Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz: why there’s no playbook for the pandemic

Australian museum chief executive Kim McKay sat down with Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz, CEO of Mirvac.

Mirvac chief executive Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz sees herself as the chief storyteller or chief cheerleader. Picture: Nick Cubbin

They are role models for women in corporate Australia, but these leaders are also keen to learn from their peers. The Deal paired eight high-profile executives, founders and directors and asked them to probe the secrets of success. They took it from there.

KIM McKAY: What have you learnt about leadership during COVID?
SUSAN LLOYD-HURWITZ: I think when there’s no playbook and things are emergent, and nobody knows what to do, all you have are your values and set of principles that you can draw on to make the best decisions that you can with imperfect information. So, I’ve learnt that you need to have developed that muscle before you get into a crisis. Being in a crisis is not a good time to try to work out where your character is.

KM: What are the core values that have held your ship steady through the last year?
SLH: We have actually got a really deep and strong culture, with strong engagement, and we are drawing down on that  culture to get through this and for people to do the right thing. We’ve settled on principles of ­equity, doing the right thing by our customers, by our staff, by all our stakeholders, and that really strong, genuine heartfelt desire to be a force for good has guided us through things that were very, very opaque.
KM: At the museum, we’re all about being a force for good. We shut down the museum anyway (for redevelopment) before COVID struck so I didn’t  have the issue of the public to deal with, but certainly with our 300 staff, I did. They’re highly engaged and committed to doing good. Making them feel engaged while being at home was incredibly interesting.
SLH: (At Mirvac) we’ve seen each other’s children and pets and homes, different groups have formed, but in other ways there’s something missing. There’s something very palpable about you and me sitting here ­together physically that we wouldn’t get if we were doing this via Zoom.
KM:What I did with my staff is, I decided to write to them every day, and I wrote a note and I tried to make it not just about the facts, about operations and COVID, but about how I was experiencing things, and it’s actually allowed them to get to know me a lot better. So when I’ve been running into people in the corridor for the first time in months, it’s like they think that they know me really well, which is great. It’s that trust between us, isn’t it?

Kim McKay. Picture: Nick Cubbin

SLH: One of my favourite things I’ve done during the period is I convened “wine, women and wisdom” on a Thursday afternoon for the senior women of Mirvac, and anybody who’s around just drops in with their glass of wine or their gin and tonic, or whatever they were having. And I feel like I created a group of women friends in a way that we never would’ve connected in just a corporate environment.
KM: We’ve been really trying to increase the number of women in the senior roles. And I’m the first woman in 190 years to run the museum, so it took them a while. But now I’ve got equal numbers on the senior executive of men and women, and they’re all terrific, but we really do need to increase women in the next tier down.
SLH: It’s a constant thing you have to be vigilant around: equal pay, equal promotions, making sure you’ve got (gender balanced) panels of people who are interviewing. There’s just a thousand things that you need to do to influence that agenda and there’s no silver bullet.

KM: What are the tips you’d like to pass on to young women who are aiming for the top? Study geography?
SLH: I studied geography, yes. It’s an excellent thing to study. A bit useless when it comes to actually finding a job but a very interesting thing to study. I think, particularly at this time, I recognise how hard this is for young people in this current environment, because all of the incidental learning that happens in a workplace, that’s gone. All of the just hanging around, working out how organisations function with unwritten rules, is gone. I look at my own daughter. She went to Stanford in September, by March she’s back in her bedroom in Sydney. Campus is closed so it’s very, very tough for young people. So, I would say to young people the resilience is probably the key thing you can bring to your life right now. Find another way to do the things that you are missing, and find another path through. I never had an ambition to be a CEO, it was never something I set out to be. I always was interested in doing the thing that was interesting next, and was challenging and putting myself inside organisations that would give responsibility to young people if they wanted to take it. I give Lendlease an enormous amount of credit for the early years I worked there, and their philosophy around giving people almost ludicrously large jobs and then supporting them through that. So, find the right organisation that will allow you to be heard and be promoted and to bring your whole self to work. Somewhere that values your whole human being and not just the worker in you, is a place that you should find to work.

KM: You went to David Higgins, the then CEO of Lendlease and said: “I want to go and study at INSEAD” (graduate business school in Paris).
SLH: I did. I found my education was woefully incomplete when it came to economics and business and finance and accounting and people management, so I thought, “INSEAD is exactly what I need”. Got in and then worked out I couldn’t pay for it. So I went to David Higgins and said, “Could I please have 80,000 francs — I promise I’ll come back”, and he said yes. And it was a transformative year. I met my husband there. My lifelong friends, people I lived with there, and it gave me the tools I needed to take the next step in my career.

