So she did have this fantastic piece of advice which was don't hide your light, which was as in under a bushel. What she meant by that was to challenge the paradigm that I certainly had at that time was the sort of if I do a really good job, I'll get noticed and I'll get ahead because I do
good work. That seemed like a pretty simple thing. But what I realized and McKinsey really helped me through this is that if you really want to make a difference in any kind of way, it's not enough to come up with a smart answer and be a good problem solver. If you, like you need to be able to persuade people. You need to be able to have them sit up and listen and take note and ultimately choose to do something different than what they were going to do otherwise.
And that's how you can really have impact.
Welcome to How I Work, a show about the tech used by the world's most successful people to get so much out of their day. I'm your host, Doctor Amantha. I'm an organizational psychologist, the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and I'm obsessed with finding ways to optimize my work day. Hey there, Before we get started on today's show, I just wanted to do a little call out for listener questions.
I'm wanting to experiment with a new format on the Tuesday episodes where I answer any questions that you, as a listener have on your mind about work and productivity and particularly this new world of work. So I'd love it if you could send me through anything that's on your mind. My email address is Amantha at Inventium dot com dot au and that's also in the show notes,
So I look forward to hearing from you. Okay, let's get on to today's qiest, who I'm very very excited about because I've wanted to have her on the show for quite some time and we were able to get connected through someone that we both know. So without further ado,
my guest today is Alison Watkins. Allison joined Coca Cola Amtal as Group Managing Director in March twenty fourteen, and before Coca Cola Amateur, Allison was the CEO of Agribusiness Grain Corp and of Barry, the market leader in Australian juice, and she was also the Managing director of Regional Banking at A and Z Allison spent ten years prior to that at McKinsey, and she became a partner over there before moving to A and ZED as group General Manager
of Strategy. Allison's also been a non executive director of A and ZED, Woolworth and the Just Group. So you'll see by her bio that she is an amazingly impressive and accomplished businesswoman and I was so keen to speak to her understand how has she done this and all while having four children as well. So we talk about all sorts of things in this conversation. We talk about
how her work has changed very dramatically since COVID. We talk about some of the best and worst career advice that she's been given what to do, and she receives negative feedback and as you can imagine, as a businesswoman in the public eye, she receives a lot of it from all sorts of places. And we talk about a whole bunch of other things. So on that note, let's head to Alison to hear about how she works. Alison, Welcome to the show.
Oh, it's a pleasure to be with you, Amantha.
I'm very excited to be chatting with you. One of these female business leaders that I've admired from AFAR for several years, and so when Scott Anthony, who we both know quite well, offered to do the introduction, I jumped on it. So I'm really excited to be chatting with you.
No, that's my pleasure now.
Something I have been starting a lot of interviews with given, certainly in Melbourne where six months into working from home and I imagine the way that you work since COVID struck has changed a lot. I am keen to know, like, what have been the biggest changes that you've had to make to how you work given this new working environment that we're in.
Yeah, very very very different. Couldn't be more different. When I think about how we carefully planned out my calendar for this year and then what's actually transpired, it couldn't be more different. And my job is based in Sydney, however I do actually live in Victoria, so that's added another little twist into the whole equation as well. So my normal routine actually was to commute backwards and forwards
from Victoria. We have a farm in southwest Victoria and so I would be on a flight on Friday afternoons and then coming back on Sunday, and that was my routine. It also included quite a lot of overseas travel. We've got markets Indonesia and New Zealand and then various other markets that I would visit and go to the US to visit shareholders, the UK, et cetera. So quite a lot of overseas travel, lots of social functions during the
week I was I didn't ever really try to cook myself. Yeah, and we've created a beautiful workspace here at Coca Cola place in Sydney with agile environments and you know, really I don't have an office, and it was all about collaboration and I was really loving our new office. So it's just completely it couldn't be more different now. So yeah, so I haven't been on a plane since March, which is pretty extraordinary. So yeah, my routine's very, very different.
I guess the upside is probably is not having to travel. It certainly gives me more time, and I've tried to sort of create new routines because I'm a creature of routine, and I'm also really trying to think about how I can create those interactions as well that I miss through not being in our office.
Well, I'd like to dig into a few of those things. And I can certainly relate on the travel front, not having been on a plane since March, and I don't think I do anywhere near as much flying as you, but i'd certainly been an airport probably about once a week, just for mostly domestic flights. And it's amazing the difference and how much time you get back into your life
when you strip out all of the plane travels. So I am keen to hear about what are some of the routines that you've developed now that you are working from home and not jet setting all over the place.
