Episode 45 - Anthea Cudworth

In this episode, host Adrian Cropley has a chat with Anthea Cudworth, a Fellow at the Centre for Strategic Communication Excellence. Anthea takes us on a journey through her fascinating career, which kicked off with a science degree and financial roles in London. She later found herself leading corporate communication teams for big names like Royal Dutch Shell, Telstra, and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. Now, she heads up corporate affairs at the NSW Environmental Protection Authority.

Anthea talks about the twists and turns in her career and the lessons she’s learned, especially about staying truthful, using measurement to show impact, and the importance of lifelong learning in communication. Beyond work, she’s deeply committed to giving back, with leadership roles in Scouts Australia and the IABC Awards Committee, showcasing her focus on governance and strategic leadership.

Tune in for her pearls of wisdom and some top advice for those looking to make their mark in the world of communication.

Transcript

Adrian Cropley: 0:11

Hello, and welcome back to A View from the Top. I'm your host, Adrian Cropley, as always, it's a pleasure to have you join us This podcast is brought to you by the Center for Strategic Communication Excellence, where we explore the incredible journeys of some of the most distinguished communication professionals in the world. Together, we uncover their insights, achievements, and the moments that have shaped their career. In our last episode, we heard from Kane Errol Choa, a communication powerhouse from the Philippines, and he shared his wealth of experience in public relations and corporate communications. Today, we focus on another exceptional leader in our field, and it's an absolute joy to welcome and an honor for me to introduce Anthea Cudworth. Fellow CSCE, who was actually named a fellow for the Center for Strategic Communication Excellence earlier this year. Anthea brings over 20 years of experience in corporate affairs, having led communication teams in high profile organizations, such as Royal Dutch Shell, Telstra, and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. Currently, she heads up corporate affairs team at the Environmental Protection Authority for New South Wales here in Australia. Anthea is a deeply committed person to governance and strategic leadership, serving as a chair and non-executive director for two not for profit organisations, and as a chair of the IABC Awards Committee. Be sure to tune into our conversation on Vantage Point as we explore Gold Quill Awards, in our other podcast. Her contributions to the field have been recognized globally because she's actually achieved a number of awards as well. And if that's not enough, she's a member of Women on Boards and has been involved with Scouts Australia for many years. Welcome, Anthea. It's great to have you.

Anthea Cudworth: 2:06

It's lovely to be here, Adrian.

Adrian Cropley: 2:08

It's such a privilege to be talking to you today on this podcast. We've known each other for many years, and it's the first time we've been able to get together and actually talk about you and your career. I only know a little bit about you over the years that we've been chatting, so this is my opportunity to dive a little bit deeper into your career. Are you ready?

Anthea Cudworth: 2:29

I can't wait.

Adrian Cropley: 2:30

Well, it's great to be talking to you and, you know, our paths have crossed on so many fronts over the years. But I want to take you back a little bit because I have to say, it's an honored position to actually be chatting to you and talking about your career because you've been such a role model for so many people over so many years and that's not to date you because I tell you what, you'd never pick how long you'd been in the world of communication. So, did you think this is what you wanted to do? Did you knew, from the time that you were finishing off, say, high school, going into further studies, what you wanted to be when you grew up, what was it?

Anthea Cudworth: 3:09

I never expected to be in this profession. It was absolutely not on my radar when I first started thinking about my career at all. I actually grew up in the southeast of England and went to an all girls school, which was an establishment that really encouraged young women to be aspirational about their careers. And I did enjoy my education, but I was actually slightly stifled because some of the science courses where my passion lay, that I wanted to take, weren't offered at the girls school. So it was actually quite hard for me to decide what career to follow, but I really loved geography and maths. So this is not the usual start for a professional communicator. I went to university in England and studied a science degree. And it was actually a branch of the civil engineering department. It's now I think called geospatial engineering. So that is basically studying global positioning systems, analyzing satellite aerial imagery and studying the cartography of the land and the ocean very quantitative and grounded in the scientific method and I loved it. So there you go. That's the start.

Adrian Cropley: 4:23

Did you have that technical brain early in the piece or that brain from research, it sounds like. Maybe that was the hint to where you were going to go later on.

