Susan is a non-executive director at RioTinto and Macquarie Group, Chair of the National Housing Supply and Affordability Council, Chair of The Australian Centre for Gender Equality and Inclusion @ Work Advisory Board, Trustee of the Sydney Opera House, and Member of the INSEAD Global Board.
Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz, former CEO of Mirvac, brings over 30 years of experience in the property industry to this insightful one-on-one interview. With a career that began unexpectedly as a researcher for Knight Frank, she has navigated the complexities of real estate, which she describes as more than just a financial instrument—it encompasses urbanisation, sociology, psychology, and economics. During her decade-long leadership at Mirvac, she championed cultural transformation, sustainability, and diversity, while leaving a significant legacy on the urban landscape. This interview explores her journey, leadership insights, and commitment to diversity, providing valuable lessons for anyone interested in the property sector and meaningful change.
Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz is currently serving as the President of Chief Executive Women (CEW), an organization dedicated to empowering women leaders in Australia and advocating for gender equality. CEW focuses on increasing the representation of women in leadership roles across various sectors and addressing the barriers to their career advancement. In her role, Susan leads initiatives aimed at harnessing the talents of women to drive positive economic and societal outcomes, emphasising that greater female participation benefits everyone.
UDIA NSW DE&I:
Hi Susan, thanks for your time today. I would like to start by asking how did you find yourself in the property industry because a Bachelor of Arts is quite different to the usual property industry qualifications.
Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz:
Well, I did my undergraduate thesis on the migration of Icelanders to Australia and there were 93 of them and I met them all. When I finished my thesis, it suddenly occurred to me that I would need a job and in one of those great sliding door moments,.
I called my supervisor who that very day had had a call from Knight Frank, the agency who were looking for a researcher. I thought, I absolutely know nothing about real estate. I’ve never even thought about it as an industry I’d like to be into, but I can read, I can write, I can analyze and research. So I went and I got the job and 30 plus years later, I’ve still been in the real estate industry all this time.
UDIA NSW DE&I:
Wonderful! You’d written about the fact that it (the property sector) was quite complicated given that it touched on laws, built environments, certainly social and psychological elements, which is I’m assuming are all the part that’s drawn you in and has kept you continuously involved.
Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz:
That is why I love the sector, because real estate clearly is a financial instrument, but it’s so much more than that. It’s urbanization, its psychology, it’s sociology, it’s economics. It is a really complex ecosystem, and it changes people’s lives for good or for bad in how we have built form around us. So I found that endlessly fascinating. And of course, then there’s the element of working in real estate. You leave a legacy for good or for bad one way or the other. We leave our footprint on the cities that we work in and that to me has been endlessly fascinating all around the world.
UDIA NSW DE&I:
Now that you have left Mirvac, do you feel like you could be the real Susan in your Chief Executive position?
Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz:
When you’re a CEO, you are on broadcast all the time. Every single thing that you say, don’t say, smile, don’t smile, raise your eyebrows, don’t raise your eyebrows, pay attention, don’t pay attention to. Everything is broadcasting all the time and so I was always really conscious that every single thing I was doing was moving the organization in one direction or another.
In a sense it’s both a burden and a privilege to be in that position. I didn’t realize how that would feel when I finally was able to put that down and work in a different way.
There’s always that balance when you’re a CEO, you must be authentically you, but you also send a message all the time. So you have to balance those two things up. Now I’m in six different worlds, which are all new to me and so it’s quite a different experience.
UDIA NSW DE&I:
Do you now find that to be quite liberating? Even though you are a proven leader in the industry and a valued member on the boards that you sit on, do you find that after all these years of leadership experience, it is now easier to be a more authentic leader?
Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz:
Oh, I don’t know if it’s ever easy to be an authentic leader. I’ll tell you what I do really miss about my time at Mirvac. I certainly was ready to stop being a CEO and I knew for sure I didn’t have another CEO job in me, but I missed the absolute sense of belonging to a tribe, to one group of people for 10 years, same mission every day, and I thoroughly miss my tribe.
UDIA NSW DE&I:
I do recall your departure. I think you said in an article it was very bittersweet. After a decade long in the organization, one would feel like a family member and that sense of belonging is quite true to anyone’s identity.
