and sit in the group executive of an ASX-listed company and in actual fact, I’d like to be able to do that three days a week”. The other issue we’re faced with in Australia is that we pushed out a lot of international capability during Covid-19 so the supply of what organisations need, particularly at a C-suite level, is actually a lot lower than we need. We assume we can get anybody and attract anybody into our organisations, but that’s not necessarily the case. Teneo ­issued a survey to about 300 listed entities globally and found only 28 per cent of the CEO respondents had the right mix of capabilities for the world that we’re all moving into.

What’s happening in the C-suite?

There are learning gaps everywhere but it’s not been taken on board by organisations. The same people are going into the same roles, (yet) the skills that we need to run tomorrow’s companies are not the skills that we needed for yesterday’s companies. And if we really care about ESG and social impact, is a traditional CFO role fit for purpose to run ­tomorrow’s company? Very few of our clients talk about pipelining (talent) and when they pipeline they talk about people from like organisations going from like roles. I say to them all, why would you do what you’ve always done? We’ve never had a point in time where we’ve had so many messages and disruptive voices coming to us to say we can’t keep doing what we’ve done. It’s time to change the structure of organisations, it’s time to change the way that we set them up.

It’s strange that people are becoming more choosy, given that at one stage, I felt women would have done anything to get on a board.
Are attitudes changing in that cohort?

The greatest issue is that we haven’t actually invested enough in our pipelines to actually fit more ­senior women for those roles. So, despite the fact we’re enforcing certain (targets) to make sure that we’re balancing boards, we’re not actually investing at earlier levels. We have started seeing a lot of ­senior women choosing to step out of an executive career because of the demand for senior women on boards so they can then manage a better work/life balance, but they’re not necessarily experienced enough, they haven’t done enough in the executive world to then make them credible for the non-executive world.

You will find a lot of new names pop up (on boards) but sometimes it is just because the board needed another female. But women don’t want to be token (appointments). There is quite a strong disconnect across all of this.

Are companies becoming less trustworthy or are people just more demanding about trust?

People are becoming more demanding, there’s no doubt about that. You look at rising community ­expectations. There’s a need to feel you are connected to what your company is doing and that you are responsible for the decisions no matter what role you’re in.

Are boards, and the people doing the hiring, in sync with this or are you still working uphill?

When I am in a role and my success is tied to a particular incentive over a period of time, if I keep things quiet and comfortable during that period, it’s in my best interest, it’s human behaviour. So for me to invest in disruption that will create a better tomorrow – that will impact me personally, as the chief executive and as the chair. So what we’re not doing in Australia is taking risks to create a better tomorrow. We like to Band-Aid things by saying we’re going to meet, say, 2030 targets, and then we realise we’re so far from those targets because they require significant investment and change. We’re not actually getting to where we need to because the disruption is too hard. The agility in parts of APAC is totally different. I’ve just been in Hong Kong and Singapore and talking to multinationals across the region. They want to be disrupted because they’re used to being disrupted. There is investment in ­creating agile small businesses. For example, the Singapore government is very invested in its people and in small business and start-up culture. It’s so much easier to hire people, and they’ve got much bigger populations, so there’s much greater competition. In Australia we have to accept second best a lot of the time because it’s hard to find talent here. We don’t have the volume of population, it’s an expensive place to live.

Are we still not selling ourselves overseas?

You really have to sell (the idea of) living here. A lot of international capability has come back for personal reasons, for family, but they come back ­accepting their career is probably going to go backwards. I constantly say to people, you don’t have to come to Australia to end your life. There’s a very strong fear factor about what Australia can do now (after) we completely shut ourselves off from the rest of the world during Covid. Anybody who might have thought to come here (to care for) ageing parents, for example, are changing their minds because they don’t think they can get out if something goes wrong. Those people who were overseas and want to come back are not opting to work in Australia in the same way they may have (before the pandemic) because they just don’t believe they have career choices here.

Is this worse than it was three years ago?

It is actually worse but it’s always been bad. We’ve never been in a good position in that regard. Covid-19 brought that to the surface.

Are candidates asking you about the Indigenous voice to parliament?

I’ve not had anybody talk about the voice. There are deeper-set issues around how are we balancing our investment into things that matter versus profit. That’s actually the conversation. We talk about giving back and being more impactful within the communities in which we operate, but in actual fact profit still is number one. That’s the thing that is ­really bothering people. I’ve probably had one discussion around how committed an organisation is to the voice but that was in a mining and minerals context, which of course makes sense given the ­nature of the industry.