The Australian Financial Review numbers reassure business leaders so talking
numbers you know say you know these are the results you know and give numbers
don't give platitudes. I'm now allergic of all things to mammals I've got bitten
by a tick from up in the northern beaches so no more lamb for me. Hi I'm
Sally Patton editor of BOSS from the Australian Financial Review and welcome
to 15 minutes with the BOSS a podcast about success and failure and everything
in between and along the way we're hoping to get some great advice from our
leaders. My guest today is Allegra Spender a Minister of Parliament.
Allegra hello and thank you so much for coming in today. Thanks so much for
having me Sally. Now Allegra you're the independent member for the federal seat
of Wentworth in Sydney's eastern suburbs. You represent about a hundred
thousand voters in your electorate and you spend between 18 and 20 weeks a year
in Canberra for parliament sitting weeks. I hate to think how busy you are I can
only assume you are a highly organised person. Yes to be honest I am much more
organised than I used to be but it's a challenge. It's a challenging job but
it's an amazing job. I'm guessing too there's lots of juggling. It's a huge
amount of juggling I've also got three young kids so for me this is it's a
double juggle. That's why I have to be actually as you say extremely organised
because otherwise I just wouldn't get anything done. Well in the interest of
being organised we had better get going. We've only got 15 minutes our time
starts now. So my first question is what time do you get up in the morning what
is your morning routine look like and we might assume that you're in Canberra
for this purpose. Sure I normally get up between 5.30 and 6 and I'm almost always
would go for a run like it's a very rare day that I don't go for a run. Sometimes
I play basketball in Canberra because people play quite a lot of sports so
sometimes I'll start my day with a game of basketball. Then my team and I will
get together and we'll go through the objectives of the day basically what we
think is going to happen in Parliament because that changes all the time and be
really clear on you know what are the aims of the day but also what's
happening in Parliament and also through the news cycle because you have to be
really alive to that in Canberra and frankly every day. So do lots of MPs play
basketball or do if you found other teams who play basketball? Well the
team's about half MPs and half staff and members of the press. There's actually a
lot of sport at Parliament and I think it's really good in terms of bringing
different people together and certainly building relationships but also you know
having I think some mental health time to be honest. So you all push each other
around on the basketball court and then you go into Parliament and you push
each other around. Exactly yeah I tease Ed Husey because once he knocked me down quite
hard unintentionally and then I think he actually brought me an ice pack later
that day because I think he was feeling that guilty. Oh I'm glad to hear it. And
are you a breakfast person how do you fit that into your morning routine? I do
it all in Parliament actually so it's interesting I actually share an apartment
with some other MPs but in Parliament there's a bathroom and and a little
kitchenette and all the parliamentary offices and so basically I eat
breakfast there I have a shower there I do everything there. So do you always
have breakfast or do you skip it sometimes? I always have breakfast but to
be honest the run or the exercise is the most important thing for me. I do that
back in Sydney as well pretty much every single day I'll go for exercise or run
first thing in the morning and I'm so much more clear-eyed. Yeah that's a
really good way to start the day. Now Allegra my next question is tell me about
a pivotal moment in your career that changed you as a leader or changed the
trajectory of what you were doing. So back in about July 2021 I was approached
by people in the community about whether I'd run for Wentworth and I think it's
interesting because you know the why it happened. The reason it happened was ten
years earlier I was in the Whitsundays with a friend of mine and who was working
in renewable energy and I said to him look I don't know if I can help but if
there's any way I can help let me know and about a year later he called me on
it and he said actually Allegra you know I'm gonna set up this organization
Sydney Renewable Power Company I'd like you to get involved and so that's how I
got involved in renewable energy and the person who suggested me to the community
was someone who I'd met through that renewable energy journey and I say that
because some parts of your career are planned and mapped out and some parts
you make investments you make choices a long time ago and they really develop in
ways that you wouldn't otherwise expect and that's why I always say to kids when
I speak to a lot of kids at schools and I just say do the things you care about
you don't know what will happen with them over time. So when you were first
approached about going into Wentworth did you think wow that sounds amazing I
really really want to jump in and explore that or did you think that's not
me I don't want to do it I can't do it? I mean I was incredibly flattered but I was
like look I don't know that this is me and I don't know that I'm right as well
like I had that question of you know am I the right person for the job could I
do it and I had to first prove to myself that I believed that an independent
could have a chance and I sort of got to that point relatively quickly then I
talked to people I valued and respected and said look crazy idea what do you
think and that was really important to me because it was it was a time where I
wasn't sure both personally or professionally and having people who one
said yeah I think you can do it I think there's a great opportunity here but
I knew it'd be incredibly disruptive I had a job I loved I used to have an
Italian passport which I had to give up you know and I have young kids and so it
was a big choice and it was actually that encouragement of people I respected
that helped me get through that. And how long did it take for you to actually
make that decision? A very long time actually it's about three or four months
and they were talking to other people at the same time and I always said to them
look you know if you find someone you think is would be a better candidate go
for it. And now you look back on it do you sort of wonder why you ever
prevaricated for three or four months? Look I probably could have got to it
faster but it is a really it's a it's a big decision it's not just a decision
for me you know it has a big impact on on the family as well so that took time
but to be honest it's been an unexpected joy I did it because I thought it was
the right thing to do and I didn't realize how much I would absolutely love
it. Wow that's fantastic. Okay Allegra my next question is what is the best piece
