Podcast transcript: EY Change Happens Podcast – Cathal O’Rourke

Intro: Change Happens. How we respond to change can make or break us and our careers. Join us for an intimate insight into how senior business leaders face change; the good, the bad and everything in between, because whether we like it or not, Change Happens.

Jenelle: Hi, my name’s Jenelle McMaster and welcome to the Change Happens podcast. A conversation with influential leaders on leading through change and the lessons learned along the way. Today, I’m joined by Cathal O’Rourke of Laing O’Rourke Australia. Following a succession of senior leadership roles in the UK and Australia Cathal was appointed Managing Director of Laing O’Rourke’s Australian operations in October 2013 and is a member of the Group’s Executive Committee. Cathal has played an instrumental role in managing and delivering many significant building and infrastructure projects over his 15 years with this multi national construction company that, of course, bears his surname, including quite notably elements of the Heathrow Terminal Five development. Now during Cathal’s time as Managing Director in Australia, this business has been twice named as one of the country’s most innovative businesses and was the 2016 winner of the Australian Construction Achievement Award. In 2020 Laing O’Rourke was awarded the prestigious Workplace Gender Equality Agency’s Employer of Choice for Gender Equality. Now with the property and construction industry being hit by the impacts of COVID 19 and now as we are looking to beyond, to be a key enabler for the recovery of the country, I look forward to exploring how Cathal goes about creating change, what it’s like to be navigating a family business and the lessons that he’s learned along the way.

Jenelle: Welcome and how are you?

Cathal: I’m very well, thank you very much. Yeah, pleased to be here chatting to you. Today is 11 years since I landed in Australia.

Jenelle: Is that right.

Cathal: (overtalking) __. So it’s amazing how time flies when you’re having fun, as they say.

Jenelle: It does creep up on you and you’ve kept your accent pretty strong though, so I think you’ve got the best of both happening.

Cathal: I don’t know when I go back there they seem to think that my accent’s become Australian and when I’m here I’m still seen as sounding like an Englishman.

Jenelle: Tell me a bit about how COVID 19 has been impacting your business. Clearly, construction is an industry that has been able to keep working during the pandemic but with the reduced work force, adhering to social distancing, how have you been able to ensure the ongoing, the continuity of your projects and maintaining all those norms, social distancing norms.

Cathal: Yeah I think it’s different across the sector. So I think we’re incredibly fortunate as an organisation and the infrastructure part of the sector, that we’ve predominantly been able to keep going pretty well. I’d call out a few factors in that. First and foremost, I think our client body is predominantly governments across States and also the Federal Government. All worked pretty hard to try to get everybody to keep going. So that was, I think, a real big endorsement. I think the second thing that played out well for us because of our industry and that we’re used to operating with a level of regulation and how we go to work from a health and safety perspective, that’s the norm for us. So while this did bring in some extra areas to focus in on, we were able to adopt those and adapt them very quickly to what we needed and what it drove was a lot of collaboration with both the clients and the government agencies and the different players in the market where nothing was seen as company specific. We were putting the best ideas into the industry. So okay how can we all keep going because this is what we need to do and this is good for us as an industry and good for the country. So yeah, very fortunate.

Jenelle: I’m interested in that word - collaboration. We saw a lot of that happening during this period of time. Do you think that it has become an impetus for a new way of working the way we would move forward, or is it you know situational and we’d probably have to work much harder to make sure that that is something that becomes embedded in ways of operating moving forward. What’s your views on the sustainability of the levels of collaboration you saw over this period of time.

Cathal: Is it sustainable? Absolutely it is but it’s a choice and it’s not an easy choice. I think we’ve seen some great outcomes by delivering in a collaborative way and what COVID did was take away some of the perceived barriers and cautions that sometimes stop us doing that, you know. And that the greater good and the bigger impetus was to keep going and that drove great behaviours. We have been working over the – well we’ve finished now – but we were working on the Bushfire Recovery Project which was following the bushfires last summer, clearing all of those sites across the whole of New South Wales. That was a project that started before but again the impetus was there and the collaboration between ourselves and the Department for Public Works as the agency. But broader government in truth to actually get around it to make things happen. We saw some fantastic outcomes where we were able to engage with the local supply chain in a very different way that was more focused about what they needed than what, traditionally, our processes or government processes would need. That meant we could actually get people working a lot quicker. We could pay them really quickly, which again was the driver from government to make sure that the money that was going to be spent on this got into the communities affected really quickly.

