View from the top: Pip Marlow
The former Microsoft Australia boss has returned to tech as CEO of Salesforce ANZ and she wants her new team to ask her anything, writes Kirsten Galliott. How do you define good leadership?
For me, good leadership is values driven. It’s someone clear on purpose and who cares just as much about the how as the what. When you have a great leader with both those traits, people get excited about the purpose.
Is that what you value most?
I value honesty, transparency and accountability. On the people side of things, an old mentor of mine once said – and it’s always stuck with me – if you want people to believe you care, you just have to care. There’s no program or process – that’s just faking it. It gets harder when you can’t meet everybody one on one so you have to figure out how you connect with people at scale.
How do you do that? You now have 2000 staff.
I try to think about the ways I want to show up. I do town halls, where I’m on video and people can be connected from home or from the office. It’s personal, it’s live, it’s me talking and there’s really open questions and answers. I work hard to create enough psychological safety so people feel they can ask me absolutely anything. I’m really active on Chatter, which is a technology platform that allows people to ask questions. And I do smaller roundtables. Last week, I wanted to meet all of our equality groups so I organised a roundtable with the leaders. They could also learn from one another as part of it.
You joined Salesforce as the first Australia and New Zealand CEO in October, after a two-year stint at Suncorp. Does it feel good to be back in tech?
It does. I loved working at Suncorp but one thing I missed was velocity. Technology is the fastest-paced industry on the planet. I really missed helping companies and customers do the things they really wanted to do. I’ve never been the person who’s loved technology for the technology, I’ve loved what it can do for others.
How did you prepare for the role?
I’d like to say I took a really big break and found my Zen but that didn’t happen. I jumped in pretty quickly. Because