RELEVANT with Dawie Olivier: CIO of Westpac New Zealand – By Angela Shearer

GRIT! That’s what’s needed! Leadership and teamwork are full contact sports.

  With his current portfolio of +/- 700 internal team members and around 250 in partner teams, Dawie’s Portfolio includes Strategy, Architecture, Digital Channels, Sales and Channel Migration, Information Security and Banking Technology.

  He loves the phrase, “relentlessly positive,” and cites two reasons; “firstly, positivity is very contagious, and if you can inspire those around you to aspire rather than to fear, then every battle is winnable. This isn’t blind optimism, but rather the ability to maintain the focus on the end of the tunnel, rather than writing it off as a train. Secondly, it contains the word “relentless.” The ability to stay the course and be committed to great outcomes despite adversity and setbacks. That is what wins the long game.

  “We must develop people so much that they could leave, but create such a great environment that they don’t want to – a view that Dawie borrowed from Richard Branson. The environment needs to be a place where people feel safe and comfortable to experiment, learn and improve.  The concept of organisational safety is broad and deep (and as with many concepts becomes an easy mantra quite quickly), but quite simply it starts with the way leaders behave when things break. Do we lose it and go after the root cause and the one to blame, or do we let the team do their thing and learn with them?”

   He believes that as leaders we can and must debate decisions and direction as hard as possible in the room, but when we have made the call, and we leave the room, we all action the decision with enthusiasm and commitment. There is no place for corridor violence or sabotage after the fact.

    Dawie notes one of the biggest challenges facing leaders today is rapidly evolving skills requirements. He says, “That we have so many technologies running today which aren’t the ones we want or will need in the next 3, 5 or 10 years. How do we get our people on the front of the new emerging technologies that we DO want and at the same time have them run the ones we still have? I am a strong believer in investing in the people who are already in our teams, as opposed to wholesale swap-outs with new people when new technologies emerge.

 At the more macro level, I strongly believe in the concept of the ‘loneliness of command,’ meaning that there are many pressures and tones that we as senior leaders must shield our people from. This sometimes puts huge pressure on the leader, but there are times when we must push back in the interest of protecting the flow of value from our focused teams.

   I take every opportunity to share my vision and view and to gather questions and insights from others. I absolutely love the community of practice sessions, team sessions, open-floor sessions and often impromptu corridor sessions to explore our future with all these passionate and smart people. You create shared values in an organisation by creating them together and modelling them relentlessly. You will know it’s working well when even senior people get called out for behaving contrary to the values. I have an entire book of examples where I have had my own transgressions highlighted!

   One of my mid-career memories is when a Group CIO asked me for a detailed response to a question, which would have been answered in the normal course of business if he’d just waited for a week. The response to this made me acutely aware of the disruption caused to the flow of valuable work people had in flight. This experience has stayed with me, and has taught me to temper my enthusiastic curiosity by asking questions with the caveat, ‘when will this information be available in our normal course of business?’ The fact is, the more senior you become, the most casual question can easily become someone’s quest.”

   It was Captain Sandy Myers who had the biggest impact on Dawie. Captain Myers was his Commanding Officer on the SAS Drakensberg, the flagship of the South African Navy. He had the privilege of serving under him for most of his sea-going career, in several senior roles.

   Dawie says, “Captain Myers had a gift for mentoring and giving gentle guidance to hot-headed and ambitious young guns such as myself. Captains at sea don’t stand watch, but he would often come and sit on the bridge during mine and he would tell me incredible stories about his long and exciting career. Virtually every story he told would hold the threads of great culture, of camaraderie regardless of rank, of adventure and danger and the triumph of the team despite the frailties of its members. He backed his people and he let me make mistakes, then he spent the time to help me unpick those mistakes so that I could improve my craft. It was only when he eventually retired, and I served under less proficient leaders, that I learned just how rare it is to find a truly great mentor and leader like him.”

