Beyond the CV | Episode 2 | Christine Herzog

This

week on Beyond the CV, you'll meet the amazing Christine Herzog. But before we meet Christine, let's hear from Nancy, someone who has actually worked with Christine and can share firsthand what Christine is like to work with, the kind of leader she is and the value she brings.

Hi

there, my name is Nancy.

I

found Christine Herzog to be an absolute delightful manager. When I first started out my career, she was one of the first people that ever saw potential in me, provided me with an opportunity and let me run with it. And from there, I was very, very successful. I was wanting to become a trainer. We were working in a contact centre. She said, you know all about this area. Why don't you write the training for our new salespeople that are coming on board? There's an office, you've got two weeks, go and do it. And she provided me the time and the space to do that. We ran the training and it was fantastic. And then from there,

I

was able to become the national sales trainer for the organisation that we were working at. And Christine was just such a supportive and wonderful manager, really, really clear in the way that she dealt with the team. She set clear expectations, but she was always fun and really, really fair.

Thanks

very much. Bye.

Hello,

I'm Peter Sakasiris, founder of Ovi. Through Ovi's Over 50 initiative, we're helping experienced professionals get seen and their experience valued.

One

way we're doing that is through a podcast called Beyond the CV, where each week I sit down with an amazing experienced professional to explore their story, their experience, and the value they could bring to an organisation. And it could be your organisation.

Because

I think we know a CV tells you where someone has worked.

It

tells you what they've done,

but

it rarely tells you who they are.

So

whether you're a hiring manager,

a

recruiter,

or

an experienced professional, I hope these conversations remind us that

experience

still matters.

So

today,

I'm

super excited.

I'll

be talking to and showcasing the amazing Christine Herzog. Christine, welcome to Beyond the CV. Hi, Pete. Thank you for inviting

me.

I'm glad to be here.

Amazing. Here we go. You're ready for the tough questions, Christine?

Good team.

Let's go. First one. So, Christine, I want to hear about you. I want to hear about your story.

So

if I was meeting you for the first time over a coffee or a tea,

tell

us about yourself and your career journey.

Okay. So I really came up through leadership at an organisation called MBF, turned into Bupa, and really gained a lot of my operational leadership experience there. But one of the things that I found that I was really good at is building trust with the business. So I worked through a variety of roles across customer service, sales, contact centres, operations management,

management,

systems, integration management, and program management there.

And

that led me to Sydney University, where I really honed in on that business engagement, building trust, again, through a bunch of leadership roles, but really developed that strategy kind of bone and ended up at Gartner, where obviously I further developed that strategic view

and

really building trust with the clients or internal stakeholders. I think that's what I'm most passionate about.

You

know, I'm amazing, sir. And what I like about that is that you've started off in industry,

then

you've moved up to Gartner, where I assume you probably did advisory. So you've got that nice mix of being able to understand your clients, meet your work there, and then being able to help and support and advise them.

Lovely.

An

amazing place to get that experience and hands-on partnering with clients to deliver all kinds of things. But the learning is absolutely amazing there.

Lovely.

So

tell me, what's next for you? What kind of role or challenge are you looking for? And more importantly, why?

Look, I

think I really want to double down on that building trust, that strategy, that governance, the whole AI thread through.

I

found the things that do get me out of bed in the morning are, yes, a challenge. I like to have a challenge. But being able to work with either internal clients or external clients and building that trust, either keeping them as clients or helping them to, you know, achieve their strategic outcomes that they need to.

Yeah,

lovely. I like that thread about trust. I think that's super important that, you know, there's a lot of loads and loads and loads of posts around AI and all that type of great stuff. But I think we need more around people, leadership, working together and building that trust, which is always super important for people in the workplace. Yeah. So tell me, let's have a conversation about the great word value. So if there's an organisation sitting out there, hiring manager out there, recruiter out there. So

when

an organisation hires you, what do they get?

Yeah. And look, I've given a lot of thought over this, as you do when you reflect back on your career. And I think that I am the person that helps create clarity, especially working with leadership teams. So I'm really at that intersection of business strategy, tech investment and governance. And how do you pull all that

together

and come out with the outcomes that you really need?

Yeah,

I'm liking this trust. I'm liking this clarity because we all know in the age of AI, there's so much, let's call it content flowing around. I think you need those leaders in place who can actually show the trust and the clarity. It's absolutely

amazing. Here

we go. So I think that

I'm

sure you've got a load of achievements over the years.

So

tell me if I'm interested to know what is that one achievement you're genuinely proud of and why are you proud of that one achievement?

Look,

I'm probably going to use the example there that I think I'm most proud of is when I was a business sponsor of, it was a program called Leading ICT. It was when I was at the university. It had seven streams and it was primarily about

driving

improvement from within ICT in these seven kind of different parts of ICT. But at the end of the day, it was all about back to the business and improving services back to the business. What I did there was really look at, well, how do I re-engage some of our ICT people by offering people the opportunity to put up their hand to say I'd love to lead this stream and then other people to put up their hand and say, look, I don't want to lead but I'd love to be a part of it. So I organised with the CIO and the leaders that they would have one day a week to focus on the outcomes on their stream.

I gave the program leads exposure to the leadership team and to the wider sort of operations team so that they got a little bit of kudos, they did some amazing things and came up with some really creative and innovative things to really improve the way ICT hung together and worked and at the same time, it improved the culture. So in my leadership journey, I'm always very passionate about engaging my people that work for me as well.

