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Welcome to The Executive Exchange, a premier podcast series for on-the-go senior executives. Each episode features short, impactful podcasts where industry leaders share key insights and experiences from the water industry.
[00:00:00] Piers Clark: Welcome to the Exec Exchange, 15-minute podcast in which a leader from the water sector shares a story to inspire, inform, and educate other water sector leaders from around the globe.
[00:00:10] Piers Clark: My name is Piers Clark, and my guest today is George Theo, the Chief Executive of TasWater for this special third of three podcasts that we've been doing with leaders from TasWater.
[00:00:21] Piers Clark: George, brilliant to have you with us again.
[00:00:23] George Theo: Pleasure to be here, Piers.
[00:00:25] Piers Clark: Now, let's spend the first few minutes just reminding ourselves a bit about who you are and the organization you work for. So, can you give me the potted history of George Theo first?
[00:00:35] George Theo: George Theo, CEO of TasWater, been here for just over four years. I've worked in the water sector for over 30 years. I spent the best part of 12 years at Unitywater. It was formed by three council water businesses and came to Tasmania that had been formed by 29 council water businesses.
[00:00:54] Piers Clark: Excellent. Well the experience you had at Unitywater is the bit that made you so perfect for the role at TasWater. And just in case people hadn't heard the previous podcast, TasWater, where are you? What sort of services do you do?
[00:01:09] George Theo: We're on an island off the continent, south of Victoria in Australia. A highly decentralized state with respect to where our townships are.
[00:01:16] George Theo: We serve an area of about 68,000 square kilometers, population of just over half a million people. In addition to that, is about 1.2 million tourists that come into the state.
[00:01:25] George Theo: About 11,000 kilometers of pipe under the ground, 169 treatment plants. You would have heard the fun fact that we always spell out and that is 2% of the population for 38% of the treatment plants amongst the 16 large water utilities in the country.
[00:01:39] Piers Clark: Excellent. Now, the past two podcasts have been talking to people in your executive team and trying to get a sense of what it's like working inside TasWater. You're the man at the helm. You're the man who sets the path that the organization goes on, and it's your shadow that dictates how people do things inside TasWater.
[00:01:58] Piers Clark: So I'm keen to hear it from the horse's mouth exactly what this ambition to be a leading organization and what breakthrough performance means to you. Describe to me the ambition that you've got and how you're gonna take the organization there.
[00:02:13] George Theo: Well, at the beginning of this whole process when I joined the organization, one of the things that I noticed was that we could be a lot more bold and we could be a lot more ambitious with the reality that we were confronting.
[00:02:25] George Theo: 91% of our sewerage treatment plants are non-compliant. That's about 109 out of 110. So we've got to be able to address what is effectively decades of underinvestment in sewerage.
[00:02:35] George Theo: But we had to be bold in declaring the ambition that we have and making a public commitment that we're going to address these issues. Now, they may not be of our making, but we are charged with the responsibility of making it good.
[00:02:50] George Theo: So I think the first thing is you've got to tell everyone what the reality is because people are paying you good money, and I think it's a reasonable expectation to have where a customer says, "Hey, where's my money going?" So we need to tell them. The reality is that some people may think that there are no issues to address, or ignoring the reality that we face will somehow fix the challenges before us.
[00:03:12] George Theo: I remember saying to the organization, and I've been saying it to my senior leadership team when I talk about criticism, and it's this saying that I read in a Mark Twain book , and he said "There's no power in criticism, and if there was any power in criticism, the skunk would've been extinct ages ago."
[00:03:28] George Theo: We are going to be criticized no matter what we do. We're gonna be criticized for doing something, and we're gonna be criticized for doing nothing. So I'd rather be criticized for doing something because the something that we are doing is in service of our community and for the environment. At the end of the day, what we're trying to do here is to actually deliver a better future for our children and our grandchildren.
[00:03:49] George Theo: And there's no point arguing over and trying to find out why we are in the state that we are in. What's really important is for us to focus on how do you get out of it in an innovative way, but also moving at pace. So you can have incremental improvement or can you have step-change improvement? Because just doing things the way we've always done them will just get a ripple effect improvement year on year, but how do you get that significant step change in the approach that you take?
