How Corelogic Ceo Lisa Claes Walks Fine Line Between Burnout And Development

I shifted my mindset from being someone who thought that the more you knew, the better

leader you'd become, which when I look back, sounds quite ridiculous.

It's very simple.

Saying no.

I'm a great proponent of it's the things you don't do that define you more than the things

you do.

Hi.

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 aiming to get some great advice from our leaders.

My guest today is Lisa Class, the chief executive of CoreLogic International.

Hi Lisa.

How are you?

Hi Sally.

Now Lisa, as I said, you're the chief executive of CoreLogic International, which is a property

research and data company, and you have about a thousand employees across Australia, New

Zealand and the UK, enough to keep you fully entertained, I imagine.

That's right.

Yes.

I span the time zones.

Now, as promised, we only have 15 minutes, so let's get the clock started.

Are you ready?

I'm ready.

Lisa, my first question is about your morning routine.

What time do you get up?

What happens?

It varies.

I'm owned by a US enterprise and I cover Australia, New Zealand and the UK.

So depending on call schedule, I could be up at 2 a.m. for calls, but putting work aside,

my preference and my natural rhythm is to get up between 5.30 and 6 o'clock.

So I actually thought that you got up even earlier than that.

I did until a couple of years ago and always curious about medical science and the latest

thinking and the message I'm getting from reading from credible sources is that sustained

short sleep, I'm talking the three to five hours a night, night after night, can impact

your mental stamina.

So I've been trying to push my rising time a little bit later, by about half an hour.

How many hours a night of sleep are you aiming to get?

Around a six is a good night.

Once every 10 days, I'll have an eight hour sleep, which tends to fill the bank up.

So what happens at quarter to six or so when you get up?

Right.

I have a very strong cup of black coffee and I do something physically hard.

I prefer to do my exercise in the morning.

I prefer to do it almost every day and that could be anything from a Barry's boot camp

to a run.

So I get that out of the way and I'm a great proponent of strong body, strong mind.

So I feel that if I have surmounted that challenge early in the day, everything else is going

to be easy.

Okay.

Fair enough.

So my next question is about a pivotal moment in your career.

Can you tell me about a moment in your career or a time in your career that really changed

you or changed the trajectory of what you were doing?

You know, normally I hear the response to these type of questions is typically some

external force, but for me, it came introspectively.

I shifted my mindset from being someone who thought that the more you knew, the better

leader you'd become and that you could only be a CEO if you had a good understanding of

almost every function in the organization, which when I look back, sounds quite ridiculous,

but rationally, as I was a barrister, I came from that technical specialist background

where knowledge is incredibly important, accuracy, precision, detail.

But what I learned and where I got enormous confidence from was realizing that you didn't

have to be the lead violinist to be the conductor, that the power of organizations that make

impact is through creating an aligned team of people with a common objective and getting

all that wonderful diversity of thought together and ensuring that you're tapping and aligning

and unleashing all that intrinsic human power within the organization to get where that

organization needs to go.

That's where your expertise needs to lie, not necessarily in yourself.

So there's more value to be a shaper and a leader than there is to actually being the

expert and doing all the doing.

That's interesting.

So it's not so much about the volume of information that we know.

It's actually about the people and knowing how to get them together to follow you with

a single vision.

Absolutely.

So third question for this section, what's the hardest thing about leadership?

It's a short question, but one of my favorites.

Harking back to what I said earlier about, you know, untapping and unleashing human potential

within your organization, left alone, people will gravitate towards comfort zone.

We all do it.

So as a CEO, you need to be stimulating the environment in a way that you're pushing

and pulling people out of that comfort zone to a sweet spot that full short of a red zone

because you don't want people in fear or stress.

No one does their best work in that.

So how do you get them to stretch but shield them from burnout?

Because that is where development happens.

As a leader, there are many tricks you use to influence, motivate, coach individuals

and teams, different techniques to get into that sweet spot.

So you can tell when people are comfortable and when they're super stressed.

I think so.

I mean, they never come and tell you though, that that's what I thought, yes, spending

time with people obviously is very important talking to people, not just about the task

at hand, but getting people to open up and understanding where their head is at as the

whole person.

You can tell too when an organization is tired.

One of the hardest things about being a senior leader is injecting energy and optimism and

positivity within the organization in an authentic, regular way.

I'm not suggesting you have to go around punching air in that sort of cringe-worthy,

happy, clappy positivity because that's not me as a person.

You've got to be authentic.

If I'm having a bad day, I will tell the executive team I'm having a bad day and why I might

be a little bit cranky or whatever.

But every executive meeting, I think, what can I say that will bring something fresh

or a different perspective to the team to get them thinking differently, thinking more

aspirationally?

If I'm flat, I will suck down the momentum of the organization.

If I'm energetic and positive and aspirational, that does have a ripple effect.

OK, on that note, Lisa, stay right there.

We're going to take a short break.

And when we come back, we're going to open the Chatterbox.

Welcome back to 15 Minutes with the Boss.

I'm here with Lisa Klaas, Chief Executive of CoreLogic International.

Now, Lisa, this is our section called Chatterbox.

As you will see in front of you is a beautiful brown, shiny cardboard box inside which are

20 questions all folded on little bits of paper.

I would like to ask you to start fishing in the box.

Pick out a few of those questions, which I will then ask you to answer.

You ready for this?

I'm ready. It's not Pandora's box, is it, Sally?

No, no, it's much worse than that.