And we got to having, I think, somewhere in the region of 93%/95% of all of the teams working on that particular project being from the local council area that the project, the specific house clearance site was or in the adjacent ones. So it was a real direct impact onto the community that had been affected, with I guess a recovery step that allowed them to get some upside in terms of being able to work and create returns for themselves but also done really quickly. When we want it and we focus on it, we can absolutely do that. Now, of course, we then, we were on that program of work and COVID hit, and it drove another level of collaboration because everybody had to come at it again. So in that specific project, we saw it double down. And, you know, I’m delighted that the team, the project team from the government departments and also ourselves, we were awarded the Premier’s Award for the Best Collaborative Project Delivery, I think it was.

Jenelle: Oh, congratulations.

Cathal: So, you know, it goes to show. Yeah, we’re really stoked, that the whole team, cause it was a whole team effort, really got that to work. So when I look at broader procurement and I look at broader models, we, for many years, have been looking to move to more collaborative forms of contract. Now that can be a challenge because often in our industry and the perspective of it is quite a rough and tough industry and quite combative. Well I think that’s counter productive and the opportunity to move to more collaboration where you can’t just hide behind a contract, you’ve actually got to work together to get solutions to drive forward, is absolutely the way forward. We’ve seen some great projects across the country and programs of works over the last few years that are really making ____ change. And you know what they’re actually getting better outcomes as well. So projects like the level crossing removal program in Victoria. Really by picking their teams, working collaboratively, they’re seeing over the – I think we’re four or five years into that program of works – and we’re actually seeing the elemental cost is coming down, the time that these projects are being delivered is reducing, and that has less impact on the local community that actually has to work through that infrastructure development phase. So many benefits that really can come about if you invest in that partnership. So we’re very – very much on that agenda. And I see that the opportunity coming out of COVID is to push that more and more, especially as we move into effectively a stimulus phase in the construction and infrastructure markets.

Jenelle: You’ve raised a couple of fascinating projects with the Level Crossing. I think with the tidy up New South Wales Initiative that you won with that New South Wales Government, you know, it strikes me that, that must have been a daunting – like an exciting win of a contract – but a daunting one. When you think about – well I think about the geographical spread of New South Wales, that you had to cover, and I think about the emotional – like the sensitivities of the local communities, I think about the indigenous, heritage areas that needed to be factored in, how did you even sort of set up the principles, ways of working. I mean were you quite conscious about those kinds of things as you mobilised?

Cathal: So this would have been back at the back end of January this year, so obviously people came back from the – through the fire season – came back into the New Year and then there was a bit of – what’s government going to do and how is it going to address it? While that was unclear, I guess as an organisation culturally we were, you know, shocked by what’s happening in our broader community and we wanted to help. So we did a couple of things. We did, same as many organisations, we donated some funds, respecting that we are part of the broader community so we’ve got to be part of how we help. We also enabled our teams to volunteer time. But there was a sense that the business could and would want to do something if it was allowed to. So we did a bit of planning and preparation about what did we think we would be able to do. And for us it was very clear that the impact on the people affected, it was so material that pace was a key thing. And for our business we’re very good at mobilising, we’re very good at delivering, and we do that through trying to be as smart as we can be and using technology. So we did a bit of work thinking about how would we do this. And when we got the call from Public Works - were we interested in being part of the tender process – it was a really easy answer to say, yeah absolutely, if we can we’d love to help.

Originally, it was planned as three packages across the State – a Northern, Central and Southern package – and we had some quite expensive operations happening up in the Northern part of New South Wales with the finalisation of the Pacific Highway. So we felt we knew that market really well, we knew the supply chain, we thought we could add a lot of value. But we were going to lead it with a technology led approach which was around how we’d track, trace and engage with the supply chain. So we pitched that forward for that first phase, up in the North, and we said we could probably do a little bit more but if you want to do it in the time frames you’re talking that’s probably the max of our capacity. I happened to be heading to London for some group meetings at the time and we submitted our bid and by the time I got to London I had a message from our team which was – we’ve got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that we’re preferred and the government wants to work with us, the bad news is that they want you to take on the whole of the State. So you were right it was …

Jenelle: Oh all three packages.

