Cathy O’Connor: I get up at 5am and I have a big glass of water. Then I almost immediately have a big cup of tea and not just a normal tea cup, a giant teacup. I have collected a series of giant tea cups because one small cup just doesn’t seem like enough.
It’s like my fuel. So depending on what time I need to be somewhere, I can always take a travel mug and drink it on the way to exercise.
But the exercise is a ritual. I like jogging, and I often listen to audio while I jog, or I do boot camp. That’s a 45-minute high-intensity workout.
So if you jog, how many kilometres?
It varies, longer on weekends, but I would do anywhere from six to eight on a weekday and push up towards 10 kilometres on a weekend.
And if you’re listening to a podcast, which clearly you are when you are jogging, what are your favourite podcasts that you’re listening to?
There are two things I listen to.
Podcasts are clearly one of them, but I stream ABC News Radio as well because I’m a time-poor person. That’s a really great way to consume news.
And then I’m a bit of a nut on US politics, so I have a particular favourite podcast, Pod Save America is my absolute favourite. It’s funny, it’s fun. This time of the US election cycle, it has become almost a soap opera and I follow it intensely. I love it.
And what about breakfast?
Breakfast is normally on the run. I’m a yoghurt and berries type of person, and sometimes a smoothie if I can get all the bits together. I’m not really a sit down and eat; I’m a grab and run type person.
Tell me about a pivotal moment in your career that shaped you as a leader or really changed the course of what you were doing.
I think if I look back on my career, the step change for me was becoming a CEO because it’s quite a different job to the 20 years that came before it.
What that’s about for me is the ultimate accountability. I really did love that the buck stopped with me.
I think at the time I was ready for that change. I’d been in the role I was promoted from for five or six years and I really relished that opportunity when it was given to me.
Did you find it daunting at any point?
To a degree, yes, but I’m a pretty practical person and I tended to just back myself in both of my CEO roles, both at iMedia and before that at Nova Entertainment.
I followed the founders of those businesses into those businesses.
That’s an interesting opportunity in and of itself because the business has been built off the principles of the person you’ve replaced and there’s a lot of power in that. But there’s also an opportunity to not be that person and to take the best of what they were, and what they’ve built, and then to make it yours and to enhance it.
So I think in some ways maybe the symbolism of being new, being not the founder and maybe being a woman as well, were all things that either energised me or made me feel I have a brand here and a belief set and I’m going to make it work for me.
A lot of people say it’s lonely at the top, referring to CEOs. Do you agree with that?
I don’t think it is lonely at the top. I think if anything, you have more attention on you at the top, and so there are always inputs.
However, when you are searching for answers, or when you’re feeling pressure as a leader, you can never really externalise those pressures.
As a CEO, you don’t want to appear outwardly faltering or unsure. So to a degree, you must find a way to use your outlets or admit your stressors and play your role.
It could be [talking to] your husband or your partner, but I’m also pretty good at self-talk. And that is the ability to just say, “think clearly about this. What’s going on? What do you think the way forward is? Just make a decision and go.”
And also saying, “that didn’t go as well as I thought it would. That’s OK. It’s just one point in one process on a journey. Move through it, get on, make it better next time.”
So that self-talk as a CEO is quite important.
So what is the best piece of career advice you’ve ever been given?
Early in my career it was “be useful”, and I give it to people all the time. People say, “oh, I’m not sure about my role”.
I just say, “if you’re useful, you’ll very quickly recommend yourself to be given more to do or progress in your career”.
Does that extend to find ways to be useful? Go out and actively find ways to be useful?
Do your role well. Make sure that your role is a useful role. Look at ways your role can add more value. It speaks to productivity.
“Be useful” is always a good one for me. It’s quite a simple one.
I think as a leader it’s “have the right people in the room”.
First think who, then think what.
Invariably, if I look back at challenging times or when things have gone well or when things haven’t gone well, it’s normally a byproduct of who you’ve got around you, because as a CEO, you can’t do it all.
Do you actively keep an eye out for who in the market in your sector might be good? Who outside your sector might be good, who you could tap if you needed to?
Yes, all of those things. That’s a really important skill, just being a sponge for talent and particularly in business now looking to the edges to think about what else there might be.
Some of the most risky decisions I’ve made in my career have been on people and bringing in people who are different and taking a punt.
I had a good example of that in radio where I brought someone from the UK in to lead an Australian content business. The prevailing view at the time was that won’t work. But I felt we had groupthink in Australian radio and I wanted to take that risk.
So how can you tell if people have got the right skills, if they’re in a different industry from you?
It depends on the role. Some roles are specialist, and you may not err on the side of completely new people, but the last two appointments to my team, which have only happened recently, both came from different industries.
They bring different perspectives. They have none of the patterned ways of thinking. You’re constantly looking at that alchemy in your team to make sure that the stimulus is there and you’re not drifting away from your customer.
Which sectors were they from?
One was financial services and the other was sport.
Tell me about a time when you failed at something. How did you recover and what did you learn?
