Illustration of Sara Harrup by Nate Schmold
TRANSCRIPT
Matt
Welcome back to Sound-Up Governance. My guest this week is Sara Harrup, CEO of Foodbank Queensland, Chair of The Executive Connection or TEC, and a non-executive director at Health Care Insurance or HCI. I originally reached out to Sara because I was delighted to learn that she's a musician: a singer and a keyboard player, mainly. And I'm always excited to meet people like me who have significant corporate governance and musical lives. But we'd never spoken before our interview and our conversation went in some wonderful and exciting directions, from governance insights to neurodiversity, to using music to activate your potential as an executive. Listening to Sara, you'll understand why I was excited to dive in and get to know her better. So let's do just that. Sara explained to me that seeing people perform well is like a drug to her. So I asked her for her perspective on what excellent performance looks like in the boardroom. What gets her that hit of dopamine?
Sara Harrup
I like to think of it as there's an art and a science to governance. And I like both. The science part is, look it's the structures and the processes that keep it organized, because I think organized governance lends itself to good governance. I mean, in a way I don't like the term "good governance" because it can mean really different things to different people. But the science or the art of governance is the bit that I'm eternally fascinated with, which to me is it's around the behaviors. It's around, you know, you get this group of people together in this time-limited way. And then they've got to work on a bunch of stuff together and make good decisions, and not scar people in the process. And I think potentially you learn what good governance is by experiencing bad governance. So we know what we don't want. And then we start to think about, well, what would it look like? What could it look like? And for me, that is the environment is high trust, high care, high challenge, which leads to growth. I think having the ability to think with a director mindset helps you to be a better CEO. So you want to have a bit of that, because as particularly as you're working with a board, you can be more effective by understanding, you know, what are they going to be interested in? What are the drivers for them? What's going to cause them anxiety. As CEOs, we often have a pretty clear idea of strategy before it even gets to the board. And so we want to maximize our best chances of having a good discussion that's heading in a direction that's going to make us feel good. I mean, I'll be honest about that. So I do use my director mindset as a CEO. I actually think that it's the harder part is when working as a director to keep your CEO mindset out of it.
Matt
I actually can't believe I'd never thought about it this way. It's old news to talk about the importance of taking your CEO hat off when you're a director. What is a new framing to me is that when the roles are reversed, the opposite might be true: that it's important for CEOs to have a director mindset. This is really well aligned with my thinking that executives usually have more influence over board effectiveness than the board does. One of the reasons that's true is that the CEO, for example, is the one who sets up boardroom discussions to be either thoughtful and future oriented or granular and reflective. How can CEOs help to encourage the former over the latter?
Sara Harrup
Be very thoughtful, I was going to use the word careful, but then that makes it sound a little bit manipulative, but be very thoughtful about what information you provide to your board. Because once you give the board a flavor of something, or once you put something on the table for a board, you then make them responsible for it. Right? So you can't put it on the table and then get cranky that they asked a bunch of questions and got all in the weeds with it. So it's really thinking about what do they actually need to know here? And for me, you always go back to the strategy, you know, we always complain, you know, but and boards complain "we're not strategic enough! You know, we spend too much time discussing matters that aren't strategic enough." So it's really about what's the highest level of information that you can give them that will broadly speak to how that strategy is being executed and what the results are. The other thing that I have learned the hard way is directors are trained to scan things things for bits that don't fit or don't look quite right. Because as a director, you know that you you're not in the operational detail. You can't be across everything. So you're, you're reading material with your antennae out. And so things can be a distraction. Even if you just present a graph, and there's something not quite right about the graph, it's not intuitive. They get a visceral reaction at first, like, "well, there's something doesn't make sense about that." And directors don't like to feel stupid, none of us like to feel stupid. So when we look at a graph, and we go, I don't think I understand that, well, I'm gonna have to sit down and take the time to understand that, and then they start getting more down into the detail of it. And then they're in the weeds.
Matt
You remember the dopamine hits that Sara gets when she sees people excelling. Isked her for an example from the boardroom. It's not a place that's usually overflowing with excitement.
Sara Harrup
If I think back to that first board role: terrible board dysfunction. And in Australia, we have like you can be a charity under two different corporate structures, and one is very low bar. And then the other is the proper company structure. I ended up as the deputy chair with no experience. But we had been talking about how to best advance the interests of the organization. And this organization was in the very low bar kind of company structure. And we actually managed to go down a road of really transparent conversations with the board around transitioning to a company limited by guarantee and that in the rewriting of the Constitution and the rolling over of the company, that we decided to set a new benchmark around what directors would bring to the table in terms of skills and competencies. And that would mean that everybody except for three directors would need to exit. And that conversation was had in a really safe way where, and it was doesn't mean it wasn't tough, it was tough! But it was just a pivotal turning point for the organization. And I think we knew that it was going to change the organization in a really good way.