of career advice you've ever been given? Actually two of them are good one was a
friend of mine who spoke to me again before I stepped into the running and he
said to me forgive yourself now for the for the mistakes you're gonna make
because we all make mistakes I've made a heap and the thing I've learned is that
if you let your mistakes dog you then you don't get over them and you don't
actually move on and so I think the biggest thing is actually to have
failures to learn from failures and to move on and it's not always easy to move
on so I think for me that was a huge piece of advice. And then the other one
was actually from a business woman who I approached and said look you know how
do I best talk to these very senior business executives who I was dealing
with at a time and she said look talk their language she said numbers reassure
business leaders so talk in numbers you know say these are the results you know
and give numbers don't give platitudes of you know we're doing really well and I
have to say I really stick with that because I think numbers do stick in
certainly my head and in other people's head it shows kind of weight and I feel
in particular my job now you have to communicate to the heart but you also
have to communicate to the head and I always try and do both if I'm in
speaking I try and have the numbers but I also have to try and have the emotion
so kind of two different pieces. So by the same token when you're talking to
non-business people who perhaps aren't so interested in numbers do you try and
change the way you communicate with them because they might not be wanted to be
bombarded with lots of numbers. Yeah look I mean you know you never know in any
room you know exactly what mix you've got so I'm a bit more numbers heavy
you're right with the business community and I'm trying to be better at stories
because that is absolutely critical I think to communication. Is there a story
I can tell here that can better illustrate this? Is there a story or a
you know metaphor or you know comparison that would bring this to life because we
have our default ways of expressing ourselves and I think you know we kind
of have to challenge ourselves to express different ways. I often will also
ask people if I'm giving if I'm practicing a speech what's the bit you
remember so if I'm practicing in my speech in front of my team I say well
what bit actually stuck with you because it is often I think statistics or it is
a story and it's good to know what people take away from what you're actually
saying. Allegra on that note stay right where you are. We're going to take a
short break and when we come back we're going to open our delightful chatterbox.
Welcome back to 15 minutes with the boss. I'm here with politician Allegra
Spender who holds the federal seat of Wentworth. Now Allegra this is our
section called the chatterbox. In front of you as threatened is this really
beautiful shiny brown box cardboard box inside which are about 20 questions or
folded up on little bits of paper. I am going to ask you to pick out some
questions hand them over to me and I will of course ask you to answer them so
please start fishing. What's the hardest thing about leadership? I think one of
the hardest things about leadership is empowering other people because I think
sometimes there's a danger of leaders trying to solve everything themselves or
people sort of constantly looking to you to fix things and I think the truth is
that you can achieve much more if everybody around you is fixing things and
so I think that's one of the challenges particularly if you've grown up in an
organization and you know a lot about things you can actually fix a lot of
stuff. I think one of the most challenging things about being a leader
is not to be the fixer and not let everybody sort of give you that problems
and effectively disempowering them and I think about this as a community leader
because people come to me with a lot of different problems in the community and
often they do want me to fix them but some of those things you know you can't
they're actually a better place to fix than they realize and so part of my job
then is to help them understand their avenues the tools how I can support them
but ultimately do I support them to solve those problems themselves. So it's
basically a case of teaching people how to help themselves and where else they
can go for help. Yeah understand what avenues are available to them and what's
the best path for them to achieve that. So what's the difference between
empowering your constituents and empowering your employees. With your
employees I want them to know clearly what the goals and our aspirations are
but then I want them to bring their full imagination to it and politics it's
creative like you need to use your imagination you can do things that are
done differently to how other people have done them in the past I want people
to bring that sort of creativity to it and so that truly empower them in that
sense and then a community it's a different type of empowerment because
often for me with the community it's about giving them the right tools helping
them understand how how government works what leaves they can pull you know what
leaves I can pull what leaves other people in government can pull and how to
get stuff done and that's so they're different types of empowering community
Really interesting. OK Allegra have another fish. Now this one is about
mistakes. Tell me about a time where you failed at something. How did you recover
and what did you learn. I mean some of the mistakes I've made and thinking one
in particular is about communicating with members of my team and I think
particularly as a boss I think it's easy sometimes to forget the weight of what
you say because you know when you say something if you're a bit frustrated or
a bit gruff or something like that it weights very heavily particularly on
more junior members of your team and there have been times at which you know I
know that whatever I have said has hit much harder than I intended it to hit and
so the thing I'm aware of now is that sometimes you do need to be hard hitting
in what you say to your team like you know sometimes as being critical yet
being critical and but so sometimes you have to be really clear and extremely
critical because you know and performance manage people and you know
even performance manage people out and I've done that a number of times but
sometimes you unintentionally hit someone quite hard with something which
wasn't your intention and so for me what I try and do is think quite
deliberately now about how I'm going to approach those sorts of conversations
and think through the force at which I'm going to say something and also sometimes
is am I the best person to say that or is actually you know their manager or
someone else the right person to say that. So is there a particular formula
that you use in having that sort of hard conversation. Do you go in and start
with it's a nice day how are you you know you've done a really good job but.