So I've had a few different blocks of time. I've had a block of time where I was actually working from our farm in southwest Victoria. So the first sort of stage of the law down to really sort of March, late March through till June, I was based at our farm, working from our farm, and then we had a period where I was able to come back to our office week on, week off. We have a team a team B thing, and then we've had the lockdowns again in
Victoria and I've been based up in Sydney exclusively. So it's looked a little bit different at each of those stages. But I've suppose the things that I've really tried to focus on making sure that I'm still exercising regularly and maintaining those disciplines. So I usually do something first thing in the morning. And even though I don't really like the rowing machine, that's what we had at the farm, So I sort of got myself into the rowing machine
a lot more than I would have otherwise. I'd always meant to get around to looking at some of those apps, apps like the Nike training app. That was a little apprehensive about whether that would work for me, but I actually got into that, so I sort of had to recreate how I exercised. I'm normally like to swim, but there wasn't a lot of swimming at the farm, so
that was certainly one thing. But just making sure I was exercising every day and maintaining that discipline, and then having a separate workplace or space, I should say, so I would disappear to work at you know, seven point thirty and then really reappear at the end of the day, and going for walking meetings on a farm. That was a very nice thing to be able to do, and I had a bit of fun sending pictures to my Indonesian colleagues of me talking to Kadir our Indonesian managing director,
with a group of curious cows following behind me. Yeah, so really recreating a different kind of routine. Now I'm back up here in Sydney. I can you know, Sydney feels very unrestricted, But since I've been up here, i'm kind of My husband is a fantastic cook, so when I was at the farm, I didn't I've just got incredibly well fed, another reason why I needed to exercise
pretty regularly. But now I've sort of made a little resolve to myself that I am not going to order food in I'm going to use this as an opportunity to improve my cooking skills. So I think it's probably lucky that I'm the only person who's actually eating what I'm cooking at the moment. But I am getting a little bit more self sufficient, so that's good.
How are you becoming a better cook?
Out of interest, I'm experimenting with a few different things. Actually, So while I decided I wasn't going to go to the Uber Eats style of ordering on I have tried out some of the services like Marley Spoon or Hello Fresh, those sorts of services where you do actually cook, but you have a lot of hand holding, and that's just been a really good learning exercise for me to see how that service actually works and what appeals about it. I have a rule which I've always admired my husband
for not observing the same rule. But my rule is that it shouldn't take any longer to cook it than it would take you to eat it. So therefore that is to limit my repertoire to about a twenty minute type preparation time. That's my sweet spot.
I love that rule. That's fantastic. Now you mentioned going on walking meetings around the farm, which just paints a beautiful picture. I can relate to that. I certainly do have quite a few zoom meetings or virtual meetings, but I try wherever possible to default to phone meetings. And if I've got a phone meeting, my rule is that I walk, so at the moment that's kind of doing laps of the house, so I don't have to be wearing a mask outside.
But what are your rules.
Of thumb as to whether something should be a video meeting or whether it can be a phone or let's say walking meeting.
Yeah, it's a really good question because I think I'm really conscious that it is often important to be able to actually see people and for them to see you. And I'm really conscious of being able to use those interactions where you're looking at someone, particularly someone that I don't interact with that often, to be able to see them.
And there might be somebody who's working on a project in our business and I know they're doing a lot of work behind the scenes, and if we're all in the office together, I might be able to wander around and ask them how it's going and sort of give them a bit of a pad on the back or
a thanks. So I think those interactions are not happening therefore, using you know, we use WebEx and Microsoft teams using those interactions in a virtual sense to just check in with somebody and make sure that they get drawn into the conversation and there's you know, I think those sorts of visual interactions, while they're in some ways they're certainly not a perfect substitute, they are a lot better than just a phone hook up where you just don't have
that same sort of awareness of who else is necessarily even on the phone. The walking meetings that I've found most successful, particularly where I mentioned our Indonesian managing director, Kidir, and he was going through a really, really tough time and he was quarantined himself for quite a period of the time, A tough time in the sense of it
was just really intense. The health situation in Indonesia has been very dire, and so making sure that we were keeping out people safe, continuing to serve our customers, and keeping our business going. It was just a really intense time, and I felt like I wanted to just talk to him or listen every day so that he knew he had our support. And so my role often was listening more than you know. I didn't need to be looking at slides or you know. And we knew each other.
