A straight shooter from Queensland with a talent for turnarounds, Amanda Lacaze became CEO and MD of the troubled miner Lynas Corporation (‘Lynas’) when financial ruin was imminent. 18 months later, her expertise in marketing, pricing and internal operations has pulled Lynas back from the brink.
A mother of three who didn’t think twice about combining business travel with breastfeeding, Amanda previously led change management in industries as diverse as telecommunications and manufacturing. Known for taking a clear position whether she’s talking female quotas or her company’s future, Amanda gets results – hardhats required.
In this edited extract from Women of Influence, she speaks to Gillian Fox about the four attributes she believes are essential for female leaders, how to plan a career, and the trade-offs that come with, “having it all”.
Amanda, tell us a bit about your fascinating career.
I haven’t built a whole career doing turnarounds. I spent a lot of my time in large, stable businesses. I have a really solid corporate foundation.
For the first half of my career, I worked in large corporates. I worked for Nestlé, I worked for ICI, which is now Orica, I worked for Telstra. They were all big, highly profitable, market-leading companies.
I’ve done 4 turnarounds, 3 in telecommunications and this one in mining. The corporate disciplines that I learnt early in my career are still relevant, with an increased focus on urgency. But no matter what the business is, you’re always dealing with change.
Telstra, for example, is where I learnt a lot of the skills that I apply to achieve effective change management. People talk technology change today; I worked at Telstra when it went from being Telecom to Telstra: the first two phases of deregulation of the market, the first two phases of privatisation. It went from being a government department of 90,000 people to a public company of 50,000 people.
Good leaders tend to have qualities in common. Which attributes do you think are indispensable for up-and-coming female talent?
I think there are four things exceptional leaders have in common.
Firstly, you do need to have the right skills. If you think about a sporting analogy, there is no use being able to run really fast but having lousy hand/ eye coordination if you’re trying to play golf. It helps to be smart, to be able to work swiftly and to synthesise information quickly.
Secondly, is that you need to work hard. I sometimes look at these TV shows, things like Suits, for example, and they swan through life, have long lunches, bark a few orders at some willing underlings, and every now and then they do a deal. It seems to take a nanosecond, there’s never any real issue with it, and it’s all done.
I worry about our young graduates entering business thinking that is what life’s like. It’s not. As a CEO, I work hard. I work hard every single day. I do not have long lunches. I don’t drink red wine for 3 hours in the middle of the day. I don’t do any of those things. It’s my ethos that as I’m paid the most out of anyone in our company, I should add the most value and work the hardest.
The third thing, which is probably the most important, is you need to engage with the workforce. In any company, but particularly in a turnaround, I need people doing their very best work every day. No matter how smart or how hard I work, I cannot do as much as getting our 750 employees to do their best work every day.
The fourth thing is people need to have fun. Winning is always having fun. It’s no fun if you’re losing. You ask anybody in a losing footy team. Winning is really important. When you look at surveys about employers of choice, it’s not that they’ve got beanbags in their breakout rooms, pool tables or anything like that. They’re all successful companies. What drives people is that their effort is valuable and delivers a good outcome.
You can’t always win the war in the first foray. You have to win some battles along the way, and you have to celebrate them. When people are winning, when they’re achieving, they can climb mountains. When they’re not, a speed bump looks insurmountable.
How can young female executives apply the principles you use in leadership, regardless of the industry they’re in?
Everyone comes to work wanting to do a good job. The task of leadership is crystallising what that means for each employee. People will give you their best effort. But in the absence of your telling them what you need them to do, they’ll do their best, but it might be the wrong thing.
So the task of leadership – sometimes this is hard – is working out the things that you really have to do. It’s never difficult to come up with 20 to 40 good ideas, but you can’t execute 40 good ideas successfully at the same time. Organisationally, you can execute about 5 at a time and that’s it.
The task of leadership is to crystallise and identify the right five things, then to ensure that everyone in the organisation knows what they are and to make sure they have the skills to do what’s required. If they choose not to do it, then you’ve got another conversation. But I say to my team, “Our job is making sure that everyone knows what we need them to do, how we need them to do it, then measure them on doing it.” If you do that, people are really going to do their best work.
Do you think planning a career journey early will eventually enable emerging women to enhance their worth?
I worked out when I was 22 that I wanted to be a CEO. I was really fortunate. I had a smorgasbord of options available to me. You’ll laugh about this, but some of my music teachers even wanted me to be a concert pianist.
By the time I left school, smart girls were allowed to be doctors or lawyers. We came after the smart girls who only got to be nurses or teachers – we had a bit more variety. I had lots of opportunities but I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I grew up in Queensland, so I graduated when I was 19. I left for university and thought, ‘So now what?’
I fell into a corporate sales role to start with. That’s where I really learnt that I wanted to be a marketer and ultimately CEO.
Amanda, you set very high standards for yourself and your workforce. What’s your view on the obsession with achieving work/life balance?
I’m going to say something that people generally don’t like when I say it. As a CEO, your work/life balance is not my problem. My job is to run a successful business, to provide a return to shareholders, to service our debt and to keep paying the people who work in the business. Your work/life balance is your issue.
The only time it becomes my issue is if it affects the performance of the company. Therefore it may be that it makes sense for me to create flexible working arrangements for you, but only if there is reciprocal value. I remember this very clearly in one company I was running. Two of my direct reports wanted to work part-time; both very good: one male, one female. Absolutely I accommodated that, because they were both really valuable members of the team.
I had a slightly more junior bloke who wanted to work from home. Now, I had trouble getting him to work when he was at work, much less if he was at home. So I didn’t accommodate that. You have to be valuable to the organisation; you have to be adding value.
Finally, looking back over all your different roles and experiences from where you stand now, what can you tell young women who are at the start of it all?
In your 20s, it’s not worth agonising too much over which job you take. Wherever you are, you will learn something. You might learn you never want to do this job again, but it’s valuable to learn that.
In your 30s, you need to be much more careful about your choices, because the world tends to categorise you according to what you did in your thirties.
In my 30s, I worked in IT, which is why for so long I’m described as an ‘IT Executive’, even though I’ve probably worked as much in manufacturing industries as in IT. You tend to get classified.
At the stage where the pyramid starts to get a bit pointier, in the 30s is where you need to make your really serious decisions about what you’re prepared to trade off to take the next step.
The 40s are very much about consolidation and taking those final steps.
I would also tell young women to think very carefully about what will really make them happiest.
When I was young I bought the concept that ‘you can have it all.’ The reality is, every choice comes with tradeoffs and there are times in your life where you can prioritise your career and other times where you need to prioritise other parts of your life e.g. your family. My experience is that when women make these choices deliberately, they are more satisfied and happier then when they allow the choice to happen by accident, or worse, have it forced.
Women’s Agenda readers can download an exclusive preview of Woman of Influence ahead of the official launch of the book on May 17, 2016. To download your exclusive preview, simply visit here.
Check out more from this series:
Tracey Fellows on why leadership is like love.
Marina Go on going from magazine editor at 23 to CEO and board chair
Dr Simon Ryan on why the scramble to the top is making us sick.