Start fishing.

OK, first question.

Do you have a favorite productivity hack to help you get more out of your day?

It's very simple.

Saying no.

I'm a great proponent of it's the things you don't do that define you more than the things you do.

So how do you know when to say no?

I think experience gives me a sense of what is going to be beneficial for the organization.

If I say yes, what will be beneficial to my balance in life?

If I said yes, what might push me into that red zone?

Because, you know, all of us could say yes to everything.

If you say yes to everything, you will not leave time to pursue and further what your role requires of you.

That is a very good hack.

I'm going to try that on the editor-in-chief next time he asks me to do something.

OK, next question.

Tell me about a time when you failed at something.

How did you recover and what did you learn?

Rather than speak through the particular detail, I think there's been a common theme.

And the theme that resonates is misreading the drivers of the decision that needed to be made on which success was dependent.

And that could be depending on the situation.

It could be not understanding who the decision makers really were in the equation, what the drivers of that decision.

So a simple example might be that you might be pitching for a huge contract for your organization and you think we've got the best price,

we've got the most sophisticated functionality, great relationships, and we ascribe a certain priority to those factors.

Sometimes those factors may have an inferior priority to the customer than what we thought.

What I've learned is to ask questions early in processes, understand priorities, sensitivities,

build relationships broadly, not just the primary and secondary decision maker.

And after failure, in most cases, you're able to go back and unpick the failure with the person or the power that made a decision against you, for example.

So when you inevitably go back to the person who has said no to you and actually ask what went wrong, where could we have done better?

Totally. Most people are very open to discussing why they chose A and not B, and it can be multiple factors.

And you might think, oh, I would not have thought that they would put weight on that factor or that they would have rated us that way on that factor.

So it's a good point. Understanding priorities and key relationships is really critical.

Next question, would you like to have another little fish inside our box?

Oh, this is a good one.

What will you miss most about the job if and when you leave?

Not that, of course, we are wishing that upon you.

It's not so much the job. It's what you do because you're privileged to be in the job.

So the problem solving, the diversity of people, backgrounds, personalities.

I like the pressure of this role.

I believe I operate in that sweet spot most of the time.

And if I feel inertia setting in, I push myself back in and the growth that I have been privileged to enjoy being in this role.

So how have you grown through the company?

You only grow when pressure is put upon you.

You build stronger muscles when you stretch them and you break them.

So I have grown most markedly through the tough assignments or the scary things that I've had to prepare for and build myself up for.

So I just hope whatever I do next, whenever I do it next, that I'm in something that continues to stretch me and challenge me and open me up to new experiences.

Lisa, I'm sure you'll be able to do just that.

OK, we have one last question.

Have one last fish in the box.

Thank you.

What do you do when you switch off, assuming that you do switch off from time to time?

I don't think I totally switch off, but I definitely go to another bandwidth if you like.

Some that know me, I love design, so I will, you know, immerse myself in fabric shops and go and look at different types of buttons.

I do like physical activity, walking around my suburb, which is, you know, blessed with lots of trees and wilderness.

And it also could be something intensely physical.

And, you know, clearly, I like to do those things with my family and friends.

Thematically, again, it would be probably just switching from the left side of the brain to the more activity involving the right side of the brain than the left side of the brain.

So more in the creative field rather than the data driven metrics, KPIs field.

So what do you design?

I have had a go at designing every physical object.

I designed a house.

I design a lot of my wardrobe, jewelry, furniture.

I don't make it.

I work with a craftsman, so a primary producer, so to speak, and I'm very sensitive to my environment.

And I like it to call it feng shui or whatever.

I like beauty in my environment.

So that could be sort of paintings or the fabric in the curtains or the view or the light in the house.

So many different things really that feeds my soul and I will create my surroundings or my interest to feed my soul.

And that's where the balance comes in.

So you design all your work clothes and all the buttons and.

Not all because it's quite a process.

And I've had some dreadful flops, I can tell you, but I get a lot of pleasure out of I really enjoy it's very relaxing for me to do that.

OK, love it. Thank you.

So, Lisa, that is now the end of our chat a box section.

Now we come to one last question, which is if you had a month off unencumbered and you could do anything you liked, what would you do?

Using the ingredients that I've spoken about before, I would reweight my activities interests more towards the offline component than the online.

So I would still read challenging literature.

I would still get up early and do my hard physical stuff.

I would overindex.

So on the experience part, spend some more time with family and friends in probably a different environment.

So it wouldn't be dramatically different.

It would just be the same ingredients, but different quantities to produce a different cake.

Would you redecorate a room or would you design a couple of dresses?

I think I've got one house left in me.

So maybe maybe finding that renovators dream if one such exists in Sydney to put my footprint on.

Well, Lisa, I so hope you find your renovators delight.

Thank you, Sally.

On that note, our time is up.

Thank you again, Lisa, for allowing us to spend 15 minutes with the boss.

It has been great talking to you about sleep and the importance of sleep.

I'm very glad that you said yes to us rather than no, which is your productivity hack.

And I also take on board that challenge of finding the sweet spot between comfort and the red zone or burnout.

That's something that actually I should apply to me as well, I think.

Well, there's no doubt that that's where the magic happens, where development occurs.

And thank you to everyone for listening.

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This podcast was hosted by me, Sally Patton, produced and edited by Lapfan.

Our theme is by Alex Gao and our executive producer is Fiona Buffini.

The Australian Financial Review.