The Australian Financial Review.
Your ability to kind of listen, ask the right questions, absorb, and then turn that into
a plan of action, that's what separates sort of good leaders from great leaders.
Stop thinking about your career plan as only up.
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 really great advice from our leaders.
My guest today is Mel Silva, the managing director of Google in Australia and New Zealand.
Hi, Mel, lovely to see you.
Thank you, Sally.
Lovely to be here.
Now, Mel, you're the managing director of Google in Australasia, which employs about
The business has built products that have been rolled out globally, such as Google Maps.
And I'm reliably informed that you travel to the US three times a year, as well as regular
trips across Australia, New Zealand, and Asia-Pacific.
Sounds kind of busy.
It's kind of busy, but it's a lot of fun.
Hope you're not trying to look after a family as well.
Of course you are.
We might come to that.
So thank you so much for allowing us to spend 15 minutes with the BOSS.
Our 15 minutes starts now.
My first question is, what time do you get up?
I'm guessing you've got children.
So three, I've got a teenager, a tween, and a toddler.
And if you'd have told me that that was going to be the case, I would have laughed in your
But that's the reality.
So I get up at about 5.30.
Then I kind of stumble out of bed, pour myself a cup of Ambition, as Dolly said, make myself
a cup of tea, and try to have about that 10 or 15 minutes just by myself before the little
And then we're in the hustle of getting everyone ready to get off to school.
So my eldest son has got, he's on the way for me in terms of the commute.
So we get some nice sort of morning chat time.
And that's a huge part of my routine, to be honest, is having that little chat with him
And my hubby picks up the other two and drops them off.
So what do you do for those 10 to 15 minutes of quiet time?
You know, I flick through the phone and see what's sort of been happening around the world
and see what's come in overnight.
But yeah, it's not usually work and reacting and responding at that time.
It's more just absorbing.
And what time would you get to work?
Again, depending on kitty schedules.
Some days we've got to get him there at 7.30.
So I get to work usually about quarter to eight.
But most days I'm there by eight o'clock.
And are you a breakfast person?
No, I'm not a breakfast person.
Most days if I eat breakfast, I feel really quite sluggish.
So I tend to just have the coffee and get myself through to lunchtime and then go from
My next question is, did you have a pivotal moment in your career, a moment that really
changed the trajectory of your career or helped to shape you as a leader?
Yeah, absolutely.
And it was the moment I didn't get a job that I really, really wanted.
There's a bit of a theme here.
That's happened to other people as well.
What was the job that you didn't get?
Well, it was actually the job I have, but I applied for it the sort of round before
and didn't get it.
I had the hiring manager at the time leaned in, told me that he could see my ambition,
told me that I had kind of just been pipped at the post and really spent time trying to
uncover what would be a great next step for me.
And that was the beginning of my trip to go and live in Asia for a couple of years.
I became kind of the strategy and operations lead for Asia Pacific.
And oh my gosh, Sally, I learned so much in that role.
So that person really decided that you needed international experience would really help
you develop as a leader.
Being in Singapore, but looking across the entire APAC region.
So you got a lot more exposure to things like product strategy and product direction and
how to really execute well at scale across an immensely diverse region.
And the Asia Pacific region is just really quite random.
It's just basically a circle around some countries that happen to be in the same place in the
There is nothing that Australia has in common with India or Japan or parts of Southeast
Or that they don't really have in common with themselves.
A hundred percent.
So it was this really great masterclass in what do customers need in each of these markets?
What are the cultural norms?
What's the competitive landscape?
And then how do you execute at scale and getting the balance right between what can be consistent
and what needs to be bespoke in order for you to be successful in a particular market?
And how do you use those skills in Sydney when in Australia you're really looking after
two markets which are probably not that different?
Do you use that knowledge or those skills in a different way?
I mean, look, fundamentally it's about people.
What I learned in Singapore was listening and asking the right questions and that having
those hard skills like being a great salesperson or being a great leader even will only get
Your ability to kind of listen, ask the right questions, absorb and then turn that into
a plan of action, that's what separates sort of good leaders from great leaders.
And of course I use all of those skills today, whether it's listening to customers, listening
to Googlers, listening to my leadership team, all of those things, adapting, really listening
and then putting in place and making the tough decisions.