We know each other incredibly well, so it didn't matter if we couldn't see each other as much. And I told him that Kid, I'm going to wherever possible these meetings, I'm going to be doing a walking meeting, and so he knew so, and he was very very happy about that. In fact, I think he quite liked hearing the birds and the cows, and my role was much more of listening and just really being there for him and supporting him. That's how I was feeling it.
Anyway, That's quite beautiful to hear about that, and just the amount of time that you invested in him, knowing that he was going through a tough time. I want to change tact. So something I'm curious about is I imagine, I mean, in the various high profile roles that you've had, you would have had to deliver a lot of bad news in all sorts of situations, whether that be to staff,
to shareholders, the market, and so forth. And certainly in the last six months, I imagine you've probably become quite well practiced at delivering news that you know is less than optimal and you know not where not where you know you perhaps thought things would be at the beginning of the year. And I want to know what's your strategy for delivering bad news? How do you kind of think about that and then consciously deliver that in the best way possible?
Well, yes, I mean I think the things I've learned probably the hard way, certainly to be upfront and not to wait or feel like you have to have all the answers, and so it's just better to be straightforward with people. I think it's also important to give hope, though, so even though you may not have all the answers as to what you're going to do or certainly in these last few months, I think trying to pretend that we knew how this was all going to play through
was fraud because we just didn't. But I think being able to point to the reasons to be optimistic is really is really confident to remind people of, for example, in our case, the strength of our business, the ability to outperform in times of adversity because of those strengths
that we have, those sorts of themes. And then I think also with bad news, and it depends on the kind of bad news, but certainly where for example, you might have tough news about somebody's job or somebody not being successful on something that they know, maybe to get
a job that they were hoping to get. Being empathetic and really trying to sort of mentally prepare yourself for a tough conversation by putting yourself in the shoes of the person receiving that information and trying to think about how you would feel and I certainly have been on the receiving end of plenty of tough conversations in my career and trying to visualize how I would want that message to be delivered, and think about then, as the deliverer,
how would I like that person to feel after the conversation. I find that a helpful device as well.
I think that's really useful, I think, and I certainly know for me, when I'm going into a tough conversation, naturally, you can just start to spend a lot of time thinking about what am I going to say, how much going to say, how am I going to phrase it, and you almost like ironically just forget about, well, hang on, how's the other person going to be feeling? And you can also forgets not quite the right word, but it kind of is like forget to listen because you're so
focused on doing your bit as well as possible. So I really like what you're saying around just it's simple, but it's actually sometimes not that natural to do, even
when you are an empathic person. I think. So I do really like that, And I guess like on the topic of you know, receiving bad news and negative feedback, I imagine you know, given how public your roles are and still are, that you've hold you you've probably received a lot of negative feedback from people you know over the course of your career, and what's your approach to to taking on board negative feedback and deciding even whether it's worthy of being applied or actioned.
I certainly used to be very very much I guess when I worked at McKinsey for a few years what we used to describe as an insecure overachiever. So there was a level of insecurity that makes you, and certainly made me very very much somebody who wanted to please. And then as a result of that, you realize that by being in that mindset of I want to meet or exceed expectations, you are then very vulnerable to the
judgments of other people. And I never really sort of appreciated that until I went through some really good leadership development work, probably twenty years ago or so, and I realized that you really need to think about if you're exposing yourself to the judgment of others in that way, that is a it's really an untenable position because those people who pass judgment may actually not have particularly good judgment.
They may not be well informed. And as you go into more increasingly senior roles, there are lots of people with lots of different judgments, so it would become an impossible not that you would tie yourself into because you
just can't please everybody. So I think I've become a lot better at accepting that not everybody is going to agree with the choices that I make, or the things that I say, or the things that I do, And to think about the people that I care about and value their judgment the most because I think they are well placed to be wise or considered, and so therefore
their feedback is actually really important to me. And to try not to leave myself vulnerable to the judgments of the sort of broader, less informed people, but to accept that you will get that, And also to try to embrace a bit of a mindset of that there's something to learn in everything negative that you do here, and you know it may be, for example, that what we didn't could do a better job of communicating is this person they are speaking up. Sometimes that takes courage, in
if it was in an organizational setting. Somebody who criticizes a decision or a direction that can take a lot of courage, So you don't necessarily just want to ignore it or jump on it. You want to sort of reflect on it and say, well, is there something that
we should be learning from that? But to not allow yourself to be your own self worth to be a function of what other people are saying, unless they are that small number of people that you know whose opinion you really really consider is important.