    “Great ideas come from everywhere, if we create enough opportunities for people to engage in free and informal thought. We often see “innovation teams” and “garages” created in organisations to encourage fresh ideas, but this approach is contrary to true innovation. When we make it someone’s job to be creative, well then that’s what we get! On the other hand, when we embrace ideas from anyone and give them room to elaborate and test, all kinds of magic happens. One of my favourite examples is in my current team. About 18 months ago, one of the data leads asked me for a blank laptop to play with because he wanted to try out some open source data tool. That test ended up creating a real time, cloud-based enterprise analytics and big data platform that is so far at the front of the curve that they have been consulting back to a few Silicon Valley giants on the use of these platforms. 

  I live for those moments when people create magic, and even they are surprised! It’s an almost child-like delight that lights them up from inside and you can actually feel their self-actualization.  It’s Priceless! 

  I also had the amazing opportunity to attend the Stanford Executive Program in 2016 and to be part of the MIT-Soane Digital Leadership course. The opportunity to be with extremely smart people, having great focused conversations about the “big ideas” of our time is inspiring and intimidating in equal measure!

   To inspire creative thinking within my teams, I use a favorite technique which I call “THE 1 PAGE WHAT.”   When we start looking at a problem or goal, we tend to limit ourselves to the reality we know. I ask the teams to put down on a single A4 sheet WHAT they would need to do to make it ten times faster, cheaper, shorter, bigger or whatever the desired dimension or outcome may be. Then, we work back one A4 at a time until we have an idea of the first test and what the learn cycle is. Then, we go after it.”  

 “My personal approach? I say yes to all new contributions but with the following rules: Iterations must be short and showcases must include both the product and the engineering learnings; these must also be shared publicly. That way we don’t end up with secret societies, but rather a body of shared learning that benefits all.”

     When asked about the most important decisions that he makes daily, Dawie says, “It’s about where I spend my limited focus and time. In a nod to the Agile Manifesto; I prefer conversations and unscripted interactions over meetings and agendas; Individual and small team open sessions over townhalls, emails and broadcasts; Whiteboard sessions and creativity over frameworks and Target Operating Models; Stand-ups and showcases over Steering committees and Board packs; Outcomes over inputs, Iteration and exploration with customers over polished models and detailed specifications.

     When helping new employees acclimatize, Dawie says, “My favorite tool is to spend half a day with them at the formal inductions and then check in informally a few weeks later.  Formal induction sessions can be a bit dry, so I love to get in the room towards the end of the week, and take all questions, then draw and discuss. Probably the best way to illustrate culture and value is to let people experience them.”

   Dawie believes that to stay relevant we must deliberately expose ourselves to as many ideas and people outside of our environment as possible. He says, “We actively bring names and thought-leaders to New Zealand to spend time with us on the floors. It is quite a cool experience to watch our own people debate things with the folks who literally wrote the book! Love it.”

   He goes on to say, “I often get the opportunity to host leadership teas from other companies and share our journey and learning with them. The main thrust of the conversation is about culture and values, and I tell a story about a time that I quietly nipped into a vacant meeting room to take a call. During my call there was a knock on the door and I saw a small group standing outside waiting for the room. Well, the call was important, so I waved them away and finished my call. When I left the room, the Scrum Master was waiting for me. He pointed out that I had just prevented the team from having their morning stand-up as scheduled, and to boot, had shown a lack of respect for them! Of course, he was right. I duly apologised to them in person. 

   About a year later, I was hosting the executive team from a smaller bank and we’d had a fantastic morning.  I’d just finished telling this same story when there was a knock on the door. I opened it and there was the same Scrum Master and team who’d booked the room for a teleconference workshop and we’d overrun our slot. Imagine their surprise when I marched the entire executive team out of the room to find another one.

 The one thing that Dawie finds tough to tackle as a leader is retrenchments. He says, “When our organisations get themselves into a position where they are so overweight and cumbersome that we have to reduce the headcount, I see that as a failure of our strategy. When we get ourselves to that place again and again, that is a failure of our leadership.”

 In keeping his rose-tinted memory in check, Dawie says, “Humans are VERY bad at remembering things as they actually were. I use a simple technique when doing presentations at conferences or when telling the stories of our journey. That technique involves having another person present who has also walked the path. Their mandate is to call me out if I stray too far into hyperbole, and I tend to point them and their task out to the audience. I couldn’t come up with a better way to keep my inner story-teller honest!”