Cathal: … it was a deep intake of breath moment and then we had to seriously say, well could we do it, cause the worst outcome would be for our team to attempt, not achieve, and then we’d leave people who’d been impacted so much already, hanging out, and that wasn’t a good outcome for them, for government or for us. So we had to get confident we could do it. We came up with a plan and then we executed the plan and the beautiful thing for me was the feedback that we’ve had back from the individuals who our team connected with. We knew this program was going to take months. There were going to be the people who were going to be first and sadly somebody had to be last, and we had to weigh up the benefits, of which were the sequence that we would go through, and we did that through working with an ethics committee to say – okay how would we prioritise – which was really helpful. So we gave the team a framework and then they could engage with really extensive communication with each local community so that the expectations were managed and then when we engaged with everybody it was very much on a personal, one to one, this is your home, what do you want and how do we best service your needs that allows you then to start rebuilding. 

And there’s some great stories. There was one where this lady, her house had been lost and the one thing that she was really looking for, was her wedding rings, which were in the house. Now the team had a magnet on the project with their excavator and they just took the time to do a survey across the whole of the rubble and the burnt remains before clearing out. We didn’t actually find that wedding ring, but the fact that the team took the time and were considerate enough to do that, gave this lady, at least she knew she’d tried everything she could, and so much so that she actually wrote to me to comment on that. And then there was another gentleman; he had – we were there to clear his property and he had a pizza oven which he had built with his son and I think he thought that we had to clear the whole site and then he sheepishly asked – well can we keep the pizza oven. You know, it survived the fire. I said, yeah absolutely. And this brought this individual down – to breaking down in tears – and all it was, was just by partnering to get to what was the best outcome for them. So there’s lots and lots of little stories there, that play out, and it was because everybody got dealt with individually and with sensitivity. So that’s the most proud I get about my team for what they did in that program of works.

Jenelle: And there’s no greater way I think to connect your staff, your employees, contractors to the cause, than those kinds of stories. I think it connects the head to the heart and the discretionary effort, you know, to look for the rings, to save the pizza oven, it is done with pleasure and pride when people can see that homes are saved, memories are kept intact and these stories will outlast, you know, the rubbles of ruins any day. Cathal, I – just on the topic of kind of daunting tasks. You had to move, you know 50% of your workforce to remote working and I know that you had described that as daunting in the past. One measure that you adopted was to – adopted around building that trust and preventing anxiety with your employees, was to introduce something called the No Apology Framework. What was that?

Cathal: So the week before we were having a workshop trying to promote a bit of, like some people being able to work from home and – or wherever they wanted to accommodate a different sense of a lifestyle. The industry’s reputation and its culture for a long time has been presenteeism, being on the site, being in the office and long days. So all of a sudden lockdown came. We moved everybody out of our offices pretty much, so that we were all working from home, and that what we tried to do on each of our project sites was get down to at least 50% reduction so the people who are in more administrative or site office base roles could work from home. And then what we needed to do was space out our workforce across that – but the actual work face. We were delighted to find that our IT infrastructure that we had – it was already there ready to go. We had all the tools and it worked incredibly well. But you also have the other dynamics of people’s lives. So they might not be the only one at home. They might have had a working partner and also their children and home schooling was coming in at that stage. So we had a lot of pressures on and we were finding that people were struggling to reconcile that and feeling that they needed to keep this veneer of a work professionalism, if you like. This was creating an added level of stress, where we’re trying to act as though everything’s normal where obviously everything is exceptional in this situation. So what we did, we just came out with this policy, that if you had one of your children or a partner or you know children coming in looking for help with their homework or schooling, or a dog barking or a cat jumping up on the table, that was just our new normal and we made it very public by saying, no apologies. So if something happened you weren’t actually allowed to apologise for it, you just had to say – kick on with it, let the noise go in the background, we can all deal with it, it is what it is. Exactly. But because we vocalised it, we named it and we normalised it, it just took a load of pressure off of everybody that said, okay, well if he’s comfortable with it then – and the leadership team are comfortable with it then I can get comfortable with it. And it just gave everybody a bit of a licence to just accept that this is exceptional, it’s different, and if you get distracted for five minutes, it’s not the end of the world.