My next question is, what is the best piece of career advice you've ever been given?
Stop thinking about your career plan as only up, start thinking about the skills you want
And going sideways is okay.
Going sideways is okay if you're going to acquire a huge number of skills or have a
set of experiences that you would otherwise not have.
I think it's so narrow minded to only look at your boss's job as the next opportunity.
It's actually sometimes helpful to think, well, what's the job I want in 10 years?
And if I applied for it now, what would people say?
And then work back from there in terms of, well, here are the skills I need to acquire
between where I am and where I want to go.
And as long as the job gives me that, I'm going to go in that direction.
So during your career, have you taken a number of sideways steps?
Can you give me some examples?
I mean, starting at Google was a massive sideways step.
I was actually working at Fairfax.
I was running a business.
I was the general manager of a business.
I had a really small team, but I had full P&L responsibility.
And I got offered a role at Google as an individual contributor doing marketing for one of the
vertical teams in sales.
And you thought what?
I did not think what.
Everybody I think around me thought what, but I'd been a customer of Google and I was
impressed by the people that I had come across.
I knew that it was just a direction that I wanted to take.
And so, yeah, I took it.
It was not a sideways step.
It was actually a backward step.
And within Google, you've also taken other sideways steps, have you?
A hundred percent.
Yeah. So I've, you know, I started out in this marketing role.
Then I moved into sales, which I had never done before.
And I never thought of myself as a salesperson, but I was running sales for a particular
industry vertical in financial services, because that's where I had worked my whole
career. And then when I came back from having my second child, my boss said, I think you
should do something different.
Why don't you go run a different set of verticals, which was a completely a sideways step.
Did that again, expanded my knowledge, then went on to do the strategy and operations
role and now back into the country manager role.
So, yeah, I mean, and look, even before joining Google, I just always have had this view of
like, I need to sort of acquire as many skills as possible until I'm about 40.
Because even if I work from 40 till 65, that's still 25 years to like hone my craft.
So figure out what is you actually want to do.
And that's just always been the approach that I've taken.
That's an interesting cutoff point.
Gather as many skills as you can until you're 40 and then hone them.
Yeah. You have 25 years to get great at it.
Yeah. Sounds good to me.
Okay, Mel, 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 very famous chatterbox.
Hello and welcome back to 15 minutes with the boss.
I'm here with Mel Silva, the managing director of Google in Australia and New Zealand.
Now, Mel, in front of you here is this lovely box called our chatterbox.
Inside, which are 20 questions all wrapped on pieces of paper.
I'd like you to have a bit of a fish around the box.
Select one, which I will then ask you to answer.
And we'll do this a few times.
I've got the vibes.
What's your pet hate in the office?
This is very revealing.
Oh, lateness to meetings.
Every way, shape and form of lateness.
If you say you're going to do something at a certain time, do it.
If you have a meeting that's got a huge number of people in it, show up on time.
And, you know, if you can't just send someone a little message and say, you're running late.
There's something about doing what you say you're going to do that I value very highly.
And so it's my pet hate.
And presumably your team are well aware of this by now.
Look, it's, it's actually less late to meetings and more, if there are deliverables
that are due and deadlines that we've set that teams are depending on, don't let the team down.
You can always tell me that something's going to be late and I'll have no issue with it.
You can always tell me the week before something's due that you're not going to make it, but
telling me on the day that it's due, that it's not going to happen really gets my goat.
That's very good advice for people who are perpetually late.
Okay, Mel, do you want to have another forage?
When you were in school, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I was obsessed with Yarn Event when I was growing up and I wanted to be a journalist.
I'm a news reader.
I definitely wanted to be a broadcast.
I wanted to be an investigative journalist.
My dad has videos of me.
I would just do assignments in that format.
I would get him to video me and I would deliver it like I was delivering a news story.
And he brought me like a headset once with a microphone and I'd record my own radio show.
Like it was, it was serious.
I was serious, but I've, I've tried to unpack what it was.
The reality for girls growing up at that time was they had never seen someone like
On Australian TV screens, my family's from, you know, Europe and they sort of
emigrated to Australia and to see someone who had a name that wasn't that easy to
pronounce, who was doing incredible work and being recognised for it and was a
woman that had never been in my world before.
And we should say that Yarn Event was one of the most famous female
broadcasters of the 1980s.