[00:04:16] Piers Clark: Yeah, so step one is understand what you've got and be open, honest with both your teams and your customer base around the scale of the challenge, which can't have been easy, 'cause of course that then burns all sorts of relationships if you're not careful, so that must have meant that step two was making sure you've got the right team.
[00:04:35] George Theo: Not only having the right team, but also being really clear about the direction, and then enrolling all our people onto the journey that we're on. We're all focused on pulling the same direction, getting alignment on what's the problem we're trying to solve. Because when you talk about issues, people have different perspectives, and you may not necessarily be aligned on what the actual problem is that you're trying to solve.
[00:04:59] George Theo: So we put a lot of work into getting alignment, common understanding, and then the pathway to solution can be varied. But it starts with at least recognizing the problem, and collectively we're on the same page with respect to what the problem is.
[00:05:14] Piers Clark: But that must mean that as a leader, you've got to exercise some, well, there's zero tolerance on certain behaviors, I assume. 'Cause if you're going to do this, you're gonna set an ambitious goal, and you need an executive team that are bought into it, and we're not hiding things, and we're actually gonna get on with it, there must be certain things that you're saying, "Okay, this is not something we're gonna compromise on", and expecting your management team to work with that.
[00:05:38] George Theo: Absolutely, and we have to be vulnerable in that process. And it's easier to say the words, but you gotta actually play them out. Words are important, but also behaviors and the standards you set are equally as important, if not more important.
[00:05:52] George Theo: So that's all critical. So you gotta have some vulnerability in all of this. We will get many things right and we'll get many things wrong, and one of the things I keep reminding people is we don't do brain surgery in this organization. You can recover from a mistake.
[00:06:05] George Theo: And the important thing is when we do make mistakes, we recognize them quickly , we correct for them, and we keep going. And everybody knows, you get more learning out of mistakes sometimes than out of getting something right in the first instance.
[00:06:18] Piers Clark: And it's interesting 'cause there are many organizations where when people make mistakes, there's a blame culture of "Well, who can I blame for this thing which I was at least partly responsible on?" And people bury the bad news.
[00:06:29] Piers Clark: You've gotta be in an organization where people are open about it so that other people learn from that mistake and they don't repeat it.
[00:06:35] George Theo: Absolutely, and we're getting very good at being able to call out the things that we haven't done well, and I think that's really, really important.
[00:06:43] George Theo: One of our directors when she was at a previous organization, she was pleading with her organization to have a trophy room of all the mistakes that they made which is so powerful because it says not only do we celebrate our wins, we can also learn from the mistakes that we made because they are wonderful learning opportunities. So it's a really nice way of thinking about it.
[00:07:03] George Theo: We should not be afraid of trying something new. And if we're gonna bring about change at pace and be a high performance organization, you need to be able to innovate. You need to be able to look for better ways of working. You gotta be able to collaborate better, be more inclusive and bring more people into problem-solving opportunities, and not try and solve issues through the lens of your own team, for example, because most of the challenges we have in water utilities requires input from across the organization as opposed to input from one part of the organization, 'cause you don't get the best possible outcome otherwise.
[00:07:39] Piers Clark: Brilliant. Now you've mentioned a couple of times breakthrough performance, and those are really powerful words , but what do they actually mean to TasWater?
[00:07:49] Piers Clark: What does breakthrough performance mean?
[00:07:52] George Theo: It's looking at those parts of the business where we're not performing as well as we want to. And it's setting stretch ambitious targets over the next 18 months, three years, and five years. And then having a crack on improving the way we work. And, I find the technical solution is not necessarily the challenge. The challenge is more, how do we bring people together to bring their creative juices into the tent, and actually work together to actually problem solve, and do it quickly.
[00:08:22] George Theo: So sometimes you can hit a target by good luck. And sometimes you may not hit a target, but you were performing really well as a team. And there is a difference between how teams perform and whether they achieve or don't achieve a result, or whether you achieved a result simply because of good luck as opposed to good management.
[00:08:40] George Theo: So being able to call out is it because of the way we worked, or is it because of the way we approached it? And really being able to differentiate between the two.
