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Qantas leadership was too focused on Alan Joyce before his exit last year, a governance review for the airline has concluded.
In the report, 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”.
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“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.”
Saar’s report also found that Qantas’ “strong safety culture was not representative of the leadership culture of the Group as a whole”, board engagement with management “did not always achieve the right balance between support and challenge”, impacts of the COVID crisis “were not always fully appreciated”, and “external communications were at times combative, which exacerbated issues”.
In a press release, Saar said Qantas had instigated the review out of a “genuine desire to improve the Group and ensure the mistakes of the past led to lessons learned and improved governance”.
“Many of the actions taken by Qantas in response to the recommendations are complete or well underway,” he said.
“While some of the recommendations will take some time to embed across the organisation, if the current momentum is maintained, my expectation is that tangible benefits will occur within a short period.”
Incoming chairman John Mullen, who will replace Richard Goyder when the latter steps down on 16 September, said it is “important that the Board understands what went wrong and learns from the mistakes of the past as it’s clear that [Qantas] let Australians down”.
“As the national carrier it is our duty to make sure we always act in the best interest of stakeholders and hold ourselves to the highest level of accountability,” he said.
“Vanessa and her new management team have made positive progress towards delivering better outcomes for customers and employees, but there is still a significant amount of work to be done to rebuild the trust of all stakeholders.
“The implementation of the recommendations in the report will result in stronger governance and better decision-making within Qantas and ultimately better outcomes for our stakeholders. I’d like to thank Tom Saar for his work on the review.
“On behalf of the Board, I’d like to recognise the contribution that Richard has made during almost six years as Chairman of the Qantas Board, particularly guiding the airline through the unprecedented challenges faced during the pandemic.”
Joyce left the role of Qantas CEO last September, two months before he had initially planned to step down, amid a wave of bad press for the airline. The board announced on Thursday that his final pay packet would be slashed by over $9 million.
