The leaders
Brad Banducci
The CEO and managing director of Woolworths Group since February 2016, Brad Banducci joined the company in 2011 when it acquired the Cellarmasters Group, where he’d been CEO since 2007. Banducci previously served as the CFO and director at Tyro Payments and was a vice-president and director with the Boston Consulting Group. Born in South Africa, he moved to Australia more than 30 years ago and retains a close connection with his birthplace.
Melanie Silva
Managing director of Google Australia and New Zealand since October 2018, Melanie Silva has been a Googler for more than 12 years, including as managing director of go-to-market strategy for the Asia-Pacific region, where she was based in Singapore. Before Google, Silva was general manager at Fairfax Digital’s Direct Access. She has an extensive product and marketing background in the financial services sector, having worked at Citibank, ING and AMP (making good use of her Bachelor of Economics degree).
Didier Elzinga
The CEO and founder of Culture Amp, Didier Elzinga launched the leading peopleand-culture HR platform in 2009. One of Australia’s fastest-growing tech startups, the company now has offices in Melbourne, San Francisco, New York and London. Before Culture Amp, Elzinga was CEO of Rising Sun Pictures, a visual-effects company that worked on some of the Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings movies. He’s committed to employee feedback, culture building and fostering greater creativity in the workplace.
KIRSTEN GALLIOTT We’re all so busy these days, with a million requests coming at us all the time. I’m curious to know how each of you has learnt to prioritise the most important things and to not sweat the small stuff.
BRAD BANDUCCI Don’t let your diary dictate what you do. The problem we all have is that we end up with a diary that’s full every day and if you’re not careful, you let the diary drive what you do. That’s a very dangerous thing. Every morning, I think about the most important things I need to do that day and I try to make sure I achieve them. If it means I have to change my plans, I do. It’s critically important because events move so quickly in today’s world and yet my diary is planned a year-and-a-half in advance. You either run your diary or your diary runs you – and I think you have to run your diary.
With this in mind, how far in advance are you looking at your diary?
BB A couple of weeks. I always look at it on a Sunday then make a call about what’s important. We all get so structured and if you let that happen, you can miss the important insights right in front of you. The most critical thing is engaging with your team; we have an open office set over four storeys and I walk up and down it three or four times a day. In that walk, I invariably connect with a lot of people; I’ll know what’s going on in the business and whether there’s an issue. You need time to connect with people and you have to give them the opportunity to tell you what’s important.
Does that mean if you didn’t do that walk around the office you wouldn’t be aware of the issues?
BB You feel the heartbeat of a business not by sitting in an office but, for us, by being in a store or walking around – just by bumping into people and connecting with them. There was a study done about how many times you bump into people and what it does for building culture
– [it found that] it gives you a subliminal sense of how a business is feeling.
Mel, does this resonate with you?
MELANIE SILVA Absolutely. I try to maintain the appearance of being an elegant swan gliding across the water but under the surface I’m madly going for it. It’s something I constantly assess. Busy does not mean important. I think we, as a society, have become [used to saying], “I’m so busy, I have to check my phone all the time” and, “I’m so busy, I’m in meetings all day.” I don’t want to win that race. I don’t want to be the busiest person; I want to be the most impactful person.
I have quite a structured process. I ask myself, “Am I spending 95 per cent of my time on the top five priorities, not just for the business but for myself as a human being?” I need to spend time with my kids and I want to be a good mum. I also want to have a well-engaged team. I try to make sure I’m looking at what I call the “dopamine hits” versus the “drainers”. I ask myself, “How much of my day is being spent giving myself positive dopamine hits?” For me, that is spending time with other Googlers, going out and having chats, spending time with clients and partners. The drainers are the mandatory admin tasks: getting those reports in and all that stuff. It’s about making sure that I’m spending enough time “filling my cup”, knowing that the cup is going to get drained.
What does that process look like at the beginning of the month or, say, the start of the week?
MS I review it once a quarter to work out those top five priorities. I’m really quite detailed. I decide, “This is what success looks like and this is what failure looks like.” And then my admin business partner and my husband both need to see that list – we have to be a collaborative team.
Didier, I know you have a perspective on this...
DIDIER ELZINGA Early on, so much of your success comes from being open to opportunities – saying yes, going to that meeting, being at that event, making that call, whatever it is. Then if you’re good at it for long enough, you have to flip the other way and you need a very rigorous system for saying no because you have too many opportunities. That’s when you have to work out what you want to focus on. I find saying no much harder than saying yes.
How do you manage that?
DE Badly. I have an executive coach; he worked with Steve Jobs early in his career and he’s a really interesting guy. He said to me, “If you’re not tearing up your diary every couple of days, you’re not doing your job properly.” You have to challenge yourself to spend time where it needs to be spent. And you need to manage your energy, not your time. It’s your energy that controls how much you’re going to get done, not how much time you have available. A lot of it is me trying to figure out when I can be most productive.