What has it been like in your new leadership position in CEW? What are some of the things that you could maybe have done differently in hindsight? Of course, it’s always easy to reflect back in hindsight. What do you hope to achieve in your position at the CEW?
Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz:
CEW is a total labor of love and it’s absolutely vital for the health of our economy and our society that we make better use of the highly educated workforce that we have. We have one of the most highly educated female workforces in the OECD, but by the time we get feeder rolls to CEO positions, we’re down to 20% women. All those women have leaked out of the system and we are not utilizing the talent of half of the population in the way that we should.
It is in fact the single biggest economic lever that we have to create prosperity for all, not just for women. The vision for the CEW is really to try and harness the power of all of the 1300 women that are part of CEW and the 3000 women who are part of the Connect program, to really harness that power to affect change so that women aren’t leaking out the pipeline in all areas, whether it’s in politics or public service or in corporate Australia.
We were just not using the talent that we have right in front of us. My vision for CEW is for women leaders to enable, empower all women for the good of all. I very much see it not as a seesaw in which if one side wins, the other side loses. That’s not the case at all. It’s good for everybody if we have greater female participation. So that’s what I’m trying to do with CEW, is unleashing the power of the membership.
UDIA NSW DE&I:
I’d like to discuss a little bit about driving genuine cultural shift and leadership changes. I’ve spoken quite a lot to the Mirvac team members, they say that you are truly effective at what you do because you walk the walk and talk the talk.
How do you enter an organisation, genuinely influence, and drive change when there is perceived difficulty from the senior leadership board. Many a time, females being hired is just a tick box exercise, which we still very much experience today. How do you bring about genuine change?
Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz:
There is no simple answer to that question. It’s a very multifaceted approach in bringing about real and sustainable change but data is an important part of it. I’ll give you a good example of that. When very early on in my tenure at Mirvac, we were looking at the gender pay gap, everybody said, oh, of course we don’t have a gender pay gap. Who would willingly or knowingly pay women less than men? So we don’t have a problem.
I said, well, okay, let’s measure the data and we’ll see if we have a problem, and of course we did have a problem, of course we had gender pay gap. We then went about fixing immediately and, on the spot, fixed it and then kept fixing it and kept fixing it and kept fixing it. But without the data, we wouldn’t have been able to affect that change.
You couldn’t escape from the data. It was absolutely clear. We’ve got a gender pay gap issue. So we worked on that, we fixed it and seven years in a row we had zero like for like pay gap, which is something you have to work really hard at. So there’s data, but there’s also storytelling and providing people a reason for doing what they’re doing. I often say, and I was brave enough even to say it on my last investor call, that the people at Mirvac don’t wake up in the morning and say, I should go generate some earnings per share today. They just don’t. They wake up and think about legacy, they wake up and they think about quality, they wake up and think about the customer. They wake up and think about how we’re going to shape the urban environment for the better and leave something positive in the sense of making the world a little better than when we found it.
So that’s what drives people. Finding a purpose is absolutely critical to driving cultural change and I’ve spoken a lot about the transformation over those 10 years, but Mirvac really was in not a great place when I arrived in 2012. Staff engagement was 37%, which demonstrates a very toxic environment, there was no clear strategy and it nearly went broke during the GFC.
So there was an enormous path that we had to walk down, and there was no one simple fix. There clearly was getting the “what” right. So what is the strategy? What are we good at? Let’s do more of that and what are we not so good at? Let’s stop. Then we focused on why are we here? What’s the purpose of this organization on the planet? We framed that around “reimagining urban life”. We’ve tried very hard not to tolerate people who were very productive and very good at their job but left a trail of destruction in their wake in terms of people.
We were very explicit around measuring people’s what, but also people’s how, and all those things together really formed the foundation of the transformation. Then I would also say that two things that sort of unexpectedly got, if you like, the snowball running down the hill by itself were quite unexpected. One was finding our voice around sustainability before it was fashionable and having quite ambitious goals around being net positive in water waste and energy by 2030. We also said we don’t know how to do that yet, so please come and toil in our garden for a while and help us. Of course, people did. The other one even more surprising one was around innovation. I thought we were setting up an innovation program, which we did, and it was based on the work of Clayton Christensen from Harvard University.
