Former Australia Post CEO Christine Holgate, now steering a turnaround at logistics company Team Global Express, says surviving a political storm has better equipped her for challenging economic times.
With 35 years of leadership experience at board and executive level, Christine Holgate is the group CEO at logistics organisation Team Global Express (TGE). She was previously CEO of Australia Post, from which she resigned after intense scrutiny over executive bonuses, which led to a public and political controversy. A subsequent parliamentary inquiry cleared her.
Prior to that, she was long-time CEO of Blackmores. Holgate is also a member of the Nation Brand Advisory Council for Trade and a director of Collingwood Football Club.
How’s business?
When we took over TGE, it was tough. It felt like we were running up a downward escalator just to stand still. We have awesome frontline workers who have fundamentally improved their service, and brilliant support teams. We’re in a much stronger position now, but the market is much tougher. I read somebody from CommBank said this is the toughest it’s been since 1992.
I’m extremely grateful many of our customers have supported us during our turnaound, particularly those who accepted having price increases when contractually they didn’t have to. We’ve also built amazing partnerships with organisations like CommBank, NAB and Westpac. They helped us refinance away from more challenging lenders. Now we’re at normal business banking rates and our labour turnover has gone from 37 per cent at many sites down to 10 per cent. We’ve got to continue to build on our service for our customers and focus on growth.
What does that do to how you adapt and think about leadership?
It fundamentally changes how you look at leadership and hire leaders. Our leaders have to face into difficult markets. Several of these are currently not in a perpetual growth cycle and [our leaders] need to do this while they are transforming the business. It is hard. They must be resilient. It takes a different leader than leading in a growth market. They need different capabilities.
More than ever, you need diversity of thought, because you need everybody to challenge each other. For example, our CFO and I are aligned in the values we want inside the organisation — about respect and being united in how you work together in a team — but we might look at a problem through different lenses.
That different perspective has helped us to be stronger and consider both the upside and downside of decisions. We profile people coming into senior leader roles to make sure the jigsaw fits together. We look for competencies like resilience and endurance, because we were a business that was a turnaround before transformation, which was really hard work. It’s like inheriting 15,000 people and a load of assets, but you’re a startup. It’s a dichotomy you have to manage every day.
Some people from structured environments will struggle, while others from unstructured environments will also struggle with the ambiguity because they’re not structured enough. You’ve got to be balanced, because when you’re turning around a business that starts so deep in the red, it can be overwhelming.
What’s the playbook — what works?
With Blackmores, Australia Post and TGE, there was a common theme — none of those businesses were growing when I joined them. They had all got stuck. You can cut costs, but ultimately you have to grow again to live.
When we got the keys to TGE, it was COVID and we were unable to travel. So we held Teams calls with our 146 facilities to enable the chair and me to meet our frontline people, one facility at a time. We called it our “listening tour”. We had three simple questions: What do we need to do to grow? What do we need to stop doing? What do we need to protect? That last question is important, because if you’re not careful, you can destroy positive aspects of a culture in all the change that happens.
We also surveyed over 22,500 customers. The feedback from our employees and customers was very consistent and enabled us to build a priority list of actions promptly. If you can talk to your customers, employees and suppliers, and are prepared to listen and not defend, they’ll give you the answers you need. As you go forward, it’s important you continue to do it. That’s what is best for turning around a business — listening.
Describe the board experience with private equity firm Allegro, which acquired TGE.
I don’t think it could be a bigger contrast to Australia Post, where the board members had many attributes, but only one was truly independent and not appointed by the minister.
The first thing is, on a private equity-owned board you have the smartest people. Aside from the Allegro guys, we’ve got deep operational leaders in this industry. (The TGE board consists of chair Adrian Loader, Allegro co-founder and investment director Jeremy Trouncer GAICD, former DHL Global CEO Ken Allen and former Toll Express Global COO and Australia Post and DHL executive Harlis Malkic.)