Jenelle: And there’s a remarkable level of relatability. Let’s be honest, we’ve all got, you know, distractions, laundry pilling up, mess in the background.

Cathal: Well, I myself, I never have mess in the background. It’s always just off camera. It’s just off camera. I try not to – not have it in view.

Jenelle: If you could articulate the kind of change or changes you’d like to see and drive in the industry, what are those changes?

Cathal: Yeah, I think what we’re looking to drive is a sustainable construction industry. So what I’m trying to do is get a sustainable business working to actually come up with a way where we can drive a better industry for clients, companies and also people in it. So we’ve got to look at our culture first and foremost. So I mentioned earlier where there’s the long days, maybe toxic masculinity coming through sometimes. I think that’s changing. I really do, I think people now wanting a more balanced life. They want a – and we’ve got great people who work on exceptional projects and they loved them. And they really put their heart and soul into these things, which is great and that’s what you want. But that shouldn’t come at the cost of maybe their family lives, or their personal health or other things. So we need to find a way to balance that. And one of the things I think we need to do is make our industry more appealing. So by having a less combative culture, I think we can attract more people in. If you look at that against the backdrop of COVID 19 now, we’re an industry that didn’t stop. So we right now, we’ve had historically I think a brand issue. Right now we’ve got a really strong selling point. That if you want to have a sustainable career and you want to look after your family, your mortgage, or that – work in the construction industry – gives you a level of certainty. I think we need to play on that and actually really reinforce it. But do so with an improving culture. And one of the key things that we need to drive on that is around gender diversity, for example. We’re so under represented in our organisations and our organisation has won but the industry, especially at the very senior level. So we can – we can attract in graduates and new recruits at the young stages of a career, but we’re struggling to retain them through and get people into senior leadership roles. And that’s a big focus area for us right now as a business but also as an industry. So we started off with that, with our graduate recruitment. We’ve now got to a stage where we’re 50/50 gender on our graduate recruitment, which was a massive shift from where probably 5 years ago we would have been 80/20.

Jenelle: At the risk of being a little bit provocative here, on that one Cathal, how do you ensure that those numbers which are great, turning at a graduate level, that we don’t find the women all bunched up in traffic control and not into the upper echelons of leadership?

Cathal: Yeah so I think we bring in our graduates – we are talking professionalism, we’re giving them exactly the same career opportunities at an early stage that plays out as the guy candidates as well. Okay, so that’s there. But what we see is, we’re still not seeing that transition up. So the first thing we need is a few more leaders in those roles for people to aspire to. Over the last probably four years, our executive committee here for our business in Australia, we’ve actually moved to 40% representation female and 60% male. Whereas historically, we’ve been 100% male. Not good, but it’s what it was. But we’ve made changes now and I think having those visible leaders upfront really is key.

I think then we’ve got to recognise some of the behavioural differences that play out and again naming it, recognising it and then supporting it and coming up with strategies. So what do I mean by that? In my experience, some of our male colleagues are much more forthright. They’d be much more prepared to put their hand up for the next role where they may not quite be ready, whereas a lot of our female colleagues would wait until their at least 100% if not 120% ready for the next role. So what that means is we’ve got to take a bit more of an encouraging role as the leadership team in terms of finding the right opportunities and supporting some of our really talented, capable female staff members, to take those next steps. And that just takes a bit of focus and a bit of – I guess a bit more care to make sure that we do it. And that they’re successful in that. And I believe we start seeing them positive steps going forward, where, you know again you see some of the engineers saying, okay I can be that technical leader or I can be that project leader and that’s the step change we need. And I think then that starts driving a different set of conversations around what do our team want in their life, what’s the balance they need to have between work and home and what’s the culture that plays out on our projects as well.

Jenelle: It’s really clear to me that you have, you know, a real passion and focus on flexibility, on gender diversity. I know you’ve done a lot of work around pay equity, paid parental leave. Tell me about where that conviction, that passion comes from, and maybe some of the perhaps more unique strategies that you’ve put in place to advance those particular areas?