Yes, like she was everywhere and she was known for being smart and
It really struck a chord with me to see someone like that being so successful.
And I think I carry that through today, you know.
So are you really conscious that you can't be what you can't see?
And is that something that you take with you into your office?
I mean, I think hindsight's 2020, right?
So when I look back and I think about what my experiences were, I remember the
Yarna situation because it was that.
I had never seen that before.
And it inspired me to think that I could do that myself.
When I started my first job and I walked in and my head of the department and my
MD were both women, I didn't sort of like high five myself and say yay for the
For me, it was normal.
It wasn't until much later that I looked back and I thought, whoa, how lucky I was
that that happenstance just was my experience.
Cause it actually wasn't normal at all.
It was not normal at all.
And it's not what everyone experiences.
And so, you know, I think you do have to make sure that, you know, you, you pay
that stuff forward when you're a female or from a different background and, you
know, you're, you're helping people to see all parts of you.
I think diversity and equity and inclusion are really important, but how do
you make that real in the real world?
It's by letting people bring their whole self to work, the whole self.
Uh, next question.
Have one more forage.
Who is a leader, business or otherwise, whom you really admire and why?
Some people will think this is a very predictable answer for me.
And other people will probably be surprised and think it's frivolous, but
I am a huge Beyonce fan and I respect her as a business woman and as an
artist for so many reasons, from what I have seen and read about her, there
is a discipline there, but a self belief there that is just unrelenting.
And I think no matter what industry you're in, no matter what career you
have, no matter where you are in your career, if you have those two things,
like a really good work ethic, a really good routine and strong belief, you'll
be the best at everything that you try.
I mean, obviously commercially very successful as well, clearly in her own
right, but this evolution, I think of her as an artist, I do draw some
similarities with your kind of style of leadership as well.
Like you sort of start out always thinking you're going to do what people
want you to do and what's expected of you.
And then as you get a little bit older and wiser, you realise that you have
these strengths and that you can take some risks and do things a little bit
differently and think outside the box.
And I think when I look at the art, just the output of her art,
it's evolved so much.
I mean, she's clearly taken enormous control of her own business and her
own life and her persona and she is her own personal CEO.
And even just from the, you know, managing her privacy really well,
that requires strength.
It requires a lot of, you know, self-control to keep those boundaries
up and be the boss of your boundaries, which is something that I try to do
every day and what I tell my folks at Google to try and do as well.
On that note, that is the end of the Chatterbox.
I'm now going to ask you now one more question, which we ask all our guests.
And that is, if we gave you a year off, you were unencumbered, even with our
children, you could do anything you liked.
What would you do?
I'm a huge music fan.
I would map out a year of like awesome gigs I would love to go to around the
world and I would just go for it.
There's something about going to see a gig in a place you're not familiar
with that is just awesome and it fills your soul.
So I would probably just travel the world going to see a year of gigging.
And who are your favourite musical artists?
Well, if I could construct what that list would be, I would definitely see
Beyonce again, I would see Kylie, I would see Gang of Youths.
I love Gang of Youths.
I mean, if I'm unencumbered and I can live in the fantasy world, I would love to
see like Jumeirah Kwai and Radiohead and all these bands that are probably all
split up, I'd love to have gone to an Oasis gig in the day, you know, see
Boy George DJ, my taste is quite broad.
Well, fingers crossed they might come back together for you.
I mean, fingers crossed Beyonce might actually come to Australia.
And that is our 15 minutes up.
It's been an absolute delight chatting to you.
I love the way you talk about moving sideways rather than moving up all the
time and indeed moving sideways may become the new moving up.
I love the idea that you've been hell bent on acquiring as many skills as
you can until you're 40 and then you want to hone in on them over the next
And I like your dislike of lateness.
You would do extremely well as a journalist.
And you know, you love Beyonce.
What's not to love about that?
I mean, she's a queen.
So thanks again so much for allowing us to spend 15 minutes with the boss.
Great to be here.
And thank you to everyone for listening.
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At the financial view, we investigate the big stories about
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people at AFR.com forward slash subscribe.
This podcast was hosted by me, Sally Patton, produced and edited by lap fan.
Our theme is by Alex Gar and our executive producer is Fiona Bufini.
The Australian financial review.