Anthea Cudworth: 4:34

Well, I always say to people that my brain is split because my father was an actuary and my mother was a language teacher. So while I studied science and then interestingly went into finance in London, I worked investment manager and qualified as an investment manager and became an investment professional. There was always an aspect to the way I worked and the way I operated that still loved language. So, what happened to me in London was that there were very few women in the investment management industry at the time. But my favorite part about the job was meeting senior executives. And I realized that I wanted to build my understanding of business management. So, I traveled to Australia. to do an MBA. Now, I know it sounds like a really strange choice to have selected Australia, but I'd been working and investing in the UK, European and North American markets, and I really wanted to better understand the Asian markets. And it turns out that at the Australian Graduate School of Management here in Sydney, More than 50 percent of the students are from Asian countries. So I did a two year full time MBA course here in Australia and learned all about management and all the aspects of running and stewarding a business. So that started my progress towards a different type of career than either the science side or the pure finance side. So if you like the mathematical side of my brain. When I graduated from the MBA, I joined the largest retail bank in Australia, the Commonwealth Bank, and moved into a strategy role, which is a fairly common role to take after an MBA. But it became really clear to me that corporate strategies are only relevant and deliverable if they're well understood, and if they're only shared at the board or executive team level, they never get actioned. So I had the opportunity at the CBA to pick up the comms portfolio. In my position because adjacent moves were really common and supported and I've never looked back.

Adrian Cropley: 6:53

That's amazing how that's that opportunity. When you think back to your career and your background, that move from science to, communication via that MBA makes sense now, you know, when you look at it and obviously it started making sense to you as you started to develop your role, but it sounds like a great opportunity opened up earlier in your career to move into communication. How important was that MBA to you to actually help that understanding as you moved into business?

Anthea Cudworth: 7:26

I think the MBA was incredible for many reasons. It was a wonderful opportunity for me to feel welcome into a new country and I never looked back. I became an Australian citizen and could never quite understand why I wasn't born here in the first place.'cause there's much more likely to be. But it was also a wonderful way to build networks and understand a lot about general business. So it is a high level course that gives you an overview of a lot of different parts of the business world. that actually was very helpful for me, particularly when I started getting involved in voluntary work and looking at board roles. I think it's also been incredibly valuable for me to be able to speak the language of the C suite and speak the language of business as well. So there's no question that that MBA stood me in very good stead.

Adrian Cropley: 8:21

And you know, I reflect on that and it works wonderfully well to have that business grounding and speak that language for the next part of your career. Because often what we see in the things, I know you talk about a lot and so do I, and you know, my colleagues like Sia. We talk knowing the language of the business is what communication professionals should do and should know. And so I think that that everybody start grasping that earlier in their career to actually position them as they move forward. So tell me a little bit about that first role. What did it open up for you in terms of experiences that you had In communication and kind of getting the grasp of that business acumen and how that changed the conversation within the organization.

Anthea Cudworth: 9:10

So the job I took at the Commonwealth Bank was in the new international arm and I had a range of communications tasks, but one of them was that I was the media spokesperson and I had to oversee the reputation building activities of the bank as it expanded overseas. I remember very distinctly needing to announce to the media that the bank had entered China for the first time through a partnership with a local Chinese retail bank. And with no media training at all, I fielded calls from the likes of the editor of the Wall Street Journal, asking why an Australian bank was investing in a country with such an appalling human rights record. So it was a baptism by fire. I spent several years there, but in fact, my partner's role then moved to London and I left the CBA to join him. And through my contacts, indeed, somebody that you fairly recently interviewed on this podcast, Joe Alexander, I was able to secure a role at Shell. And that was where I found myself in this new field called internal communications, which was an area about which I knew very little, but my time at Shell, was incredibly valuable. I learned an enormous amount and I was very lucky because. I had the privilege of very heavy investment into the profession because the company got this very long, established and sophisticated communications team with a leader who sat in the C suite. So, that helped me tremendously to broaden my knowledge, broaden my skill set and have access to some of the best research and some wonderful minds and some great experience. And that really cemented me into the communications field.

Adrian Cropley: 11:03

That's brilliantly, and I'm picking up the connections there, obviously from Joe Alexander yourself. And, I was reminiscing with Joe on our podcast about the Melcrum Black Belt program at the time, because that was early adopted by Shell globally and I was part of the team that delivered it in this market and people like Sue Dewhurst and Liam Fitzpatrick in the UK who really came up with that. That concept, but Shell was a leading organization at that time into developing communication professionals. And it makes real sense because the communication lead sat within the C suite. How important, before I move on to look at some of your other things, how important do you think that role is? Because I know you've achieved that.

Anthea Cudworth: 11:51

It's absolutely essential and It's something that I feel very, very passionate about. I recently penned an article for the CSCE which talks about the importance of aspiring for communicators to be able to contribute at a very senior level. At its best, the role of corporate affairs and communications is highly strategic and highly valuable at both the boardroom and in a C suite. There are many reasons why we should be sitting there. You know, we get privileged access to, context for company decisions. We get to read research, find out what's happening in our industry. We get to explore all the external stakeholders and their views of what's happening. We have very, very good social skills as well. We're able to negotiate different perspectives. And that's particularly challenging in a world with a lot of disinformation and at a time when a lot of people have polarized viewpoints. So that ability to bridge conversations and bridge perspectives is incredibly invaluable. But I do think I was particularly helped by having a financial background, because there's no question in my mind that in order to move. into a very senior role in corporate affairs or communications. You do need to have a broad understanding of financial and risk skills as well.

