This transcript has been lightly edited by AI
Sean: So, change takes leadership. I was looking at your LinkedIn earlier today. You were talking about vertical leadership and how much you want to do that as yourself, but also with your exec team. Do you want to explain some of the concepts and why that's important to you?
Catherine: Yeah, it's funny. Vertical leadership, we highly recommend it to people. It's a bit of a different way of looking at leadership growth. They focus on heat experiences. You can look at your own journey and you probably get your biggest growth trajectories out of either stuff that goes wrong or taking a big leap of faith. So for me, at 20, going to the other side of the world, I'd never been out of Australia and I moved to Amsterdam.
Sean: Yep.
Catherine: That was pretty significant. I don't know how my mom dealt with it firstly, because I've become a mother now and I just don't know how she did it. But I had to coach everyone from six-year-olds through 35-year-old men. And I was 20. You have to rise. And if you've got that growth mindset, The heat experience that medical leadership Nick Petrie talks about. That's where your fortitude comes from.
Those are the moments that make you lift and you find that you've got capacity or capability that you didn't even know you had. COVID is one of those where, you know, I was thinking, I'm a believer that CEOs particularly should not overstay their welcome because you become the problem.
and five years, loads of change. And literally my job's just changed with getting a venue, but COVID, the environment. Leading a bunch of people through huge uncertainty where literally on a daily basis you have four or five changes to the things that you're making decisions based on.
It's brought everything in and the pressure, are we having a season? Are we not? Are we having an SSN season? Are we not? How do we financially get through this? What are the mental health tolls? How do we decentralise our workforce and maintain productivity? For us, that's where moving to Agile a while ago has been, I've just proven that this transformation journey we're onto is absolutely critical.
It set us up for success and in that way, this is one big heat experience and if we can encourage our people to look at crisis as an opportunity to go back to your core business. To focus on what's really important to grow and seek out the opportunities like digital being one of those, you're going to have the biggest growth out of those moments versus when we're sitting in a conference or in a moment of comfort.
I think for us, it's about embracing it. Not being overwhelmed by it, but trying to really focus on the heat being a way of growth and stimulating growth.