Cathal: Yeah, it’s a good question. I think it comes really from a morale position that it’s just – it’s not right. That’s I guess the starting position. I’ve been very fortunate to always have very strong female leaders around me as I came up through my career as well. So my mentor for many years was a lady called Anna Stewart. She was our commercial director for a very long time in the Group and then went on to become our Group CEO. So from a capability perspective, I don’t know if I’ve met any or definitely not many people who were as capable as she was. So I guess that’s my starting point, that I’ve had some great role models myself. Then I looked at the benefits of actually having a diverse team and I’ve witnessed that around my own executive table, where the conversation, the perspectives and the starting viewpoint is so different that it’s really enriched the conversation, and we’ve come up with better outcomes. That just makes absolute business sense to me. And then when I actually watched the engagements that some of my female leaders will have with their counterparty and clients, it’s a very different outcome as well. It’s less combative, it’s less – listen I’m saying things like they’re absolutely binary statements, this is a range, obviously. But I have definitely witnessed that you can get to different outcomes by engaging in different ways and often the female leaders tackle it from the get go in a very different way that gets to a more successful outcome.

So from a business perspective, I think well that’s an interesting observation and it’s something that if we can tap into, then we are going to have the bigger goal which is a better culture in the industry. So there’s the things that drive me and I guess it comes into the philosophy of collaboration being better than actually combative engagements. And the truth is it’s actually harder to collaborate because you can’t just hide away and defend, you’ve actually got to constantly come back to the conversation and find a way through. And we just have to be courageous enough to try things. And I’m hoping that possibly coming out of COVID we can have that conversation. And I think the scale of what we do when you’re into hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars, it gets a bit scary for people to take those big jumps. But what little micro experiments could we try? That’s probably a philosophy. It’s one we use in the business ourselves. You know when we’re trying to work on people’s flex or energy, we say well what could you do differently? One thing that may improve that. I we let them try it. And once they try it, if it works, great keep it, if it doesn’t, fail, fail fast, move on, try something else. And by having that experimentation culture I think it could be a way that we could unlock some things that could add real benefit and they could be scaled across the whole of the business and the industry, merged from one to one to another.

Jenelle: So just moving from diversity over to the technology, you’ve been quite vocal about the need to the industry to look at new technology and be willing to try new ways of doing things. How have you been going about that at Laing O’Rourke?

Cathal: Yeah, look I think as an industry it’s not a great advert to be honest. But sometimes we are caught up in quite old practices and yet the appetite to look for new stuff is quite low and I think that leaves us open to being disrupted. So we’re more keen to be at that front end ourselves to make sure we disrupt ourselves as opposed to it happening to us. That’s our – I guess our philosophy but that’s still challenging. I think the biggest lean in for us is around our digital technology and we start by design first and foremost. So, you know, traditionally design done on 2D drawings, and even when you moved into CAD it’s a digital form of a 2D drawing. We’ve been big advocates for moving from that into digital modelling. So we don’t call it BIM which is Building Information Modelling, we call it digital engineering. It’s not just about buildings, it’s about any particular element you’re working on, that can actually be designed, modelled, in the model. And what that’s led us to do is to be able to quantify things, very quickly. We’re doing a thing, we’re calling parametric design modelling, and what that allows you to do is to work on multiple scenarios, really quickly and get to within the level of accuracy of plus or minus 10%, a sense of what this is going to cost you and also the time to construct it. Now this might take, in a traditional design team, six to eight weeks to do. We can do that down in about a fortnight and come up with multiple options. So the benefit of – and that isn’t Laing O’Rourke doing it, that’s the whole team, working in that collaborative, digital, immersive environment and using new tools. So you actually get to the better conceptual answer quicker.

So you’re saving time, you’re able to move through discount things and end up on your primary work flow a lot quicker. Then coming into how you actually manage projects, understand your productivity, what are the barriers that actually stop you being more productive. We’re using a lot of tracking and tracing and dashboards to actually do that and they’re now becoming automated which feeds into then being able to quantify again, able to price and also being able to pay. So if you go to the Bushfires Program for example, we pitched in with a very clear, digital dashboard. So that at any given time we’d know what projects were being worked on, what stage they’re at on their process and what value has been quantified for the teams being employed to deliver it and what that means, is we could move to a payment schedule which the industry traditionally works on, maybe 30 days, in some cases 45, and in some parts of the industry, even worse. We were able to move to weekly payments. So, again, a real critical driver for government but they wanted to get that money into the community to actually help the people who had been affected and we could enable that by having that technology to play into it. As we sometimes find that with customers too, that their not quite ready to take that step, and we’ve taken a philosophy, well this is the way we work, so if that’s the case, we will still carry on in the way we feel is best. We’ll fund that, potentially, and we’ve had cases where we’ve shown the out workings in a digital environment to our customers, and they’ve come back and said actually, we might buy that back off you now. Now that we understand it. So maybe we need to get better at communicating and giving the narrative of what we’re trying to achieve and selling the benefits. Because once they see it, they really, really believe it and they get it but it’s hard to articulate when we’ve got a bit of a traditional mindsight sitting behind it.