And how did you get to that point of being able to actually not let all negative feedback get to you and take that personally like where there's some sort of some key moments along the way where that happened, or strategies that you use, because I think that's really sensible, you know, really picking and choosing who you do actually
listen to, so to speak with negative feedback. But it can be really hard to distance yourself from negative feedback even when you know that it's not, you know, worth listening to, so to speak.
I think there were a few formative things. I remember when I was at A and Z we did the LSI and that was one of the first sort of kind of leadership feedback leader and style feedback exercises I've been through. So I sat down with the facilitator and she showed me that my team had rated me quite strongly on the various leadership attributes, but I rated myself much less strongly, and I was secretly thinking that's a
good thing because it shows that I'm modest. I'm not somebody who bignotes themselves and ticks the extremely you know, very strongly agree boxes. I don't have a big ego,
was how I saw it. She really explained to me though, that actually that was a negative thing that I had this sort of minimalist view of myself, because it meant that I wouldn't be I wouldn't be sort of strong enough, assertive enough, demanding enough in context for example, where I needed to set my team up for success and make sure we had the resources we needed or we didn't get sort of pushed into targets that were impossible, that you know, I needed to be able to be as
stronger and assertive as a leader. And that really made me reflect on, yes, that sort of perception that I
had of myself. And then I'd say, another piece of leadership development work that I did back in the early days, again with John McFarlane at A and Z, was really about this idea of everything that happens to you, to embrace accountability for yourself and instead of blaming others or blaming externalities or the weather or COVID nineteen or whatever you want to blame, or you know, somebody who made
a stupid decision before you joined, to take responsibility. To have a mindset of taking responsibility for everything that happens to you, even the things that are negative things, and to ask why was that thing sent to me, Why did that happen, what was it sent to teach me? And to really try to take that mindset of I'm in control. I may not be in control of everything that happens to me, but I can control my reactions. I can choose how to respond. I have choices in
this situation, and there's something to learn from it. And so that has been a really important mindset for me in making sure I never allow myself or try not to allow myself to feel like a victim, because I
think then you're disempowered when you feel that way. And I think the final thing which I have found really helpful to think about is to think about the five people that you are surrounding yourself with, the five people who have the most that you spend the most time with and really ask yourself, are those people that I will learn from and who can help me grow and be a better person.
They're really interesting experiences. And I think what you mentioned around that first experience at A and Z with the LSI assessment and kind of seeing yourself as I think smaller was the word that you use than your team.
I don't know if this relates to you know, when I was doing research for this interview, I read that you said that one of the earliest pieces of advice he received from Diane Grady was to not hide your light, which I found really interesting and I'm wondering if you can explain what she meant by this and how you applied it.
Yeah, Diane was I think she was the first female partner at McKinsey, and she was based in the Australian office, and she was, you know, and still is a fantastic leader. So she did have this fantastic piece of advice which was don't hide your light, which was as in under a bushel. What she meant by that was to challenge the paradigm that I certainly had at that time was the sort of if I do a really good job, I'll get noticed and I'll get ahead because I do
good work. That seemed like a pretty simple thing. But what I realized and McKinsey really helped me through this is that if you really want to make a difference in any kind of way, it's not enough to come up with a smart answer and be a good problem solver. If you like you need to be able to persuade people. You need to be able to have them sit up and listen and take note and ultimately choose to do something different than what they were going to do otherwise.
And that's how you can really have impact. So this whole idea of not hiding your light, I never sort of saw that as needing meaning you need to kind of self promote. It was much more a call to action to me, to say, you need to really think about how you're actually making a difference, whether it was as an advisor or in an organization. It's just not enough to have the right answers. The only way you have impact is through being able to persuade people. And
that means speaking up when it's uncomfortable. That means saying what you think and why, and it means not falling in line with everybody else, it means challenging and having those more uncomfortable conversations. So that was a really important thing for me.
Yeah, I think that's interesting around influence and persuasion, and it's clearly I mean, to get to where you are, I would think that you would need to be very
skilled at that. And I'm wondering what are the strategies that have served you best when you're thinking about influence and persuasion, because I guess one that comes to mind for me when I think about you and I think about you, know, particularly when I was preparing for this interview and listening to interviews, watching interviews, reading interviews, and even my experience of you during this interview, is that you're very good at telling stories and bringing points to
life in kind of a visual and emotive kind of way. And I'm wondering, like, is that one of your main strategies for influencing and persuading and what else are you doing consciously to do that.