Lovely.

Here we go. So you spoke a little bit about this before, about what gets you out of bed. Yeah. What type of work gets you out of bed in the morning

and what are you

genuinely passionate about?

I

don't shy away from a challenge. Like I do prefer to have some kind of a challenge.

I

think when I'm in the room with either a group of execs or leaders and I'm helping to facilitate an outcome, I'm not necessarily the smartest person in the room, but I know how to pull a thing together to try to get everybody on the same page and agreed. I do love to run a workshop if that's a thing that I can do.

Not

that many people say that, but if I can do those things and really what I'm

wanting

to do at the end of the day is impact outcomes and positive change or positive move forward so that we can achieve the business strategy.

Yeah,

lovely.

So

let's have a chat about how others see you. So how would people who've worked with you before describe you as a colleague, leader or a mentor?

So

the interesting thing there, Pete, I actually had lunch with people I used to work with at MBF just about a week ago and there were a couple of people in that lunch group that worked for me and they said some things that really touched my heart that I as their boss and mentor and how I engaged them and provided them with opportunities to branch out into the things that they really like doing either in the aspects of the roles that they had or helping them across the organisation to get exposure and experience in other things and that I was always one of their women role models of a woman in leadership. And that made me really chuffed as a leader.

But I think in general people would say that I'm calm in a crisis, which really does help as far as what they would say about me and I'm very focused.

Yeah,

lovely.

Here

we go. So what's something about you that people would be surprised to learn that isn't written on your CV?

Well,

probably that I'm a qualified yoga teacher. Oh, I'm

a

yoga

teacher.

Yeah. Yeah. So people probably don't expect that.

So

when did you first become a qualified yoga teacher?

Way

back in 2012.

In 2012. Do

you

still

practice

and do you still teach yoga?

I

don't teach as much. Obviously, as my career kind of escalated and became, you know, more and more senior, you have less and less time. You do a bit of backfill. But I definitely still practice, yes.

Oh, you could have been. You could be one of those amazing yoga wellness influencers for a few years later. That's a good, lovely. That's a nice day. Hey, one thing that we know that's out there in the industry at the moment, we know that there are perceptions about hiring more experienced people. So what's one assumption

you

think people make about experienced professionals that you'd like to challenge?

Yeah,

I think for me it's an assumption perhaps that we're behind the times, that we're slow, we don't like change, and we can't use AI. I'm all about all of those things. I

mean,

I've been pushing change through my whole career and obviously riding the AI crest, particularly, you know, from that business outcomes standpoint. and pretty nifty with the tools myself.

Yeah,

and I can, and also I'd just double take on that as well is that I'm sure that moving from your industry roles to your gardener roles is

such

an amazing level of able to adapt and change quickly to

get a new

time. So, again, AI, we all know how great AI is, and there is definitely a thing out there that I think that

the

more experienced generation struggles, I think that's far from the case. I think that the experienced generation with all their knowledge and context, they can leverage AI better potentially than others because you've got that context, you can validate stuff. Yeah. You haven't got a second guess.

That's

amazing. All right, here we go. If there was one,

if

there was an employer out there or a hiring manager watching today, why should they have a conversation with you?

Well,

if you need a gal that's experienced at building trust with the leadership team and senior players, that's experienced at governance, that can do operating model, that can build strategy, people and culture,

even

write the odd board deck for you, then maybe I'm your gal.

I'd

love to talk

to you.

Lovely. And if someone's going, hmm, Christine sounds amazing, all this great experience, energetic, passionate, understands change, can change yourself,

what

type of role would they be thinking? Are they thinking transformation lead? Are they thinking business advisor to IT? What are the names of the roles out there that you'd like to consider looking at?

Yeah. Look, definitely a transformation lead would appeal to me because my career has been all about that and engaging back with building trust with the business along the way. Absolutely be interested in that. But I would love also just as equally to build a business relationship management team back out into the business and kind of put that capability and that ability to speak business speak back out to the business when you're in IT and translate, as I've been known for in all of my roles. It's a really important skill to help the business understand IT.

Yeah,

absolutely. And I think you've got the trust,

the

experience to bring people a journey as well. I think that would be an absolute ideal role from my perspective.

Okay.

So we've been through the very, very tough questions with the spotlight on us, Christine. So here we go. We'll finish off with some quickfire questions.

Are you coffee

or tea?

Beach. Beach

or mountains? Beach. Morning person or night owl?

Morning.

What's one word that your friends who know you very well would describe you?

Focused.

Focused. Absolutely. So, Christine, it's

been

absolutely fantastic getting to know you over this past 20 minutes or so.

It's

been a pleasure. It's been an absolute pleasure. And thank you for coming on Beyond the CV.

So

if you're an employer out there or you're a recruiter and you'd love to connect with Christine, you'll find her LinkedIn details below in the description.

And

if you're an experienced professional looking for your next opportunity and you'd like to be featured on Beyond the CV, we'd love to hear from you.

Because

we know every person has a story. Every story has value. and every experienced professional deserves the opportunity to be seen, which is something that I'm super passionate about.

So

thank you all for watching and supporting Beyond the CV. So as we always say, to support the channel, thumbs up, like, share, forward. Again, your support is what's going to keep this channel going strong.

So

until next week, once again, Christine, thank you and all the best. Over and out. Bye-bye. Toodaloo. Bye.

Bye.