Jenelle: I mean I was about to ask you, what is it that’s holding the industry back. You’ve mentioned a couple of times in a couple of spheres, that the industry is behind on things like flexibility and the use of technology, and I was wondering what it was and do you think it’s that point about not really being sold on the upside of it, not seeing enough examples, which is where you’re trying to play or are there other things there that you also think are the resistance to change factors?

Cathal: Yeah, I definitely think the – we’re a very tangible industry. I mean if you look at what we do, a lot of people join construction and infrastructure because they can point and say well look I did that. Yeah. It’s a very tangible entity. To taking that leap of faith without the evidence and you know we’ve an awful lot of engineers sitting in this business and this industry. We like to know the facts and the evidence. So I think we need to be a bit more courageous about that in places. But I think we’re probably not the best storytellers either. I think we have to be a bit bolder about our dreams and our visions and what we could be as opposed to just being consistently constrained by what it has been. And I think if we can get a few more leaders being bold and putting out some thoughts and some ideas, and then others can get behind that, I think it makes a big difference. There’s a lady Alison Mirams she’s the Chief Executive of Roberts Pizzarotti. And this is a relatively new company in our market, but actually they’re looking at, sort of, how do we move the industry from a traditional 6 days a week industry to a 5 day a week industry and protecting the weekends so people can get more balance. And fair play, Alison’s been really articulate about that. She’s doubled down and actually put in tenders where they give clients two options and again she’s given them a narrative and a story that’s allowed them to then weigh that up and in fairness to the clients, they’ve chosen to go with it. Now that’s – we need a bit more of that I think. People actually daring to dream, articulating what it can be and then finding a way to implement that into a real life situation. Once we have that and a few places to see it work, guess what, people are very smart in the industry. They’re going to follow where they see benefit and I’m a huge believer that once people see the good stuff, they’re going to take it onboard. And what are we excellent at in this industry is implementation. So once it’s been established, I think we’ll adopt really quickly. As we saw during our individual COVID journey. We went from not doing much flex to being incredibly good at flex. 

Jenelle: Oh that’s fantastic, I love that response. I’m going to change tack now and get onto something that, I’ll put a disclaimer right up front. I am obsessed with the series, Succession, and so I’m going to ask you about your family business. I’m not in any way suggesting that you are anything like the Succession family but a family business can clearly bring some challenges, it can also have many positives.

Your dad is Ray O’Rourke, he’s the Chairman and CEO, runs the company along with his brother, or your uncle…

Cathal: That’s right.

Jenelle: …And your uncle I should say, not or, Des. And I believe they founded the original R O’Rourke & Son back in 1977. So the business has gone through a number of twists and turns and permutations over five decades, there’s got to be a truckload of stories in there I’m sure – all of which I’d love to unpack but not going to – tell me, what is like to work in a business which bears your surname?

Cathal: It’s a huge privilege and an honour in truth. But it comes with a bit of responsibility that you want that association which is our family in effect to be associated with good things, not negative things. So the business started in ’77, R O’Rourke & Son, I was the son in R O’Rourke & Son and now I don’t even get a credit, I’m just part of a broader group.

Jenelle: I did wonder, I was like why don’t you just call him out? And son. The unnamed son.

Cathal: So my sisters’ weren’t too happy about that. They thought it should have been R O’Rourke & Son & Daughters but it’s moved on to Laing O’Rourke and I think working in a family business, and I’ll take you back, so when I left University, I’m an Engineer by training, when I left University it was when R O’Rourke & Son where operating and our business was a very different scale to what it is today. When I left Uni I wanted to go out and get my own job.

Jenelle: So with a view that you would eventually go into it? Or like no way, I’m not going to be the son in this picture?