Matt
So was it like a slow burn dopamine hit? Or was that was there a moment in there where you just thought, "Oh, we just did something really special!"
Sara Harrup
The moment was when I realized we'd actually come to a decision. There was no dopamine hit for me, and that I earnestly knew it and wanted it. And I was like, "you know, not sure how this is gonna go if we're actually gonna get there." And then it was a courageous chair that led those discussions. And when I realized we'd actually made the decision, there was part of me that was like, "Oh, wow, I actually almost can't believe we just got there."
Matt
What about an example from the CEOs perspective? If you've ever been a CEO, you know that boards can often be a source of extreme anxiety. But when things work, it can be really exciting.
Sara Harrup
CEO example would be in my current role. So I'm CEO of food bank, Queensland, which, you know, 14 and a half million kilos of food a year to people in need. So you know, you'd have food banks in Canada. And our success had always been very much measured by you know, more food, more food, more food. It was all about the kilos. And myself and the executive team started a bold discussion with the board around, well, what's in a kilo? Coke's, pretty heavy pasta's pretty light. We got a very experienced PhD nutritionist on board, she actually spent a whole bunch of time with us in our strategy work. And we actually completely pivoted the strategy to nutrition dense, then decided to do a piece of research with the university. Like it's actually just really pivotal in terms of the impact that that made. So yeah, the end of that day, that was a definite high for me, like a "wow!"
Matt
How did you shift the mindset of your donors?
Sara Harrup
Yeah, that's an interesting question. So I don't think it was that hard to shift it. I think. I think you always shift people's mindsets through storytelling. So some of the stories of, for example, you know, you know, historically, you know, we give people a box and in the box is pasta and pasta sauce and whatever. And if you give that to somebody who's come from Southeast Asia, where they're actually they might be a refugee or you know, and they used to cooking in a communal environment with other people. They have never seen pasta in their life. They don't even know what that is. They don't know what to do it do with it. They don't know how to cook it. And in fact, it can be like really humiliating for them to actually try and do something with that food and that food doesn't necessarily even feel good in their stomach. And so it's you know, we've taken away all of their agency and all of their ability to determine their own, you know how to meet their own needs. So when you tell it in those terms, people really get it. And they move away from that welfare mentality of "oh, we should just be grateful that you're getting something anything." To "gosh, I can imagine how that would feel if someone decided for me what I was eating and cooking that week, and I looked in the box, and went 'It's all horrible!'"
Matt
Sara used the word "humiliating." And it struck me that humiliation or embarrassment is maybe the most common emotion I witness in boardrooms. Not necessarily in a traumatic sense, but, you know, anytime someone is reluctant to put up their hand or disagree or admit that they're not understanding something. Coincidentally, Sara had recently shared a post on LinkedIn about the unintended negative consequences of doing something like pointing out spelling or punctuation errors in the middle of a boardroom. I asked her to tell us more about where the inspiration for the post came from and her broader perspectives on this topic.
Sara Harrup
Look, Icould talk about it all day. The original purpose of my post was around the fact that I have ADHD, right? And people wouldn't... They look at me and they go, "Really? You're like the most organized, high performing person, we know! How could you have ADHD?" Well, I have a lifetime of sophisticated workarounds. Right? And I work with a lot of people who are neurodiverse, and they are some of the most high performing people that I know. There are superpowers to that, but sometimes things like, you know, punctuation, and phrasing can sometimes fall away, particularly when you're working to deadlines. So I think that's the first part of it is just acknowledging where people are at and where their strengths are, and not shaming them for things that they at times will have limited control over. Like even the best spell checker and Grammarly doesn't always pick everything up. The second thing is around that people who are neurodiverse often have something called RSD, which is around, it's called rejection sensitive dysphoria. It's a real phenomena, that when they get rejection over something, it can feel enormous for them. So my biggest challenge in my early days as a CEO was managing defensiveness or my own internal sense of defensiveness because it's all amplified. And I now have a really great mechanism of how I deal with that. But I see sometimes for people that I work with, who I know, are neurodiverse, that, you know, they're still on that journey. So that's, that's part of it. The other part of it is it's happened in every boardroom I've been in. And it's foul! Like, it's honestly just foul! I kind of go, "if that's the best contribution you can make, then maybe you should reassess why you're here." The other bigger, broader thing is that when when we are reporting to a board, or when we're a director, and we've got a CEO reporting to us, we must always be aware that there is a power imbalance there. So as a director, you could be sitting there with, you know, up to nine people or on some crazy boards, even more than more than that, but you know, seven to nine people, one person in the room reporting to you that the power imbalance doesn't leave. And no matter how much you think you have a great relationship, it's still always there. I've seen a lot of bullying and harassment happen in boardrooms over the years. And it seems like a small thing, but if you've got some CEO that's being bullied or harassed outside the boardroom, those pedantic things are some of the things that in the boardroom can absolutely undo them. So just for me, it's around equity and being respectful and engendering trust and using open questions and focusing on the strengths. And look, I actually am quite passionate about good grammar and punctuation. But I always just ask myself the question "in the big picture of things, does that lack have a full stop...is that material?" And if it's not, let it go.