 Overwhelming volumes of email pose a time and capacity challenge to most leaders and Dawie suggests I ask a friend and colleague about his approach to email; he says, “Mike used to just SHUDDER. Too much mail is my standard. I do a quick scan for spam and marketing stuff (vaguely interesting, file for later; not vaguely interesting delete). All cc’d mail goes to file X. Then I look for anything important in its subject or sender and deal those and I pass along ones that someone else needs to deal with.” He adds that he routinely has around 400 unread emails in his inbox.

  On the controversial topic of social media, Dawie has a positive view, “Social media has created the reality of instant feedback and the expectation of exactly that. It means, where we may have been slow and methodical before, often at the cost of what our customers really need and want, we no longer have the luxury. If we aren’t living up to our customers’ expectations, they tell us loudly and publicly. This short and loud feedback loop is one of the biggest reasons for a relentless focus on short iterations and high velocity. Of course, at the same time, it is also an absolute gift to get that feedback quickly when we are operating at velocity.”

  On the more personal side, Dawie believes in Karma. You never take what is not yours!

  He is also not above being playful amid serious talk. When asked what color he would be in a box of crayons he said, “Scissors. There are enough crayons to colour in the picture. What we need is some shape and texture!”

  When asked to describe the color yellow to a blind person he broke the rules again and said, “Yellow is the warmth on your skin on a lovely summer’s morning; orange is the heat of early afternoon and red is the pain of sunburn… Sorry, I know you just asked for yellow.” 

  I thought I had him on the dilemma of giving him an imaginary elephant that he could not give away or sell but he stepped right up and said, “Well, Mr Elephant, I guess it’s just you and me. My morning commute is a gorgeous and relatively short trip along the sea, and I reckon it would be even better a couple of meters above everyone else. My Shi-Tzu (Button) would just love to have a new friend around the house, he and our Siamese cat (Ariel), not so much…”

  If Dawie could morph into any animal in the world, he says he would be an Orca. Graceful, powerful, tight family bonds, smart, they travel widely and have been known to eat Great White Sharks!

  When asked to wage a bet on the winner between Wonder Woman and Wolverine in a battle, Dawie reckons Wonder Woman wins hands down. He says that her indestructible bracelets and shield are made of feminum, which is one of the few materials that can resist Wolverine’s adamantium claws.  Once he gets tired, it will take very little effort to restrain him in the ‘lasso of truth’. He says, “Besides, Logan is in his late fifties and after years of hard living probably not so sharp anymore anyway. Dianna is an Amazon, schooled in the art of combat from infancy.”

  The last TV show Dawie watched was a great Discovery Channel documentary on the Pacific Ocean. Him, his partner and daughter are avid scuba divers and have just returned from an amazing diving trip to Fiji.  Watching the documentary together was a way to revisit some of the majesty they experienced first-hand.

   Private thoughts while driving include yearnings for pies, while his more serious side is kept busy with audio books and podcasts. He recently finished Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography narrated by Bruce himself. A Fantastic story! He also recently listened to the Tao of Seneca, which he describes as a great reading of the letter of Seneca, the Stoic master to his student. Apparently not as heavy as it sounds. 

  When Dawie isn’t listening to audio books, he says he mulls over conversations and interactions, past and those yet to happen, trying to figure out how he could handle them better.

  Describing himself at school, Dawie says, “I fell into the uncomfortable space between the smart kids and the popular ones. I loved sport AND computers. I didn’t enjoy school because I found the content and delivery boring and mechanical and I ended up rebelling quite badly. In my last 2 years of school I went to a strict Afrikaans boys’ school, which aggravated the problem. In short, school was a bit of a trial (for my parents and teachers as much as for me). My call-up to the military was a blessing in disguise as it tipped me to join the Navy Permanent Force. Nearly 10 years there does wonders for a rebellious spirit. As a kid I wanted to be a Fighter Pilot. I was madly inspired by two great books about WW2.  The first was ‘Fight for the Sky’ by Douglas Bader, the second was ‘The Big Show’ by Pierre Clostermann.