The biggest professional failure in my life would be the launch of 95.3 and 91.5 FM in Sydney and Melbourne in the early 2000s.
I was not yet the CEO, but I was the managing director of DMG Radio as it was called then (now Nova Entertainment).
These were the last two commercial FM stations to be launched in Sydney and Melbourne, and we had won the licences at auction and they were much anticipated.
Vega launched and it was ambitious. It was music and talk, it was old, it was new, and it didn’t perform. From memory, it got about 3 per cent to 4 per cent in the Sydney and Melbourne ratings, but it had a lot of talent on the air. And so with those sorts of formats, because of the cost of the talent, you’ve got to rate 7-10 per cent. So it lost money and we in the end had to change direction.
I remember my boss, the CEO at the time, said to me, “this is the best thing that’s ever happened to you because it’s all gone too well up until here”.
And I said, “gee, it doesn’t feel like that”. I was very fortunate to be given another chance, and I said to myself, I’m going to learn and make sure next time that I don’t settle for answers that I don’t agree with, that I don’t get sold a research proposition if I don’t believe it, and that I have the right people.
And this is where I brought the person from the UK in because I thought I was getting the same people telling me it had to be a rock format and I didn’t think that was right.
I thought it needs to be an easy listening format. I looked around the world and saw similar stations at number one or two positions.
Sydney and Melbourne didn’t have this proposition and those stations, which were designed to have no talent costs, low operating cost. The music was the star.
They were intensely different to the established sets, and in the end, they both at times became the number one station in those markets. So the failure ended up driving me to the biggest success of my career, which is Smooth FM.
So do you think the mistake was to not trust your gut instinct? Was it that you were listening to the wrong people?
I think it was overconfidence. Nova’s worked, so this is going to work. And not challenging decisions enough. Ultimately, you make your decisions, you get on with it. But I had an element of doubt with some aspects of it and I didn’t fully challenge it because I think we were overconfident.
When you were at school, what did you want to be when you grew up?
When I was at school, I wanted to be a businesswoman, but I didn’t know what type of businesswoman. I knew what business was. I knew I wanted to have a job in an office and be a businesswoman. So I signed up for law because that was the most businessy thing that I could see that was available, arts/law at Sydney Uni.
Then a friend of mine said, “There’s a brand new course called BA of communications and arts, and it’s really fun. It’s media and journalism.” And I said, “Oh, that sounds good.” And then literally the day before the form was due, I swapped and the rest is history.
And why did you want to be a businesswoman? Did you like the idea of being in an office in a big tower?
I’m not quite sure where it came from because my father was a dentist and my mother worked in the home.
I had a feeling that that’s what people who had jobs did. I must have got that through observing the world I grew up in, which was suburban Sydney, other people’s parents, and perhaps learning commerce at school.
I just thought, yep, I want to do business. I want to be a businesswoman. I ended up in a sector, radio, that I loved, I listened to when I was growing up. I couldn’t believe this world of music and content and business came together. It was probably my perfect role.
What keeps you up at night?
Well, the beauty is I can fall asleep very easily, and I almost always fall asleep instantly, but I can wake up early, sometimes too early. So 5am is a normal time, but it could be 2 o’clock, could be 3 o’clock.
If I’ve got a big project or there’s a lot on, a busy mind keeps me up. So it’s about learning not to let the thoughts in. Breathing is a good way to do it and I get it right some nights. Some nights I don’t. But I can very quickly shift negativity or concern or worry into action, and [I learned] that the only way to break an anxious moment as an executive is to do something.
After those nights where you haven’t had enough sleep, are you very good at hiding the fact that you’ve had no sleep in the morning? How do you cope with that?
First of all, many of us have Fitbits or Apple watches or any number of these devices, and for some time I would look at that, and my sleep would have a four in front of it or a five in front of it.
And then you say, “I’m going to have a terrible day”.
What I’ve learned is, on average, no matter whether you get the four-hour sleep or the eight-hour sleep, if you look at the average stats over time, it’s about the same.
For some people it’ll be eight hours, some people it’ll be six hours, you sleep about the same.
So I say sleep is a bank account. Sometimes you’re withdrawing and sometimes you’re depositing, but every day you feel the same.
That’s my mantra. So I don’t say, “I’ve had a terrible night’s sleep, I’m going to have a terrible day”, because you will.
Your brain is just a dumb muscle. It will do what you tell it. So I say it’s a bank account. We withdrew today, we’re depositing at some point in future, and I’m having a great day, and it works for me.
If you had 12 months off unencumbered, you could do anything you liked, what would you do?
Travel overseas to places I’ve never been. I also love camping, so I would love just to head north in the winter in whatever device made it easy to get a bit off the beaten track.
Also, we have a very small rural property, so there’s stuff to be done there. I like growing things and then I like cooking them and bottling them. We’ve got bees. It’s cool and I like that. So I’d like to do more of that. I’m just too time poor to do it well, so I’m somewhat underdone as a horticulturist and beekeeper.