How Sadhana Smiles mastered the system, and made it work for her

Each year, Sadhana Smiles does a business plan for her life, as well as her business. She sticks the plan to her shower wall as a way to stay connected to her goals. 

A trailblazer in the Australian real estate industry, Smiles has previously led Harcourts Victoria as CEO and been the global chief executive of property management for Harcourts International. She is currently the director of her own property management business, Harcourts Move, and chief executive of industry body, Real Estate Industry Partners. 

She’s also an author, the founder of not-for-profit Links Fiji, co-founder of the Business in Colour podcast, creator of Harcourts’ Walk a Mile In Their Shoes initiative, and a self-confessed “agitator” when it comes to improving diversity and inclusion in the Australian business community. 

Smiles moved to Australia when she was 16, leaving behind her homeland of Fiji, where she encountered a “glass box” of pervasive racism, sexism and discrimination. After completing high school in Melbourne, she started but didn’t finish a TAFE qualification in hotel management, before finding her way into the real estate industry via a secretarial position in the 1980s. 

Despite being a “terrible receptionist”, Smiles quickly moved up the ranks in the industry, becoming one of the most influential women in business in this country, all while also raising nine children.

I recently caught up with Smiles to discuss the leadership style that has got her to where she is; her approach to hiring and firing staff; why she believes it’s not possible to motivate someone; and what really needs to happen to make Australian businesses more diverse and inclusive. 

Each year you do a business plan for yourself. Why?

I do a business plan for my business and then I have a personal plan that I have on my shower wall. It keeps me connected to what I want to achieve over the next 12 months. On the days when you’re feeling low, when you’re down, like two weeks into lockdown number four in Melbourne and you wake up and think, ‘oh my god, I’m just shitty’, it’s the sort of stuff that keeps you connected.

In the business, our plan means we have a roadmap, and we can measure ourselves against what we have said we want to achieve, versus what we actually did. If you put a plan in place and you review it on a quarterly basis, by the time you get to the end of the year you would have moved forward in your business because you’ve kept yourself on track and you’ve measured your improvement levels. If you don’t have a plan and you do nothing, the dial probably wouldn’t have moved as much. 

What is the best piece of business advice you’ve ever received?

The best piece of advice I’ve ever had was: master the system and find a way to make it work for you. This was given to me by one of mentors by the name of Gilbert Enoka, who works with the All Blacks rugby team in New Zealand. 

At the time when he gave me this advice, I wasn’t feeling supported in my role, I was dealing with a number of critical issues and couldn’t really see a clear path. The reason why this was such great advice was because I could apply it not just to my business life, but to my personal life as well. 

For me it came down to this: I needed to have a very clear focus on what I wanted to achieve, and I needed to make sure that I had a plan around this, and I had a tribe of people around me who would not just support me but hold me accountable if I was going off that path. I needed to believe in myself and the decisions I was making.

I also needed to know who my heroes and villains were in the businesses that I worked in, because then it would allow me to know how to manage them. The heroes are the people who support you and who open doors up for you, while the villains are the ones who talk behind your back or share information about you with other people.

The last part of that advice came down to knowing when it’s the right time to walk away. You can walk away for a number of reasons and I have. I have walked away from companies, roles and people that I have loved, but I don’t see that walking away as me being a victim. I see it as an opportunity to reemerge into something brand new. 

It’s a funny thing because when Gilbert and I message each other, quite often the message I get back is: ‘I hope you’re still mastering the system and making it work for you’. The critical piece around that advice is we all work in a system, whether it’s your work, whether it’s social, whether it’s cultural. Society is a system, the workplace is a system. So if you want to climb the ladder or be successful, you’ve got to find a way to master that system and make it work for you, as opposed to you working for the system. It doesn’t work the second way.

What’s the most counterintuitive thing you’ve learnt about running or growing a business?

A lot of leaders spend significant amounts of time on research, on committees, on panels to make a decision. What I’ve learnt is, yes I can do all of that, but I also need to trust my gut and intuition. Before you get to the committees and the accountants, tap into your intuition or what your gut is telling you, and make sure that it sits right with you.