[00:08:49] George Theo: To give you some examples, the business had record numbers of water quality complaints and odor complaints. And as soon as we brought teams together from across the business to actually look at it, we halved those complaints. Within a matter of a few months we were able to solve those complaints because people started working collaboratively and not trying to solve customer odor and water quality complaints in isolation of each other. That's a really simple example.
[00:09:12] George Theo: If you look at water meters, it's the cash register of the business, and customers need to have accurate meters. Everything that you should be metering should be metered. But it's so easy for disconnection to occur.
[00:09:23] George Theo: One part of the business, which might be in the Asset Management Group identifying meters to replace, the Customer Group saying, "We really need to get these meters in the ground." The Delivery Team thinking, "Oh, well, do I really wanna install a meter? I'd rather be focused on upgrading our sewage treatment plant."
[00:09:39] Piers Clark: Yeah, the priorities are different.
[00:09:40] George Theo: Correct. So I spoke earlier about alignment, but if you look at problem-solving from the customer's perspective and work backwards, then it should be easier for people. 'Cause if we're here to serve our customers and we're problem-solving in service of our customers, and you have that end in mind, and you work backwards, then you're able to actually press ahead and actually problem solve collaboratively and quickly.
[00:10:05] Piers Clark: Excellent. Now, you've been a chief Exec for 16 years, so you're a very experienced water utility chief exec. The water sector globally has shifted quite a lot in that 15-year period. What advice would you give chief execs coming into the water sector now to maybe come up the curve a bit?
[00:10:22] Piers Clark: What do they need to know?
[00:10:24] George Theo: I think you gotta stand for something and I think you gotta be able to clearly articulate and bring an organization on a journey. I think you gotta be able to look at what matters most. And again, it's in service of your customers.
[00:10:37] George Theo: What do you wanna stand for as an organization? And then work really hard to make sure you deliver on whatever it is that you wanna stand for as an organization. And be steady, cause you'll have your detractors along the way, but if intrinsically your motivation is to deliver better outcomes for your customers and the environment, and they can be different things for different organizations, if that's what you're there to do, then you need to hold true.
[00:11:00] George Theo: What will hold you in good stead is that you've got a group of people that are supporting you, and you're all on the same bus heading in the same direction, delivering the outcomes that are important to your customers.
[00:11:11] Piers Clark: And what you've referred to a few times is you gotta acknowledge the state you're in and be prepared that there's gonna be detractors, there's gonna be people who don't like it, but actually just get the truth out there, 'cause once the truth is established, you're then able to at least have a half-ass chance of building on it.
[00:11:27] George Theo: Yeah, absolutely, Piers. And look, I think there are too many people that think there are simple answers to complex problems, and that's not the reality we live in. The world's becoming more and more complicated. Expectations are changing and they're increasing, not only from regulators but also from customers, and I think that's fair enough.
[00:11:47] George Theo: And you gotta think about, what are the alternatives to doing what we are doing? The alternative of not responding to the challenges that are being presented and the emerging challenges that we know are coming our way, anywhere from affordability to environmental pressures and the like, you gotta be able to respond to all those challenges.
And I think, how you do that is really important. And the best way to do that is to actually bring everyone together and work together and have everyone contribute as much as they can into what that future looks like and how we get there.
[00:12:18] Piers Clark: Brilliant. Well, we've run out of time, I'm afraid. As you know, we like to finish with a bit of a personal question, and last time we had your messages to what advice would you give your younger self.
[00:12:27] Piers Clark: Now, the question I'm gonna give you is what do you owe your parents?
[00:12:32] George Theo: Oh, I think pretty much everything. You know, one of the things I learnt through observing my parents is the value of hard work. The value of honesty. Treating people with respect. Don't buy anything you can't afford, save up for it is something that sticks with me to this day.
[00:12:47] George Theo: And fundamentally, just being a nice person, be a good person. You know, add value in the community. Be someone that others can be proud of.
[00:12:54] Piers Clark: You have been listening to the Exec Exchange with me, Piers Clark, and my guest today has been George Theo, the Chief Executive of TasWater, and this has been the third of three parts that we've been doing on TasWater and its journey to become a breakthrough performing water utility.
[00:13:11] Piers Clark: Thank you to our sponsors, and until next time, keep asking questions, keep sharing, and keep safe.