  Recommended Reading:  Dawie recommends Blink, Malcolm Gladwell. “I have always believed in the value of instinct born of experience and repetition. In this book he lays out the many different forms that this takes and how it comes about. Over the last 10 years or so of management training, we have been given some of the most sophisticated models and tools for management ever created, and yet, when you spot something you often almost instantly know that it is a duck without using any of them. At the same time, this is a time when we know more about, and are more aware than ever before, of our inherent cognitive biases that colour every decision. I highly recommend the book.”

    Who does Dawie look up to?  “My Dad!” He says, “I was a very difficult teenager, and it must have been very hard for him to have me around. Despite that, we became very close when I grew up. He has always been there for me (even if I didn’t want to know it), and he picked up the pieces I left behind many times. 

  I also look up to my partner, Toinette. When we moved to New Zealand she gave up a great career and business. She focused on getting our family settled. She then undertook an MBA, which she just finished, despite having been turned away from Universities in South Africa for not having a B-degree. She threw herself into it and emerged with both her degree and a Cum Laude. Her focus and work ethic are just amazing to me, and then she still has time to be a great Mom and fix my booboos. Love that lady.”

 When asked what he is proud of, his answer was short and swift, “My beautiful, smart, curious, funny 10-year old daughter, Isabel.”

 In his free time Dawie likes to be on or in the sea. Given the chance, he loves to get out on the boat and anchor up in one of the many little bays in the Hauraki Gulf around Auckland. A bit of (not very good, he says) fishing, a simple braai, lots of jumping in the water with his daughter. That is bliss. He adds, “When time is less scarce, I love to read, so my Kindle is never far away.”

  The most physically challenging thing that he ever did was participate in the Ironman South Africa. He did it three times but the first one was especially difficult. Dawie says, “I pulled my hamstring a month before the event, and I could barely walk. I wasn’t allowed to run again until the day of the event. On top of that, I had never run a full marathon before and here I was about to do one after a little swim and cycle.”

 On the topic of conflict Dawie says, “I have learnt how to bring conflict back to the individual perspectives being experienced and the reason for the conflicting reaction. When we understand opposing views, we can start working through the gaps in our understanding and/or intentions. This is something I was very bad at and have been working on actively for many years. Still not exactly Henry Kissinger, but better.”

 Unforgivable for Dawie is underhandedness, lack of authenticity and lies.  His philosophy is, “Dogma is the enemy of learning,” and he makes sure that victories and success are properly celebrated by broadcasting the stories of the amazing people who were responsible for creating them.

 On the future and digital currency, he said, “What a ride we had last year! Cryptocurrencies are here to stay and will find wide and official adoption over the next couple of years. Whether it be Bitcoin or Ethereum or another one is irrelevant. We are probably about 5 years away from a first true national cryptocurrency, and after that it will spread like wildfire. Paper currencies are, frankly, dinosaurs. Will we end up with a universal currency? No, I think we will end with a much smaller number of regional/political/ideological currencies, and perhaps a single conversion vehicle/coin. I do believe we will see blockchains come into their own first, and most likely in the context of national ID, passport and voting environments. My current mission is to lead the bank out of fearing these things, and rather figure out early how to make them a regular part of our financial environment. Watch this space!”

     Advice for those going into leadership positions: “It isn’t about you! Your only job is to make others possible. Learn as much as you can as early as you can. Bring your fresh thinking and ideas, and at the same time make sure you are getting the experience and absorbing the wisdom of those who have been around the block many times.

  Always be curious, and never accept things as they are because they always have been that way. Lastly, do, or do not, there is no try. A common mistake that leaders make is believing that they must have the answers themselves and traits that are most likely to derail then is arrogance and self-interest.   One of the most poisonous concepts of our time, is the focus on creating and managing “personal brand” within organisations.”

  What most people don’t know about Dawie is that he struggles with near paralyzing imposter syndrome. There are many nights, he says, that he wakes up in a cold sweat, fearing that he might fail the team and the amazing people in it. 

  Dawie says, “I AM just getting started.”