And don’t be afraid to change or pivot halfway through a decision that you’ve made, because often you’ll have learnings — which many people call failures, I call them learnings — along the way that will allow you to pivot for a better outcome. 

You could have a committee for a committee and you are going to have to take people on a journey. But you need to be decisive. Sometimes you have to make decisions without all of the information and you need to be able to take what I call the smart risks. 

How do you know it is time to fire an employee?

I think to fire an employee is a very serious course of action. There are things that may happen in your business; aggressive behaviour, bullying, those sorts of things will force you to make the decision to fire an employee very quickly. That’s a very separate conversation. 

However, if you need to remove an employee, there has to be a process. We need to ensure we have given that person clear feedback on what the expectations are, or how the role needs to be performed. If their performance isn’t up to what you expect it to be then ensure they understand what you expect it to be, and that you have really clear measures and targets in place. 

I say this to people all the time: very few people wake up in the morning and say I’m going to go to work and be a shit employee. So if you’ve got someone in your business who isn’t performing at the level you want them to perform, as a leader, you need to look at yourself first. Look at the system in the business. Look at your management team, look at the culture in the business. Ensure that before you make the decision to fire the employee you have done all you can do to change their behaviour and their performance.

How has your approach to hiring or finding the right people changed over the course of your career?

For me now, it’s to hire slow and fire faster. 

I’ve made the bad hiring decisions. I’ve hired people because I was desperate to fill a role — never a good reason to hire someone. I then took too long to remove them from the business. I could see their behaviour was deteriorating the culture, it was having a bad impact on people. And I remember there was a time when even I was sitting in the car park thinking, ‘I don’t actually want to go to the office’. If I felt that way, as the owner of the business or director of the business, then how were other people who are working in the business feeling?

Now when I hire I ensure I have all the basics in place, to understand what we need and why we need them. Is there anybody in the business who can absorb the role or step up? What does the team think about who we need or what we need? Do they know anyone that we can bring into the business? 

I do more than one interview. If you can, do a site test so you can see if the person you are hiring will fit into the culture that you have. I will get the team to interview the person now as opposed to just me interviewing them. I will set some very clear expectations in place and give them regular feedback and be really okay to move them out of the business quickly if I believe that they are the wrong hire. 

How do you get someone to do what you need them to do?

No one likes to change, right? No one likes being told what to do either, without really understanding why they need to do it, or the impact it’s going to have on the business, on their role, or how they’re going to be supported through it. 

So I think if you’re going to have people do something that needs to be done, you need to explain all of that to them. 

Get their feedback. They may still be negative about what the change is going to be, but it’s important still to get their feedback. You need to understand what their issues and fears are, because both parties need to understand the pros and cons from both sides. I need to understand why you don’t want to go down this path, and you need to understand why we do. 

What really motivates people at work?

I don’t think you can motivate someone. I think as a leader you want to build a place where people love coming to work. Once that person is in the business, I can build a culture and an environment that people want to be part of. They feel empowered, they know they are respected, they’re cared for, they’re valued and what you give them, they will find very hard to get anywhere else. 

One of the things I’ve learnt is it’s more than the motivation, it’s the engagement. How do I engage my employees? By building high levels of transparency around the business. People in my business know everything there is to know about the business. I don’t show them all the in-depth data but they do understand the business, the debt levels around it, whether we’re profitable or not. I share with them key numbers and key metrics, every single month. 

You can’t do one big thing in your business and say, well that’s going to engage people. The engagement process is the constant doing of the little things.

What is the best way to give someone feedback?

I’ve always done the positive or negative feedback at the time the situation occurs. I don’t believe that you wait till the end of the month, or whenever your review is and say, ‘well you know, on that day you did this and it just wasn’t the right thing’. 

Now, the flip part to this is, as leaders, we won’t always get it right; we’re not perfect. 

What I’ve always tried to do is sandwich the feedback. I bookend the feedback with positive feedback and then I provide the improvement feedback in the middle. So, I say, ‘this is what we’ve seen, this is the feedback that we’ve had, or these results that we’ve had, now what can we do to fix it? How can we help you? What more can we do? Is it something that we’re doing that isn’t working for you?’ 