Matt
I personally think that what Sara is telling us here is universal, not just in the sense that it goes beyond boardrooms, but also in the sense that it's not just about correcting punctuation and not just about being aware of and curious about and inclusive of neurodiversity. It's about being interested in the fact that there's no one set of conditions that will be optimally inclusive of everyone in the room at the same time, and that any person in your boardroom might require a different set of circumstances to activate their superpowers, no matter how experienced they are, or aren't. In any case, I mentioned that I initially reached out to Sara to talk about music. And let's be real: she's a legit musician, a trained singer and dancer actually, who played in a serious band, in addition to being a serious executive and board member. I really wanted to understand the extent to which her musical and professional lives are intertwined.
Sara Harrup
So intertwined! So one of the things about having ADHD is you never know when the inspiration will strike you to do the things you need to do. And unfortunately, when you're a CEO, or a director, or in any role, you have deadlines and you have things that you just need to do, even when you don't feel like it. I actually use music a lot I use, I have particular types of music that I use when I'm writing a report or writing my board papers. And it's become so trained in me now. I only need to put that music on and I'm immediately in the space of being able to write. I use it for big picture thinking. So on the drive, if I'm driving to my work site, I will play like stuff like from Pirates of the Caribbean and Harry Potter. So really big themed music, when I'm trying to visualize a big strategic goal or something massive that I think we should be aiming for. So I use that sort of big music to help. It just gets my brain into this other space of almost like grandiosity and anything's possible. So I use it to motivate me, I use it, I use it for fun. So if I'm doing work that I find boring, I'll put something fun on in the background and I'll bring my standup desk up and I'll stand, you know, and kind of work that way. And I also use it because my brain doesn't ever really switch off, it only switches focus. So I use it to switch out of work mode. So for example, on a weekend, if I want to make sure I'm not thinking about work. Like, I really liked to cook. So if I'm cooking, I'll often put totally different type of music on or I'll often when I'm cooking, I will revisit old music that haven't listened to for a long time. And so it puts me in a different space. So I use it to change my areas of focus and my mindset,
Matt
Do you... I do this, and I don't I can't find other people who do at least not in front of me. But do you use your music life as part of the identity that you put out in the world? So for example, I will introduce myself to a boardroom or a conference or whatever by saying, you know, "here's, here's what I do professionally. Also, I'm a musician." And always there's people in the room who say, "Hey, you know, I'm a musician, too! Let's talk about that sometime." And it's a, it's a humanizing experience. Is this part of your...the way that you identify yourself?
Sara Harrup
No! and it's not... and it's interesting, because in my professional life, I've done a huge amount of work on the imposter syndrome stuff. So I no longer have that in my professional life. But I still have impostor syndrome, about being a musician. So I don't introduce myself, as a muso.
Matt
But you did out on LinkedIn, right? Where did that come from?
Sara Harrup
I was having a go! I dunno, having a go.
Matt
Okay, that's really interesting. This is, you may be I assumed that you weren't one of these secret musicians, who are the CEOs who are secret musicians, but sounds maybe like you are.
Sara Harrup
I am a bit. Yes, yes. And it's funny because there's a TV show in Australia. And it's quite funny. They get like comedians and stuff on it. And there's a part of the TV show, where they have to take a passage out of a ridiculous book, like, I don't know, the Engineering Principles of Bridge Building. And they have to actually sing that passage to a really well known song. And everybody has to guess it. So actually, at my work at Foodbank Queensland, someone gave me this really bizarre book, and we're all joking about it. And I went, "let's play that game!" And I actually sang! And it was great because I got over the imposter syndrome because the focus was on the ridiculous passage in the book. And people went, "Oh, you can sing!" and I went. "Yeah, I guess..."
Matt
There's a lot to admire here in what Sara is telling us. Her extraordinary success in her professional career, her dedication to music and dance, how ADHD has impacted her life and work. And let's not forget her governance insights. I'm now inspired to seek out all the secret musicians I can find in the corporate governance world and hear their stories. Oh, and be sure to remember Sara's advice to CEOs that they need to sometimes think like a director, even though the opposite can sometimes be a pain in the butt in the boardroom. As usual, I learned so much from this conversation, including about stuff I never would have guessed. Thanks as always for listening to Sound-Up Governance. If you have any insights you'd like to share or ideas for future guests and topics, please send an email or voice memo to soundup@groundupgovernance.com. Until next time.
Sound-Up Governance (Ep10) - Music, neurodiversity, and good governance (feat. Sara Harrup)