Adrian Cropley: 13:32

And it's quite often that the skill set that communication professionals will avoid and for natural reasons because they quite often, see themselves as the word people. And it is, such a change between words and numbers, but having that numbers and having it's

Anthea Cudworth: 13:49

Yes, it's probably one of the areas that has actually disappointed me most about this profession. Too often I've met communicators who are so capable at handling major inquiries or writing stories for their fellow employees or preparing short posts for social accounts, and they don't have any interest in the quantitative analysis. It's very rare for any of my team members to have ever asked for training in reading a P& L or understanding a balance sheet or a cash flow statement. And yet that's probably the area that they would really benefit from. I do think it's an incredibly important skill to have.

Adrian Cropley: 14:32

It's funny you mention that because I know during our strategic communication management training and we do our modules on measurement and we do ROI. I'm absolute advocate for ROI and I always context that session with I know you're going to hate me as we get a bit into this because we're going to get into the numbers but trust me this will change your life because you've got to be able to talk the language of the business and not only deliver great outcomes but show people what those outcomes have done from a business sense

Anthea Cudworth: 15:06

Absolutely. And top communicators when you meet them, they've got both a data driven approach and that intuition based nous. They're really well placed to anticipate, manage crises, but also they can identify really well how to protect value and create more value.

Adrian Cropley: 15:25

Absolutely. So let's move on with your career. So after that time within the Commonwealth Bank, what were some of the jobs that you did since then?

Anthea Cudworth: 15:35

So after I had spent some time with Shell in Europe, I realised I did miss Australia, and I'd become a citizen, as I said, so I went home and I secured a role in Sydney, focused interestingly, again, on internal communications, which was fast becoming a valued part of the wider profession. But it did become clear to me that at that time in my career it appeared to be quite difficult to move into more senior positions unless I demonstrated broader communication skills. So I took the IABC's professional qualification which was called the ABC at the time and I studied the Institute of Directors course And I did, I had a brief change management role at Telstra. And then I started an external communications role at AMP, which is a financial services, financial advice company here in Australia.

Adrian Cropley: 16:29

And it's great. What were some of the things through those roles, obviously going back and doing an accreditation. Of course, now it's a certification that we can do through the GCCC. How important did you see that to helping build the credibility of the roles you were doing? You'd already built this great business acumen, but why did you go back and do an accreditation? Why was that important?

Anthea Cudworth: 16:56

So I often find that communicators identify themselves in their career through their employers. They rely on their employer for their credibility. If you meet someone new, you'll often find they mention their employer before they describe themselves as a communicator. And that's not me. I wanted to be known as a communications professional and feel really proud that that person or our profession could stand up alongside the profession of investment management, where I had also completed a qualification where I had signed. annual declarations of ethical practice where I had to do continuing professional education. I feel that is absolutely essential if you really want to be a full profession and so that was a very important part to me around First of all, qualifying in the profession itself, but also making sure that I was connecting to best practices and really understanding latest trend industry, which I might not necessarily see if I just had a very internal or in house focus. So I've actually volunteered for the IABC for, many, many years, and I do find it astounding people don't join an industry association. I think there's about 1 percent membership in Australia,

Adrian Cropley: 18:22

and it's fairly much reflective worldwide because we're very heavily involved with the Global Alliance now with access to all the different associations. I think part of it is, you know, because we're not a regulated, profession. And that's the shame, to be perfectly honest. Because we could have so much more impact if we get that credibility within organisations. And part of that credibility, is really about the qualifications and the certifications and the continuous learning and development. And that's why we're so pleased that you're part of the Center for Strategic Communication Excellence now because we're such advocates for ongoing professional development, getting certified, keeping your skills current. And you seem to have done that quite naturally through your career.

Anthea Cudworth: 19:11

And that's why I have loved being a member of the CSCE because I get to meet people like you and Sia who are just phenomenal advocates for this industry. I'm so impressed every time I meet you about your continued passion and your energy and your enthusiasm. After so many decades, it's incredibly inspiring and it honestly just keeps me going.

Adrian Cropley: 19:35

But thinking about that energy, what are some of the lessons you learned during your career in those different jobs that you have? What were some of the lessons you learned that you'd like to share with other communication professionals about getting ahead in their career?