Cathal: I think naively I thought I’d be able to strike out on my own and I think if I look back on it now, I think there’s a sense inevitability of giving it a go. But at 21/22 I thought I knew better. I went to work for part of the Ford Motor Company actually as a financial analyst. I still look back on those times and I learnt some interesting lessons through my time in that organisation. Some that I didn’t realise until much later on but I used to sit at the desk which was right by the front door and I’d see the manager, the General Manager for the division used to come in every day, walk past and never used to say hello to anyone. And I can’t honestly remember feeling upset about that at the time. I just thought that was normal. But I know now I would never do that. I walk into our office and I would always greet people and say good morning and I think that’s just a nice human characteristic that I think is a good leadership trait. Well just a human trait never mind leadership.

Then at the time, the division I was working at was a company called Visteon which was Ford’s parts division that they’d separated out, made a separate company but it was wholly owned and worked predominately for Ford with a few other car manufacturers they were trying to engage with. And the way that company operated was people would move between Ford and Visteon. It was just like a rotation and a cycle. You just did that as part of your career journey.

In the 6 months I was with them, they actually moved up from being a two-way door where you’d move backwards and forwards into a one-way door where if you move into Visteon, you couldn’t get back into Ford. So people, the culture aligned working with Ford was you were a Ford person. It was pretty much all encompassing.

And for them to then be left effectively cut adrift into this other vehicle, just because I happened to be there on that cycle, that felt quite tough. And then to compound it was that the General Manager, she actually gave the news that this was happening, there was no way back but just before that door shut, she was moving back in to Ford.

Jenelle: That was a bit handy for her.

Cathal: Yeah and it’s interesting because I didn’t realise the impact that had on me but I guess that’s the thing that sat in my mind was “rats leaving a sinking ship”. And unfortunately that company didn’t survive once it became a separate entity. I always think about the consequences it had on people. I was in there as a temporary employee, I got great feedback and I asked for, as most people do, I asked for a bit of development and a bit of a pay rise and a permanent job and I was greeted with “oh we’d love to, you’re doing well but we’ve got a recruitment freeze”. And it lead me to then start looking at other opportunities.

And at the same time as I looked out into other businesses, our business won at the time was a major project for us, which was the Citigroup Tower in Canary Wharf in London and I remember my father saying to me “right, come on, now or ever son, give it a go”. And I thought ok I’m leaving one business because I’m not getting opportunity but the one thing I will get in a family business is opportunity so I said ok, I’ll give it a go, I’ll give it a year.

And here I am 21 years later on the other side of the world, running my own portion of our business, which is much larger than the business I joined. So it’s been a very exciting and diverse career that I’ve been able to have inside of our family business.

But the things that I take away from the early years is that people have choices. I had choices and when I wasn’t being on the road in terms my opportunities, I voted with my feet and I left. So we bring that culture into our business, well that thinking into our business and our culture I should say. We look to do, we’re quite heavy on people development, invest a lot into our teams and our people and that’s about them choosing to spend their careers in our organisation. So we have to make that exciting, we have to give them opportunities and there has to be growth. And this is their career and they’re choosing to spend it with us so let’s make it the best it can be.

So I think that’s a really strong characteristic of our culture is our people. And I think you see more of that inside of a private business than, I assume and I’ve never worked for a big PLC company even in our sector, so other than the Ford experience which is quite limited. So I think that’s one of the characteristics that being in a private business affords you. In terms of being, the benefits of it from being a family member in an organisation, I remember this from when I was a lot younger, I’m still living at home but working with these, I’d hear, or even on a Sunday lunch table, you’d hear the impetus and the thought process that was going behind what the senior leaders were trying to do.

Jenelle: Senior leaders being Dad?

Cathal: Dad and the executors.

Jenelle: And Uncle Des.

Cathal: He was leading, yeah they were leading it. But then you’d see it filter back down through the organisation and it was quite fascinating how it had morphed into something not quite what was needing to be done. That sits quite highly in my mind and that’s why I think in our business we try to do a lot of direct communication as well.

Jenelle: Yeah that’s fascinating.

Cathal: So that you actually get the channels where you can converse with people directly and you can have unfiltered message. You can explain what you’re trying to do.

