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Chairman John Mullen has said there are no “big egos” left in the Qantas board or management one year on from the Saar review into the Flying Kangaroo’s culture and governance.
Speaking to The Australian, Mullen said Qantas has “religiously followed through” on every one of the report’s 32 recommendations after it found the airline’s leadership had been too deferential to former CEO Alan Joyce before his departure in 2023.
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“We’ve had the actions audited by independent auditors to make sure we’re not kidding ourselves that we’ve done things when we haven’t, so I think that’s been hugely helpful but also I think the change has brought a much stronger focus on customer,” he told the newspaper.
“For instance, on-time performance is really doing well – that journey never ends – reputation is rebuilding, and employee motivation and employee engagement is strong and rising.
“I don’t think there are any big egos around the board table anymore, and there are no big egos in management, both of which can be really corrosive, I find, in a business.”
The board has seen the exit of several prominent Joyce-era figures over the past two years, including ex-chair Richard Goyder and adman Todd Sampson, while audit committee chair Belinda Hutchinson will be retiring “in due course”, said Mullen. Among the current board are Doug Parker, former CEO of American Airlines, and ex-Cathay Pacific CEO Tony Tyler.
“I think it’s very important we have two or three really strong leaders of airlines around the world on our board who can help us,” said Mullen.
“We don’t have low cost budget airline experience, as an example, and so we’re working on that, but you don’t want the whole board to be made up of experts from the field or you just start to sing with one voice.”
In the report released in August 2024, independent business adviser Tom Saar found one root cause of events that damaged Qantas’ reputation in 2023 was “top-down leadership with a dominant and trusted CEO, leading to insufficient listening and low speak up”.
“There was too much deference to a long-tenured CEO who had endured and overcome multiple past operational and financial crises,” the report read.
“The mode of engagement between the Board and Management did not always facilitate robust challenge on some issues. Issues could have been brought to the Board earlier for input and reporting could have included more analysis of options and risks for Board debate.”
Goyder in September last year said Joyce’s “command and control” leadership style had been necessary during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, but conceded Qantas had not done enough to return to normal after it was over.
“We had tightened up on so many things, nobody could spend a cent, it was all about liquidity. The number one rule of business: don’t run out of cash,” he told The Australian Financial Review at the time.
“As we came out, we had probably a coincidence of people who decided not to come back to Qantas, and we still had very tight controls because we needed to, because the balance sheet had been really knocked about.
“We probably didn’t give our frontline people the capacity to deal with the myriad issues which came along. Our customers, rightly, felt that we weren’t responsive enough. In hindsight, you would do it differently, but it was difficult at the time.”
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says:It’s great that QF has given itself the “mirror treatment” so now both the customer and staff can traverse the new road on and up. These days, whilst QF has some innovative programmes for world travellers to enjoy it has to be aware that it is now only a big regional carrier, just a small cog in a huge international wheel and, likely to remain so but no doubt the strong relationship with Emirates will continue and increase with benefits and synergies for both carriers and their customers. Good times ahead!