‘I see myself sometimes as the chief storyteller or the chief cheerleader. It is all about the people and understanding where they’re at ... if you don’t acknowledge the human stories behind the people, you’re not creating an environment where they can be their whole selves’

— Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz

KM: Do you think women still find it difficult to admit they are ­ambitious?
SLH: It’s part of that conundrum that Sheryl Sandberg called out about power and likeability being positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women. And if you hear the insult or the putdown behind “she’s very ambitious” — that’s a negative. The same behaviour in a man would usually be assertive or leader-like, so it’s very hard to thread that needle of power and likeability. I guess, the only way you can do it is to be your authentic self. And to find a style of leadership that does work, and for me that’s servant leadership. That’s only one style; there are lots of ways you can do it, but it is a constant challenge to help women hold their power in a way that’s meaningful to them and gives them the greatest impact.

KM: You know, the authentic self mantra I guess that is around.You don’t need to be anybody else and let people know who you are and just project that.
SLH: People can sniff inauthenticity a mile away. It doesn’t ring true and if you can’t find a style of leadership that accords with you, you’re never going to have a strong leadership shadow because it’s inauthentic and people can’t handle that.
KM: And I think it’s really important to admit your mistakes, be as vulnerable as you can. COVID has highlighted that for me. People almost trust you more I think if they can see that you do make mistakes, too. You’re not perfect.
SLH: Absolutely. I remember one time, very early on, we tried to even up the expenses policy because some teams were having drinks and lunches and other teams weren’t, and it offended my sense of equity. So, we changed the policy. We put it out and we hadn’t thought it through, and all of a sudden, people were saying things like, “I’ve been working really hard. I think I’ll have a beer. No, wait … I shall have my one beer tomorrow”. They started making jokes about it because it was not thought through. So, I pulled it and I sent an email to the entire company saying, “I haven’t thought this through properly. I’ve rescinded it. We’ll do a better job next time”. And it was really early on in my tenure as a CEO and it really set a tone: you own up to your mistakes; you acknowledge them and fix them.

KM: Do you think things are changing for young women around childcare and the glass ceiling?
SLH: I think it is slowly changing. One piece of advice for young women is to find a company with good parental leave that will support you through those years. Because those early years are very, very challenging. You need to be in an environment that will be supportive. At Mirvac we have a 100 per cent return rate from parental leave. We’ve got more and more men taking parental leave.

KM: I always say most of the issues I deal with are about people.
SLH: Absolutely. I see myself sometimes as the chief storyteller or the chief cheerleader. It is all about the people and understanding where they’re at. So many people bring so much pain to work with them every day, and if you don’t acknowledge the human stories behind the people, you’re not creating an environment where they can be their whole selves. COVID has really shone a spotlight on that: the vulnerabilities of people in this environment and our duty to really, deeply, genuinely care for them.

KM: What’s the worst thing that happened to you in your career and what did you learn from it?
SLH: I think one of the most challenging times I had was when I was in San Francisco. I was working with two people and their sense of ethics were in a different realm, and I was very young. It was my first general management job and I was really grappling with understanding that not everybody sees the world like I do and how, as a young female, do I work with two very established people who see the world in a very different way than I do, and what effective styles can I use? I found it very, very challenging to learn a method that would be effective, and in the end I don’t think I was terribly effective but I certainly learnt a lot from that.

KM: Did you learn to stick to your guns?
SLH: I did and I think there were times when I let things slide that I shouldn’t have, because I didn’t in that moment do what I knew was right. I was learning how to hold that and be effective in that and do the right thing, even when the personal cost would be high.

K M: Which is probably the best advice you could give anybody.
SLH: But it’s complex and nuanced. We try and think at Mirvac about an ethical scale to help people make those decisions, because many of the areas are grey. There isn’t one right answer for many things that we have to grapple with. We’ve done some robust training around what ­questions should you be asking yourself to get to the right answer. Simple questions like, “Would I like what I’m about to do to be on the front page of the newspaper?” “Am I willing for the spotlight to be shone on this — yes or no?” If no, question why. So, try to give people some tools where there are no hard-and-fast answers to many of the questions we’re ­grappling with.

KM: Are you going to adjust your COVID policies in the ­future?
SLH: We already had 75 per cent of people on flexible working ­arrangements before and so we were well equipped to shift over the weekend of March 13. I will never forget that weekend. One minute we were talking about rotating floors and then the next minute we were like, “No, everybody out — everybody who can, go home”. We were one of the first corporates in Australia to do that and by Monday morning the whole company was operational remotely.
KM: The museum is the sort of place where you mostly have to be there if you’re a scientific researcher or if you’re dealing with the public face to face. But within a week from that date we had equipped all of our staff with the technology and the facilities to be able to work from home. It was a brilliant, very quick turnaround.