Today's episode is another my favorite Tip episode where I go back to interviews from the past and I dig out the thing that was my favorite tip, like the thing that I got out of the interview that really impacted or resonated with me. My extract on today's show is from my chat with Alison Watkins. So Allison is someone that I have admired for many years as really a very high profile female business leader in Australia. So Alison joined Coca Cola Amatal as Group Managing Director in
March twenty fourteen. Prior to Coca Cola Amatal, Allison was the CEO of Agribusiness Grain Corps and of Berry, the market leader in Australian juice, and she was also the Managing Director of Regional Banking at A and Z. Alison also spent ten years at McKinsey and Company and became a partner of the firm before moving to A and Z as the group General Manager of Strategy. Allison has also been a non executive director of A and ZED,
Woolworths and the Just Group quite the CV. So in this extract of my chat with Alison, we talk about how she thinks about receiving negative feedback. So as you can imagine, being a high profile leader and female business leader, she's received a lot of negative feedback over her career, and I was fascinated to hear about how she decides what to take on and what not to take on, and also what to do with the negative feedback that
she does listen to. So let's head on over to Alison, 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 told 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 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 if 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.
If it was in an organization or 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 some sort of some key moments along the way where that happen, 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 are a few formative things. I remember when I was at a and said we in the LSI, and that was.
One of the first sort of kind of leadership feedback.
Style feedback exercises i'd 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 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 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 and help me grow and be a bit of person.
That is it for today's show. If you want to listen to the full episode, I link to that in the show notes, so you might want to check that out. And if you are enjoying how I work, I would be so deeply grateful if you just take five seconds out of your date to leave a review in Apple Podcasts. It might be a star rating or a few words, and by doing so, it helps other people find the show and it also brings a huge smile to my face. So thank you to the hundreds of people that have
left reviews. It is so deeply appreciated. So that is it for today's show and I will see you next time.