It forces you to ask why. The program’s called Hatch and if you ever meet a Hatch trained person, they’ll ask why that’s interesting, why this, why that? And they drill down and down and down into the problem until you get to what you’re really trying to do. The reason why it had a cultural effect as well was at that point we got staff engagement to about 60% and we got stuck. We were stuck around safe to speak, which was very puzzling to me because Mirvac’s a really nice place. You’ve met Mirvac people, they’re lovely. It’s not shouty, it’s not aggressive, it’s a lovely place, lovely people, but for whatever reason, people didn’t feel safe to speak. So you can have all the diversity in the world and if you don’t have a psychologically safe workplace, the diversity is meaningless.
People who got trained in the Hatch methodology were working on things where nobody had any expertise. There was no hierarchy in the room and they were trained to question why and turns out they went back into their day jobs and did the same thing and it completely broke down the concerns people had about being safe to speak.
Then our staff engagement rose to the nineties, so that was a happy accident and a byproduct that I would never expect to have happen. So the short answer to how do you affect real cultural change – there are a thousand things that you have to do every single day to keep that cultural change moving in the right direction.
UDIA NSW DE&I:
Transparency and honesty play a huge role in the sense that to be able to open up your workplace and allow them to speak their truth without being reprimanded is quite a big element. There’s always talking the talk about instilling cultural changes, but until you can measure that you don’t really know how effectively it has been implemented.
On being introduced to Mirvac and similarly, any other female CEOs around the country, you faced quite a lot of controversy when you were touted as being flown into the role. Surely there were some very difficult moments entering the chief role.
With tenacity and commitment, how else did you quieten the noise and criticism to get on with your day job? Having a sense of purpose to be able to show up at work each day and every day, that’s obviously very fulfilling. But to last the whole 10 years there, there’s got to be something that’s said about yourself, your personality, and your work ethics.
Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz:
You’re quite right, my entry into back into Australia into Mirvac was very difficult back in 2012. The way that the then board transitioned the CEO was not ideal for sure, and the market didn’t like it. And Mirvac had, as I said, a staff engagement of 37%, and there were comments at the time “let’s see how long this girl lasts.” So I thought, right, well I can listen to all that noise, and it was very painful actually. I could listen to all that noise, or I can just get on and do the job that I’m here to do. So that’s just what I focused on. And in those very early years, I did nothing outside of work at all except run Mirvac and care for my family. That’s all I did. I didn’t go to any events; I wasn’t on any committees.
I did nothing except just focus on fixing this company and my three young children and a husband. That’s what I’m going to do. And that’s largely what I did for maybe four or five years before taking on additional things outside of Mirvac. I was just very focused on this company, that has such a fantastic legacy. It’s such a rich history that Bob Hamilton started all those 51 years ago, and the flame that he lit that hadn’t gone out, but the flame needed to be tended and to grow. So I just tried really hard to block out the noise and just focus on the job that we have to do.
UDIA NSW DE&I:
That all sounds very pragmatic and absolutely the right things to do to basically steady yourself before you can focus on any of the extra board activities. It enabled you to prove the others wrong.
Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz:
Of course, I had my training wheels on, that was the first time I’d been CEO. It was a complex situation and I was a trainee CEO effectively, and I certainly won’t deny it wasn’t a painful time, it really was in many ways, but I got a great team around me, we acknowledged when we made mistakes. I mean, things didn’t always go as they were supposed to go but over the years we made a huge transformation in the organization, which I’m very proud of.
UDIA NSW DE&I:
Is it personal to ask did you have a mentor? Somebody who was able to guide you through that very difficult time. Surely there would’ve been a sense of quite a lot of insecurities, and were you scared because it was your first CEO role, the sole focus was on you and there was so much at stake. It would’ve been quite an incredible, emotional landscape to navigate.
Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz:
Over the years I’ve had quite a number of sponsors and mentors who’ve really been able to hold up the mirror to me, tell me from time to time what I was doing wasn’t as effective as it could have been or guide me in choices that I was making. So over the years, I’ve had quite a number of them, and one of them used to always say to me, and I never have forgotten this, and it really did help me through the early years, was “What’s the worst that can happen here?” It’s probably not that bad. Really bad things do happen in the world. They’re probably not going to happen to me today at Mirvac and so keeping perspective on that, on what’s real and what really matters is I think very important, and my children are excellent at this job in my life. I often call them the most honest focus group that I have.
UDIA NSW DE&I:
They sure are.
Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz:
Now 24, 22and 18, any whiff of corporate spin or theater or getting ahead of yourself, and I’m very swiftly brought back to earth in my house. They’ve been a great rock all the way through in making sure that I’m focused on the things that are real and not the things that are ephemeral if you like. And I think adding to that, I’ve never confused the positional with the personal. A lot of things come to you as a CEO, you get invited to do a lot of things, but it’s not because of me, it’s because of the position that I hold. And the minute that you don’t hold that position, all those things shift to the next person who holds that position. And if you’ve confused those two things, if you think it’s about you and about your personhood, then that’s a very difficult transition to make. I think I’ve never confused who I am as a person with the position that I held.
UDIA NSW DE&I:
I think it’s kept a very human element about you also to have not let that gotten to your head, you have been very purposeful, are always conscious that you are the representative of the organization that you head up. Therefore, you are the appropriate leader because it’s not always about your own personal agendas and that you could drive a fair initiative for those organisations that you present.
With mentorship and sponsorships being powerful tools for supporting individuals, it enables you to shine a light on the disadvantaged communities or the disadvantaged minority groups. How do you encourage mentorship programs to promote diversity and growth opportunities? Because so often we target a particular minority group to advocate for and the rest is left behind.
Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz:
I think it can happen in a number of ways, and I think I was going to say before that I certainly have sponsors and mentors, but I also had paid coaches and the whole ELT, in fact has had a coach and still they still do. So that we were able to work on ourselves as a team and I had a paid coach all the way through my Mirvac career, so you can put it in place for yourself. Then some of my other mentors and sponsors were people that I’d worked with over time who’d taken an interest in my career and offered me opportunities and offered me guidance. And then you can have formal mentoring or sponsorship programs inside an organization. And to be honest, I think that’s the least effective of the three because they can start out really well and all good intent around a mentoring program.
But when it happens genuinely between two humans who connect, I think it’s far more powerful than a formal program. I’ve seen them work, but not often. I’ve more often seen that sponsorship and mentoring happens organically for people that are looking out for other people. I think with respect to intersectionality and looking at other groups in the workplace, again, the saying is true that you can’t be what you can’t see. I remember very clearly one of our senior executives who’s in a same sex relationship told a really moving story about how one day he realized that on his career journey he’d had a partner ahead of him, in an accounting firm who was gay and he looked at that guy and said, “Hey, I can belong here because this person is openly gay in the organization and has been very successful”. Then one day he realized he was that guy, that he was now the senior guy to whom others looked up.
Having that real openness and transparency that it’s okay and it’s just normal to bring your full human self to work or whatever your sexuality, whatever your introversion, extroversion, whatever your background, that’s what drives organizations to be the best that they possibly can. When you’ve got genuine diversity of thought, not necessarily just visible diversity, that’s good, but that’s something the precursor to having genuinely diverse thoughts inside an organization. I would say I’m having visibility of different types of people being just normal, completely normalized inside an organization and nothing even noteworthy really. I think it’s really important for where we’ve got intersectionality of outsider groups.
UDIA NSW DE&I:
Previous staff have approached me to express “Sometimes I don’t always feel comfortable in the office and not so much being on the construction sites”. From that conversation, we ended up attending an industry LBGTQIP+ event and I thought it was such quite a small gesture, but then the feedback I got the next day was, “Thank you, you didn’t know what that meant to me, to be able to attend with your support”. At the time I thought it was a very normal event that we would attend. If I’m reaching out to meet with indigenous students, this is no different and it shouldn’t be any different. From that one gesture, I’ve learnt that it’s about consistent daily communication, transparency and the cumulative effects rather than very big gestures.
Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz:
Personally, I think that’s absolutely right, and you don’t know the impact that you’re having on people.
UDIA NSW DE&I:
You don’t.
Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz:
When I was in the process of leaving Mirvac, so many people came up to me and said, you won’t remember this, but you did this or you said that, or you followed up on that. And I had no idea, I don’t remember doing those things, but everything that you do has an impact on people, and you never know what moment is going to be the impactful moment for somebody else.
UDIA NSW DE&I:
And you also don’t know what they are going through. As a leader, whether it be big or small changes that you can bring about in the organisation, it’s also quite telling and informative to myself as well, in the way you genuinely lead, it does affect your team in a very direct manner.
It’s also great to hear that there is nothing wrong with having a paid coach and that there are aspects of yourself that you would need to work on over the years.
Have they given you tips on how you present yourself? Recently somebody said to me, you probably need to work on your public speaking and your confidence and your nerves and it’s difficult to hear, but then you realize that it becomes a sort of a practice makes perfect situation and the confidence builds eventually. What were some of the pointers that you were given?
Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz:
I’ll share a story . I speak a lot and I still am nervous. So I think if you’re not nervous when you’re speaking then you’re not paying enough attention to what you’re doing. So as much public speaking as I do and have done over the years, I’m still nervous. Absolutely. And you just must learn to work through that. I’ll give you a good example of one of the things my paid coach said to me. He did a qualitative 360 review of me and said that the bit of feedback he gave me was that two of my personality traits were combining in a way that wasn’t very helpful. And one is that I’m super-efficient, as my mum would say, there’s no faffing around, there’s no long lunches, there’s no golf, just get the job done. So I’m super-efficient and I’m an introvert. I’m the strongest possible introvert that you can possibly be in the Myers-Briggs scheme of things.
UDIA NSW DE&I:
But you don’t come across to be an introvert at all!
Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz:
Well, I absolutely am. In the classic sense of how I recharge myself is I’ll go away and read a book, I need time by myself to recharge my batteries, but a CEO is an extrovert job. There’s no question about it. So you learn how to be effective in that way. My coach told me that this combination of those two traits is that sometimes I could shortchange the social interaction. And I thought to myself, I don’t think I do that, but let me just monitor and see if I am shortchanging. So literally half an hour later, I opened a door, walked into a room where some people were waiting for me, and as I stepped through the door, I said, “Right, what are we doing?” And then I thought, ah, ‘hello’, might’ve been a nice way to enter the room, or ‘how is everybody’ or some other way other than super- efficient the minute I’m walking through the door.
So I would never have known that I was doing that if the coach hadn’t pointed it out to me. There were many examples of those sorts of things that a coach says when you do this, the impact on other people is X, Y, Z. And you can take that on board and learn from it. And as an ELT, it was absolutely essential and very profound to have a coach for the ELT because it meant that we were working on ourselves as a team and not as a collective of people who were administering different parts of the organization, but we actually were a team of people with one collective responsibility to deliver the legacy of Mirvac. And at times it was quite raw. We used to have a whole day with our coach and we would sit in a circle, no computers, no desks, just sit in a circle all day. And the first time we did it, it was really quite confronting because it’s very vulnerable. There’s nothing in front of you and you’re just sitting in a circle. And over the years we had some quite raw moments in those sessions, but they were absolutely pivotal in shaping the collective team at the top of the organization.
UDIA NSW DE&I:
That’s quite profound to hear. What were the biggest challenges in the Mirvac tenure and then how did you maintain that resilience and confidence in steering the company? You’ve spoken about moments of being stripped back and being vulnerable and there are moments where you were scared. Was there any one event or an issue that was a big challenge to yourself? It may not be Mirvac, it could be anytime throughout your career.
Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz:
Oh, definitely have been. And I’ll pick one that’s not Mirvac actually. So before Mirvac, I worked at Macquarie and Lendlease before that, and in my Lendlease days I was running a small joint venture company for Lendlease in California. And it was a joint venture between Lendlease and two individuals. And they were very, very different than I in terms of the view of what was right and what was wrong. I was very young and I had no idea how to deal with them or how to handle a situation where I was effectively on my own on the other side of the country, running a joint venture with two counterparties were always just over the line every single time. It was very difficult and very confronting. And in the end, one of the other partners insisted that Lendlease move me on from the company and Lendlease did. It was really difficult and I was very, very inexperienced and very young, and if I look back on it now, what I should have done is reached out for support. I clearly couldn’t handle the situation as well as I would now for sure. And then the other very difficult point in my career was in the financial crisis. I was living in London. I had three very young children at the time, and I was working for MGPA and we were trying to raise a special situations fund in 2007. One day we had a billion dollars soft circled for the fund. The next day, Lehman went broke and we had nothing. I had to make my team redundant and then I had to make myself redundant. My boss was one of my mentors and I’d worked with this guy since I was in my very first day at Lendlease.
He was the person that hired me into Lendlease and he couldn’t make me redundant. So I made my team redundant and then I made myself redundant. I was out of work for nine months and it was a real lesson because I’d worked all of my life and I’d taken very little time off when the children were born, which is a mistake actually. Suddenly I had no work identity for nine months. It was really hard, and I had a young family to support. It was very personally confronting.
UDIA NSW DE&I:
On the work work-life balance part, and it sounds and feels like you have been very efficient in your time management. You have always done the right thing at the right time. Probably have dedicated more of yourself and your personal time to the boards and the organisations that you’ve worked on. Looking back now, what were some of the things that you could have done differently, spent more time with your children?
Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz:
Well, my children are wonderful in my life, and I never knew what a blessing having young adult children was going to be. I had no idea it was going to be so profound and so amazing to have these wonderful people in my life. And I have always been very, very clear on the boundaries between work and home. Mirvac has always been a very flexible workplace, even before Covid, 75% of people at Mirvac had some form of flexibility in their working life because we were trying to say, we’ll treat you like a grown-up. Here’s what you need to achieve. Have at it in a way that works for your customer, your team, and yourself – in that order. And so actually it was very handy come Covid, we were all ready and set up and flexibility was just normalized. Mirvac is the type of place where if you said, I’m coaching my daughter’s netball team at three o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon, everyone would say, great, see you tomorrow. No one would smirk or raise an eyebrow.
We’d put that in place with a very simple program called My Simple Thing. My Simple Thing was basically a program where everybody was expected to have something in their working life, which would make their working week a lot better. And there are two important facets to the program. It’s public and there are no rules about what that thing could be. If your simple thing is standing in the corner on your head, have at it no judgment whatsoever. It became really normalised. We had people who were writing books, we had people taking their dad to chemo, we had people doing horse rising at 10 o’clock in the morning and it all worked. And Mirvac continued to be successful. And I remember very clearly when we put this in place, another REIT CEO came up to me, and said, ‘Sue, I don’t really understand what you’ve done with all this flexibility stuff because surely all you’ve achieved is having your people working less’. And I thought, you definitely don’t understand the power of treating people like grownups. And then I thought, you keep thinking like that, that’s fine, because we’ll take all the talent at Mirvac because people want to work in a place where you are honoring their full selves. I’ve always been really disciplined about going home. And I as a leader would leave very loudly and visibly, whatever time I was leaving, I would say ‘goodbye, goodnight, see you tomorrow’, and make sure that I was seen to be leaving so that I could signal in that moment we could be successful and the CEO could go home, therefore that that’s how we’re going to work. I was always very, very disciplined around that. And I think between my husband and I there’s only been one school event that one of us hasn’t been at over all those years of education because it’s very important to us both to be involved. But what I would change is I would take longer parental leave. And the reason I took such short periods of leave is because my daughter was born in the US and at the time, in the US parental leave was two weeks, which is just criminal really in terms of how long people get paid off to take off. And so Lendlease was very progressive and Lendlease gave me 12 weeks and I thought, that’s amazing. 12 whole weeks!
UDIA NSW DE&I:
Compared to two. Yes, absolutely!
Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz:
It’s ridiculously short. And so I always counsel women that those days, never, ever come back and you should take them when they’re there. Then I was just in a pattern of 12 weeks is what you do. So that’s what I did with the next two as well. But I wish I’d taken longer.
UDIA NSW DE&I:
What do you do in your spare time now? I don’t know if you would have any spare time, Sue. You’ve been very choice in the boards that you have sat on. Sydney Opera House is one of them. It’s turned 50 this year. I think there’s been a good focus around the issues at Property Council, Green Building Council – just to name a few. How do you have any spare time to recharge and be your introvert self?
Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz:
I do actually. So I’ve got quite a few things that I’m doing now in my post CEO Life, including the boards of Rio Tinto and Macquarie, which are both fascinating boards to sit on. And then the labours of love that I have, which is INSEAD with the renovation of the Fontainebleau campus, the Opera House and CEW and so forth. I read a lot. I’ve always got three or four books on the go at any one point in time. I try to do yoga every day. You can see that there’s a Peloton behind me, which we bought during lockdown.
UDIA NSW DE&I:
Very good.
Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz:
Good. I try and do a bit of cycling on the Peloton, a bit of yoga and then spend time with my children.
UDIA NSW DE&I:
Adults now.
Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz:
Spending time with them is when they want to spend time with me rather than the other way around. But I’ll take it whenever I can get it. And I don’t go out a lot, to be honest. I don’t go out a lot to events. Except the F1 – love that.
UDIA NSW DE&I:
And what better way to recharge. I think F1 has had a bit of a different spin now that Netflix has released the Drive to Surviveseries, and you forget exactly how strategic and difficult the sport is. It’s about managing your mind and pushing your boundaries. Initially I used to think it was just men doing laps around the circuit, but then once you get into the tactics of it, it’s quite interesting and strategic.
Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz:
My youngest son is an F1 fanatic and he got me into Drive to Survive. He calls it the gateway drug, which it absolutely is. We’ve been lucky enough to go to the Melbourne Grand Prix a couple of times. I took him to the Singapore Grand Prix one year where we had an absolutely amazing experience. At the Melbourne Grand Prix a friend of mine was able to get tickets for us to go into the paddock where all the cars are. And we were able to go into one of the team’s garage during Qualifying and the cars were coming in and out and we got a whole tour. It was amazing.
UDIA NSW DE&I:
How exhilarating. And what a tremendous moment to be able to share that with your son. It’s just wonderful. We’ve powered through most of the questions. Was there anything you would like to cover in our interview? We’ve been very efficient with our time; we’ve about 15 minutes left. Any messages you wanted to send to the UDIA D&I committee?
Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz:
I think maybe to say that the work of diversity and inclusion is never done. It never will be done. And it needs to be paid attention to consistently and thoughtfully all the time. The work will never be finished in terms of ensuring that we create a society in which all people can contribute to their full potential, which is the reason I took on the role of President of CEW, it’s my contribution to that mission, which will never end for any of us.
I’ve been so blessed in my career with opportunities living all around the world, working in such a fantastic industry, the real estate industry. And so being able to do something that hopefully will have an impact on people’s lives for the better through CEW is an absolute labor of love.
UDIA NSW DE&I:
I think your message and intent has always been very purposeful and very genuine. I know I had a lot of assumptions coming into this interview, but it’s probably who you are as a person and that genuine thread weaves itself in all your endeavors.
That’s probably what’s caused all the impact and the way you’ve permeated your leadership style through the organisations that you’ve led and challenged.
We’ve come to the end of our interview, and again, thank you very much for your valuable time and insights.
This interview forms part of a UDIA D&I Committee initiative series to encourage and highlight more diversity in UDIA and the property industry. It is intended to highlight diversity by profiling our members through industry publications on a regular basis throughout the year.
Since 2018, the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Committee has been one of the key Business Advisory Committees for the UDIA NSW, focussed on improving and promoting diversity and inclusion in the UDIA and our industry. This year, we launched the ‘One Thing’ campaign – celebrating and sharing the ‘one thing’ that we’re doing to empower people by respecting, supporting and appreciating what makes them different, in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, beliefs, disability, sexual orientation, and education. What’s your One Thing?