And then with the wins, we celebrate loudly. Everybody likes to know they’re doing a great job; they like that pat on the back, they like the public celebration.

How would you describe your leadership style?

My leadership style within my business, where I work with people day in, day out, is very different to my call out to leaders in Australia.

In my own business, I have often been described as firm, fair and fun. I work hard to build a business, a culture and an environment that people want to belong in. I won’t always get it right and I acknowledge when I don’t. I have really high expectations from people who work with me, but I also reward performance; the two go together.

I’m really upfront and honest with my feedback. I want to empower people and delegate as much as I can so they learn and grow. One of the things I always say to people is slavery died many years ago, so you’re not going to be here forever. For the time that you’re with me, I’m going to grow you. I’m going to challenge you, so that when you leave, you have learnt enough to go to another level, in the next role you have, especially if I can’t offer it to you.

My call-out to leaders in Australia is around the diversity and inclusion piece, and I am an agitator around that because I think we have a long way to go. We have a lot we need to achieve, and the needle dial hasn’t moved as fast as it should, across all areas in business and politics in Australia. In that arena, I’m very much an agitator.

Sadhana Smiles. Source: Supplied

What do you think needs to happen to make meaningful change on the diversity and inclusion front?

I think if the current leaders, whether they’re in Parliament or leading a small business in Australia, sat down and said, ‘let’s have a look at what diversity looks like in our business’, that’s number one. Then, ‘what do we need to do to change that?’ And then, ‘how do we create the inclusion?’ Because you can’t have one without the other. Diversity is about the metrics, but the inclusion is about how you create that space where people can bring all of themselves to the business; where people from different cultures can connect and unite to drive that business forward.

Business leaders need to have discussions around: ‘How are we connecting with the consumer? Do the colours of our organisation look like the colours of the community that we work and serve? Have we got the sponsorship programs in place to bring people from diverse backgrounds into leadership positions? Do we have the right mentoring in place? Who can we tap on the shoulder?’

There’s a whole range of things that can be done. The problem we’ve got is, they’re either doing one or two things, but they’re not doing enough of them at a broader level, and they may only be doing one piece: the diversity piece. They’ll say, ‘okay, we’ll put the token woman on our board or we’ll put the token person from a diverse background, and we’ll create a diversity board or a diversity committee’, basically forgetting about the inclusion piece.

How important is it for business owners to be vocal about their values and the causes they support?

I think it’s really critical, whether it’s the business or the business leaders, to be quite public and open about the values and why. It connects you to the community. The community then knows this is what this business stands for and they will connect with you at both levels.

There’s so many businesses that stand out there and shout, ‘we’re number two in Australia’ or ‘we’re number one in Australia’, ‘we sold more than anybody else did, and people bought more cars off us’. Consumers aren’t interested in that; consumers are interested in how you are making the planet better, or how you are making humanity better, or how you are standing up for a cause that right now is critical and it needs support and it needs funding. It doesn’t have to be the same thing year-on-year, but it needs to be something.

Knowing what you know now, is there something you would do differently in your career?

From the business perspective, a couple of things would be: get better at hiring the right people; invest in the technology quicker; know that startups are hard and you will have sleepless nights; and understand the bank balance will not look healthy for a number of years. However, if you have the right people, the right structures, processes, technology, and financial rigour, you will get through it.

From a corporate perspective, it is to have a voice, and a strong voice, much quicker than what I did. When I became CEO in my industry I was only the second female CEO in the country in real estate. There was a time when I spent my entire corporate career sitting in boardrooms, full of men, and sometimes it’s hard to have a strong voice or voice at all in those environments. Or to call out behaviours that you see as inappropriate, and to take a stand around those. 

If I could change one thing it would be to say it’s okay to take a stand. It’s important to have a voice. And it’s critical to open the doors up and push for other women to join you at the table. Because one woman at the table doesn’t make a difference.

These responses have been edited for clarity and length.