Telstra, Paladin Energy, Myer, Megaport and AMP are among the companies appointing young directors

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BOSS talks to five directors under the age of 50 about their careers and the experience they bring to the boards on which they serve.

Between 2016 and 2024, the average age of a director sitting on an ASX300 board edged up to 61 years from 59.8, suggesting that the pathway for younger executives to landing listed board roles is not getting any easier.

“More and more boards are considering diversity beyond gender, and that includes age. It follows that diverse boards make better decisions,” says Watermark managing partner David Evans. The director says that apart from the actual digital expertise, her experience in building tech businesses gives her a different mindset. She is accustomed to not knowing all the answers by virtue of having worked at the frontier of the business landscape, and has long based decisions on data.

“What I bring to the boardroom is three decades of experience of knowing so much about tech. In my experience, there are a lot of people who are really motivated by the next new shiny toy when it comes to . I’ve got the depth of expertise to constructively challenge that. “I think that I then could go in with really clear value proposition. I’m really strong around risk, in particular emerging risk. The second piece is governance, making sure that the right governance is in place within management and at a board level to keep pace with the way the business landscape is changing. The last piece is technology,” she says.“I felt like it was the right thing to do, to invest in what I see as my second career.

Whittle already had aspirations to be a director, and so he did the course and became a director of the Melbourne International Arts Festival, where he served for seven and a half years. The experience taught Whittle about governance, and he observed board, chairman and CEO succession from up close.“A CEO can often be purely motivated by the short-term and long-term incentives that they are measured and rewarded against. But there’s often a much bigger, longer-term picture.

Whittle has interests beyond the retail sector but notes that board roles only work when the director is passionate about the category. But unlike the other young gun directors, Palmer has not grown up in tech businesses. Rather, the 49-year-old’s expertise is in mining and oil and gas. She sits on the boards of Paladin Energy, Karoon Energy and gold explorer St Barbara. Palmer sits on the audit and risk committees on all three, chairing two of them.

“It’s chicken and egg. You need to have ASX experience to have an ASX board. Because I turned down some junior end of town , it was starting to be detrimental. Thankfully, someone saw past that,” Palmer says.“Once you have got a listed company on your CV, that’s where it becomes very easy for the recruiters to put you forward for more.

“For anyone to conceive that a young director is needing the money really irks me. You have to come into this recognising the responsibility you have. I’d say you have to have a strong balance sheet because you don’t want to be in a situation where you’re not able to walk. And you certainly shouldn’t be hanging there.”When Bridget Loudon fielded the initial call from a search firm about the possibility of joining the Telstra board, she thought the firm had the wrong person.

“I do think it is helpful. The more you can capture the customer voice around the boardroom, the better. That’s all types of diversity, , gender, age, ethnicity and so on.”

 

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