I think you're trying to set the culture up front that feedback is part of what
you do and I started my career at McKinsey as a business analyst and one of
the sort of mantras at McKinsey was feedback is a gift and I think it took me
probably the first 10 years of my career to really sort of internalize that but
you know I try and do that by leading with my team and asking my team for
feedback I'll say OK how was that what do we think we did well what you know
what did I do well you know how did I come across what did I not do well and I
want them to feel that their job is to help me be better and so it's OK that my
job is to help them be better and then with my team you know the thing I've
learned over time is to try and be pretty explicit about what you want from
people and try and make sure that's really clear because then you're sort of
not left with a sort of awkward conversations where they think they're
doing a great job and they're achieving you know what you want and you think
they're doing something else and so you know those are some of the things that I
guess I've learned through that experience and I think trying to be
straight but also being compassionate and asking about how they feel about it
saying you know this might be hard to hear you know because it is hard to hear
you know we've all been on the receiving end of that but it is ultimately better
because you don't get better by everyone telling you that they think you're
great that's true and it's a really great way to think that feedback is a gift and
we should all really hold that dear to us yeah and to be honest it's hard to
give feedback I think many humans don't love the sort of conflict or the
confrontation of giving feedback so you actually need to genuinely be open to it
if you are going to get it well and I think that's you know something I do try
and seek and try particularly again for my team I spend a lot of time with but
also with other people I'll often ask people just say look you know how do you
think I'm going how do you think you know what do you think's happening in
parliament give me your sense and I'm asking it honestly because there's no
point telling me one thing to my face and another thing behind my back yeah
okay love that let's do one more what's your favorite meal to cook for a dinner
party I'm really boring on this because I think you come to dinner personally
for the company yeah I always say to people don't expect a lot of fancy food
from us so I if I'm cooking fast as in like I've come home from work and people
having coming over in 20 minutes I'll cook off on salmon and salmon steaks
because I think that is always delicious and really good otherwise love a fish pie
my husband does lamb back straps which is beautiful but I'm now allergic of all
things to mammals I got bitten by a tick from up in the northern beaches so no
more lamb for me really yeah I didn't know there was such a thing yeah the
northern you can't I mean I've been bitten by a bunch of ticks up there but
you can get him a malian meat allergy which also has a funny situation where
people say oh can you eat chicken and you go and they say is chicken a mammal
it's like no it's like I'm good so it's yeah so it's a thing Wow okay so I guess
no kangaroo either no and in a sort of playing crash in the Himalayas you know
I would be the first one to go because I assume it applies to you know humans
too we're also mammals yes and you don't want to get lost in our desert either
because I guess the first one to go I mean and fair enough like you know that
you know there's got to be a criteria for deciding these things so maybe stick
to salmon then and that is the end of our chat a box section my last question
Allegra is if we gave you 12 months off unencumbered you could do anything you
liked what would you do I think I would do some travel so I think I've never
been to Antarctica and I always wanted to go so I think I would love to do that
but then my hobby before I went into politics was actually reading policy
like I've always been really interested in public policy and so I would use the
time I think to particularly look at economic policy and also how that
intersects with education so how can you help more people to thrive and I'd be
doing sort of more kind of research and other things on that because that I find
absolutely fascinating oh so would you go back to university no I wouldn't they're
just amazing people out there are a lot of amazing papers out there and I would
just be drawing on that I think and trying to research in that way right and
would you take your family to Antarctica yes I mean yeah the kids are probably a
bit young but I've seen people who've gone kayaking around there it's absolutely
amazing so I'd love to do that okay sounds beautiful and that is our time up
Allegra thanks so much for coming in I've really loved hearing the way you forgive
yourself now for mistakes that you're bound to make in the future I love the
way that you shape your argument to suit the person to whom you're talking for
example with business people numbers make a lot of sense but numbers may not
make sense for everybody sometimes it might require storytelling and I also
really love the way you empower people to help themselves lastly I wish you lots
of luck with your forthcoming reading regime and hope you get to do that on
the way to Antarctica so Allegra thank you so much for allowing us to spend 15
minutes with the boss thanks so much Sally and thank you to everyone for
listening if you like the podcast and would like to hear more please consider
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by alex gow and our executive producer is fiona buffini the australian financial