Anthea Cudworth: 19:52

Well, it's funny, there are, there's a couple of things that have really struck me that have been I think I've brought from my past into the profession. For me, communication is about the truth. It's grounded in the truth. And I spent a lot of my youth searching for answers to everything around me. I was a scientist, and the scientific method is about gaining knowledge about the world through observation, Experimentation and analysis, and you challenge everything. And that's one of the things that is so important in the role of communications. You should ask a myriad of questions to try and find the truth, and then it's your job to find ways to explain that truth to others. I think that, for me, was one of the really profound insights that I had about why the profession works so well for me. It was incredibly important for me and, and why I, I fell into it. But the other is absolutely about, measuring success. I just don't believe you can be a successful communications professional without really having a competence in maths so that you can determine the quantitative metrics that you need to be able to measure success. I think it's absolutely essential to be able to measure the impact that you are delivering and then there is no question at all that you will stand alongside all of your peers in the C suite and on the board and be able to feel very confident that you are adding as much value as they are.

Adrian Cropley: 21:33

Absolutely. And great, great tips for communication professionals. I think we need to take real notice of that value add and how you are perceived within your organization I think that's a really big theme for most communication professionals keep checking in on that one and the good thing is you and I talked in our vantage point podcast about Gold Quill and, recognition and how people can actually, put their best work forward, because I don't think communication professionals do that nearly enough, is get recognized by things like certifications and, demonstration of that value as you said before. But also I think awards are very important to also demonstrating that value.

Anthea Cudworth: 22:23

Without a doubt, there are so many benefits from free entry awards. I agree.

Adrian Cropley: 22:30

cover that, you know, for those people that are listening, please tune into our Vantage Point podcast as, Anthea and I explore Gold Quills. Her being the Gold Quill chair for IABC this year, on a global level, she's going to see some of the most amazing work from around the world. Not that she hasn't, she's been doing this for 10 years. Um, I don't know. I've been evaluating those awards too. And there's so much value you get as an evaluator. But we're going to explore that a little bit more when you tune in to Vantage Point. But what I'd really like to do is finalize our discussion talking a little bit about that volunteer leadership because you are a volunteer and, you're volunteering to the Gold Quill. So being a busy professional at the top of your career, you still find time to give back. Now there's something inherent in you, I can tell, and we've often talked about your scouting experience as well as, you know, your volunteer leadership experience. How important has that aspect been in your career?

Anthea Cudworth: 23:33

It's made a really big difference. It's given me an enormous balance in the work I do, it's also given me some incredible privileges that I wouldn't necessarily have been able to achieve. In the for profit space. So, I've been a volunteer actually all my life. Even when I was younger, I used to help out at the local Girl Guides. So, this is something that's innate to me and I'm sure I learned it from my parents who always used to involve me in various bake stalls, or what we used to call jumble sales in the UK, which are probably now called recycling stalls. Um, but I, I actually moved into, a fairly senior leadership role in Scouts here in New South Wales, having been the local Scout leader for my local group for many, many years. And, and Scouts does attract a lot of STEM kids, so science technology, kids, and they get the chance to learn leadership and life skills in an outdoors environment. And it's a long standing voluntary organization, which has made a huge difference to the way I have lived my life. And this year, I actually became the chair of Scouts in New South Wales, and I also sit on the Scouts Australia board, and I'm a member of the investment subcommittee, which is no surprise given my background. But I learned some in these board roles. I really believe that there are enormous opportunities to understand how to steward an organization and how to look at the things that really matter the most. You get enormous access to a lot of information as a board director and also as a communicator and it's a really important skill set to be able to sift through that information and identify how you've cut through all the complexity to reach the insights or the gems that really matter and ask those questions. There's an awful lot of similarities between the way I operate as a leader in corporate affairs and the way that I operate as a chair of the board.

Adrian Cropley: 25:37

Communication professionals often underestimate the power of doing some of those voluntary roles or the board roles when they get more advanced within their career of that continuing learning they get from that. And it's, you know, we often say it's about putting back to the profession that's given us so much. And there is an element to that, but this is also about our continual learning as well and being able to apply those different skill sets that we get. Anthea, thank you so much for your time today. I could talk to you for hours on this one Um, but I I have to say it fills my heart with joy having talked to you spent this time with you because not only are you an amazing professional but you're a beautiful and wonderful person to have connected in, my circle and, and we love having you part of the center and, you know, thank you for all you do for our profession, Anthea.

Anthea Cudworth: 26:34

It's my absolute pleasure, and it's the least I can do. Everyone else around me is just as incredible. It's an extraordinary profession to be a part of.

Adrian Cropley: 26:43

Well, we love having you as part of that, and we love everybody that's joined us today for this episode of A View from the Top. Please do tune in to Vantage Point and listen to Anthea talk about Gold Quills, I'm such an advocate for it, having been involved for so many years and I've won a number of awards as well, it is just powerhouses your, your career. Great tips today. Thank you everyone for joining us and we look forward to having you join us for the next episode of A View From The Top.