PUBLISHED: 09 Oct 2014 21:20:42 | UPDATED: 09 Oct 2014 21:20:42
Joanne Gray
Youth and gender are issues that I’ve had to face over the last couple of years. When I was first appointed to the executive committee of Qantas, it was a clear issue that arose. I have thought a lot about how to deal with being a young woman in a senior role and the way that I managed this was seeking to bring in experience and wisdom and difference to my teams. Grey hair is very welcome in my teams. I see this as a way to counterbalance my youth. There are those who have much more experience and I can never make that up. So why not go and seek their views, listen to them, seek their counsel?
[
Grounding the fleet and locking out the union in 2011] could be described as a public relations disaster, but it’s not of the making of the
PR department. It was a decision that the business made. Was it good for our public relations? Absolutely not, it obviously caused a great deal of distress for a lot of people who were stuck as a result. But it was a decision that the CEO and board made at the time. We did our best, communicated openly with all stakeholders as best we could and you could argue if we didn’t operate the communication as we did, it may have actually been worse.
Our approach to social media absolutely changed [
as a result of the engine explosion on QF32 in 2010]. The first we knew about it was a direct result of a picture that was picked up by Bloomberg that had been taken on an iPhone on an island called Batam in Indonesia, of a piece of engine or fuselage with a kangaroo on it. The media thought when they saw the picture on Twitter it was a tail.
We weren’t monitoring social media so we didn’t know about it. Bloomberg then picked up the picture and published a rumour that a Qantas airplane had crashed. That story ran, the share price dropped and that’s how we got onto the story. That was an unfortunate way of recognising the importance of social media.
Our initial approach was trying to control it. We had very strict processes around what [employees] can and cannot say. We recognised it was wrong. We’ve completely done a backflip. Instead, we look at how do we get our staff talking on our behalf in social media. And it’s all about having conversations, we monitor it, we participate in it and we encourage our employees to do so as well.
Olivia Wirth spoke about her leadership lessons at a Boss Emerging Leaders networking event in Sydney.