They know the best practice, training and governance for our industry, and hold us to account every week. We talk every Thursday morning and have monthly board meetings. They ask intelligent questions and then, if everyone thinks it’s a goer, they say, “Right then, go execute”. If that was another company, you’d have to go back at least four times, which just uses up time.
You can be much more nimble. Everybody has the same vested outcome. Everybody is a shareholder on the board and our leadership team are shareholders too, all having invested their own money. You have a much stronger alignment on making the right decision.
What is the lesson from that nimbleness?
Productivity is critically important. You can drive a lot of productivity improvements by seeing how you can work differently. But ultimately, for a business to be successful, you have to grow. Australia has got to get the growth agenda back in the boardroom and consider risk differently.
Your thoughts now on resilience and mental health support?
When I went through everything, so many people said to me, “Whatever you do, don’t mention publically that you were suicidal, don’t mention you had a mental health issue, you’ll never get employed again”.
After what I had been through, I knew if I didn’t speak up, it wouldn’t help others who had gone through the same thing. In the days after I gave evidence and called it out, we were inundated. I decided I’d be open about the impact it had on me, because I felt not doing so was ridiculous and I didn’t want what had happened to me to happen to someone else.
(The 2021 Senate estimates committee inquiry noted: “a shareholder Ministers’ commissioned investigation of the purchase found ‘no indication of dishonesty, fraud, corruption or intentional misuse of Australia Post funds’”. The inquiry “exposed serious shortcomings in Australia Post’s governance, the board’s processes and its relationship to government”.)
I’ve been very open about mental health, the impact that event had on me and how I got through it. Speaking out has enabled our organisation. It gives people the licence to speak up about themselves and we have very open conversations.
Seventy five per cent of suicides are men, 78 per cent of our workforce are men. So if I was to pretend it never impacted me, what kind of role model would I be for our frontline workers? Not recognising the impact could also indirectly imply you tolerate it, and I won’t tolerate it. I believe you have to be honest about the impact it has on you to enable it to stop.
We end up with armour in corporate life because we must have performance. How do you create space for human awareness?
I’m very open with our employees about their health, and they are with me. That has helped build trust in the organisation with our employees. I don’t think talking about mental health issues makes you softer, it makes you stronger. Our teams know, because we will not tolerate some behaviours, we will not compromise on our values.
I’ve felt the embarrassment of being on the front page of every paper in the country, because the Prime Minister has accused me of something terrible and given me no right of reply. I felt like he did not just run me over, but reversed back over me again. Once you’ve gone through a level of public humiliation, there’s not much that will stop you. You don’t die, you actually grow as a person and as a leader. Things happen to everybody, but it’s how they get back up. I tell my team, you can make a mistake, but it’s how you call it out, deal with it and own it — that’s how we’ll be stronger together.
Do you have any standout lessons around boards and governance?
When you have people in a governance situation who have all come from a similar background or been appointed by the same person, there can be a risk you will make the wrong decision. Real benefits come from diversity of thought. It’s not just gender or cultural sensitivity. Diversity is about thinking differently, which means you’ve had a journey of different experiences to get to that table.
Marcus Blackmore AM FAICD (executive chair then an executive director of Blackmores until 2020) is absolutely amazing, but he can be challenging. We had a strong relationship of trust, and with the board directors. I know some CEOs who don’t feel they have that with their directors, so don’t tell their boards everything.
That’s not healthy for directors, or chairs, nor for CEOs, because the organisation doesn’t get the benefit of all that experience from the people on the board. Having a strong partnership between a chair and a CEO doesn’t mean it has to be cosy, but there must be trust and respect, otherwise it filters into the culture of the organisation.
How does a government board director deal with increased political risks?
I wouldn’t want what happened to me to put anyone else off joining a government organisation. I’d want them to look at the purpose of the organisation, look at the chair, who is often the most important conduit between the board and the minister. If you have a weak chair, or the chair has a poor relationship with the minister, there is a higher risk of something going wrong.
This article first appeared under the headline ‘What Christine Holgate did next’ in the February 2025 issue of Company Director magazine.
Latest news
Already a member?
Login to view this content