Jenelle: How do you ensure that you honour the legacy and the history of the previous generation and still create change respectfully and leave your own mark in a family business?

Cathal: That’s a great question. I think you always respect what’s gone before. I mean this is my Dad, my Uncle and all the people that they worked with, they were our leaders for many, many years. All my time in the business. You’ve got a huge amount of respect. However that doesn’t mean you can’t suggest things and I think that the approach I’ve been taking, which has got some traction for me, is again communicating. Being very clear about where you might have a different view, but I tend to do that in a one-on-one setting. Now the majority of the time we’ve already aligned which is great so that makes it quite easy. But when there are different perspectives of things I try to frame up what I’m thinking, why I’m thinking it. And to my father’s credit, he’s a great listener. So while he might not like an alternate perspective at one particular point, he will always consider it. And we’ll always come back round.

What I would say you mustn’t do in a family business, is let the emotional stuff play which is so much more easy when it’s a family conversation. Because if you’re critiquing or challenging, that can be intended as a professional view but it can be received as a personal comment. So that’s the danger zone so you have to make sure you step out of that and I couldn’t sit here and pretend to you that I’ve done that incredibly well all the time. But as I’ve got a bit more experience and a bit older, making sure that you have considered thought time, give your message in a clear way which is less threatening than the emotional way it can be. As a younger gentleman I probably was a bit more hot headed and I’d share things in the moment. So I think taking those lessons, because the worst thing for me, and I love the business and I love what I get to do, but I love my family more. So at no point do I want the business to be a point that creates conflict or it damages my more important relationship. And it doesn’t have to be but you just to got to be quite conscious of it.

Jenelle: What are you most proud of Cathal?

Cathal If you’re asking me that holistically, I’m most proud of our business as a whole. I hope and I believe that we’re a great place for people to work. We’re not perfect, I’m sure there will be pockets where we could do better but I think there’s always a great intent and we’re always trying to do good work and do better things.

For me, myself, I’m 11 years in Australia as I said, I came for three and I’ve managed to grow my career and develop a really exceptional business here as well. That isn’t me alone by any stretch of an incredible team of executives here locally and I get huge support from the group but we’re still allowed a fair amount of latitude and I’m very proud of the business we have here.

Jenelle: Fantastic.

Cathal: And the efforts I’ve put into that as well.

The last three. Three fast questions on change to finish the podcast.

Jenelle: I’m going to finish with a light, fast three questions for you. What is a misconception that most people have about you?

Cathal: Good question. I think there’s a, the outward perception of confidence. I am confident but we all have our little insecurities at times. And it’s nice to have people to give you a nudge in the right direction. So no, yep, you’re doing the right thing.

Jenelle: Very good. What’s one guilty pleasure?

Cathal: Love a beautiful drop of Barossa Red would probably be the worst thing.

Jenelle: Very nice.

Cathal: Or chocolate. Chocolate’s probably my real undoing but I’m on a, I’m three weeks into a detox. I haven’t had any for a while.

Jenelle: Oh goodness me. And what’s one thing you’re hopeless at? Staying off chocolate?

Cathal: Yeah. Actually I wish I was more creative. I think that’s the point. I’m a great energiser of ideas but I sometimes struggle to come up with the concepts. So that’s why it’s important I have the team around me because they’ll come up with a great idea and I’ll just come in right behind and put a lot of energy into it.

Jenelle: Very good. Thank you Cathal. I wanted to say a big thank you for your insights today, I really loved a number of your messages. You talked a lot about collaboration and collaboration being a choice and I think we’ve seen that things like bush fires, things like COVID have taken away a number of the barriers to collaborating and we’ve seen we can get far better outcomes. But as you say it is a choice. It’s something that we need to be consciously working on and towards and then we can more systemically drive those better outcomes by working in that way.

I love the stories that you’ve peppered throughout this conversation. It really shows your connectedness to your work and to the impact that your work brings to staff and communities. And there was sentence that you said that will stay with me that is: we have to be bolder about our dreams and ambitions and think about what it could be rather than what it has been. And I think that’s a beautiful way to summarise where, not just the industry but the world needs to be going when it comes to change. So thank you so much for your time.

Cathal: Thank you for having me I’ve enjoyed it.

The Change Happens Podcast from EY. A conversation on leading through change. Discover more where you get your podcasts.

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