I do often think about how do I want people to feel? Because I believe, you know, for example, if I give a speech or you know, even an informal talk, or you know, if I'm in one of our businesses. I read somewhere once, and I think it's so true. People don't remember what you said, they do remember how they felt. So the idea of really sort of putting yourself in the shoes of the audience, if it was
a group or if it's an individual, thinking about that individual. So, as a CEO, you interact very briefly with lots of people, and that's a you know, I love love to be able to do that. And I remember well myself what it meant to see the CEO and to have some
brief interaction with them. So I am always thinking, this person may you know, they may not see me for another year, or they may you know, they may go home to their family and say, oh I saw Alison today and she ignored me, or she said get a to me in the lift and she asked what I was doing, or because I think, you know, if people have a sense of belonging, which you know, I'm in a unique position to be able to create that, you really really get so much satisfaction for them and so
much more positive energy in the organization that allows us to achieve our goals overall. So yeah, I think that's the main thing.
Now, we've got a few minutes left, and I want to finish with career advice, because I imagine you must have been given a lot of career advice over the years, some of it good, some of it bad, and I'm curious as to what's been the best career advice that's really served you, and equally what's been the worst. And I'm happy for you to start with worst or best, whatever works for you.
I would say probably the best advice has come from my family. So first of all, from my husband in really pushing me to apply for McKinsey and to really give that a go. Because I was working in a charted incounting firm. He was doing an MBA. He used to come home and talk about McKinsey and the other consulting firms. I thought it sounded fantastic, but you know, it was just a dream for me. I felt I
need to go off and do an MBA. He said, no, let's prepare for it together because he was also going through the same process, and I think you can do it, and so he really pushed me. Whereas I had that sort of yeah, shrinking view of myself, I suppose that I wouldn't possibly be able to be of any interest.
So that, I think really then helped me understand that if you set your mind to something, you can really surprise, surprise yourself and not to make assumptions about how good everybody else will be, and maybe you can just do a little bit better than you ever would have given yourself credit for. So I would say that was very very good advice. Poor advice. Look, I wouldn't say any advice is poor advice. It's all griss for the meal.
I suppose an opportunity for reflection, But I know I remember when I was joining Very Limited, which is a mid size was a mid sized independent juice company, the
market leader in Australian juice at the time. I had been at McKinsey and then at A and Z for a few years, and I asked a number of people who I respected their views on as to whether I should take this role on to become CEO of Berry, and a couple of my advisors said no, they didn't think I should because in their words, it wasn't sort of blue chip enough I think was the expression they used. They were concerned, I think that I might be going off into something that I wasn't probably going to be
with people that I might learn from as much. I didn't take that advice, So I don't think it was necessarily poor advice, because it certainly made me think about what was behind their advice and why were they saying that. But I ended up not taking that advice. So yeah, and I'm very glad because it turned out to be a wonderful experience.
And why didn't you take that advice? What within you kind of knew that that wasn't advice that was worth taking on board.
I have been quite clear that I wanted to get the P and L experience, the line management experience, and I've had some of that at A and Z. I was very fortunate there at A and Z to get
the chance to run one of the businesses. But running a business within a very large organization to a bank, I knew was different than being responsible for a mid size organization end to end and getting all of the range of functional experience, and so I was really passionate about getting that kind of P and L experience end to end running a complete business, and I knew that those opportunities were few and far between for someone of
my background. Because you don't normally get people who take a risk on you when you've got a particularly a consulting, very large organization background. And in dutchy As who was the chairman at the time, a very well respected agribusiness entrepreneur. I knew he was offering me quite a unique opportunity, and so I was really torn. But at the end of the day, I thought, no, look, I think I
want this experience. I really do want to have the chance to be responsible for a whole organization, and so I took it.
Amazing, amazing. Well, Alison, we are like just about out of time. So my final final question is for people that want to connect with you or know more about you or Coca Cola amateur and everything that you do, what is the best way for people to do that?
Well, certainly LinkedIn is a great way to connect and I would love to hear from anyone and continue the conversation.
Awesome, Alison, I've loved our chat. Thank you so much for your time. I can't even begin to imagine how busy you are, but thank you. It's just been awesome.
I've enjoyed it too. Thanks Samantha.
That is it for today's show. I hope you liked my chat with Alison. I just found her so down to earth and ironically very humble, even though that is obviously something that she has addressed through her own development feedback.
So look, if you know someone that might benefit from today's show, why not share it with them just using the little share icon wherever you listen to this podcast, And if you're enjoying How I Work, I would love it if you would take just a few seconds to leave a review in Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to this show. The more reviews thesier it becomes to find a show. And thank you to the hundreds of
people that have left reviews for How I Work. It is deeply, deeply appreciated to it for today's show and I will see you next time.