FINSIA stalwart Greg O’Neill on smart investing and leadership - and advice from a 12th grader

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With three decades in funds management, CEO of $7bn La Trobe Financial, Greg O’Neill clearly knows a thing or two.

But the Senior Fellow, who says he would have been a teacher if he hadn’t gone into wealth management, openly admits there are times when you need to take advice.
 
Greg suggests asking three people for advice - your parents, a professional adviser and a 12th grader. 

“Twelfth graders will tell you truths that most people won’t because they don’t filter; they don’t try to sell you something,” he explains. 

“I’ve always worked on the principle that if you really want to understand a product you should be able to teach it to a 12th grader. If you can’t, you don’t get it.”

Greg, who is profiled in The CEO Magazine (can we link here?), has his own advice for would-be investors, saying the biggest mistake you can make when undertaking a new investment is trying to beat the market – “to try and knock the ball out of the park” – with one giant bet.

“First, don’t put all your eggs in one basket; in one investment or one company. And don’t be greedy,” he says. 

“If the rate of return looks too good to be true, then it probably is. High returns will carry a very high downside risk.”

Diversification always was, and always will be, the best way to defeat downside risk is his mantra. 

“Remember, it’s better to be a Bradman – to just get to the crease and hit singles – than a Bradbury – getting the gold only when catastrophe happens and others fall over.”

Having worked at La Trobe Financial for more than 30 years, Greg takes a very humble approach to leadership. 

“Managing people is a very difficult but privileged position,” he says. “It’s not a right to manage others – you have to earn it through your actions and words.”

Among the many effective leadership skills one must have as a manager, Greg specifically mentions the ability to handle confrontation. 

“Some leaders shy away from anything that resembles an altercation in the mistaken impression that it will make them more likeable,” he says. “Or they delegate it and let someone else do the ‘dirty work’. Both styles are wrong.”

Greg explains that if you aim to be a leader just to be popular, you’re not prepared to “grab the hard ball”. 

“The day you do that, it becomes what they call in psychology a ‘blink moment’,” he says.

 “Your staff will never tell you that you let them down, that you blinked. When you need to take them to that position on the hill, when you’re fighting those deep battles or when there’s a lot of stress in the business, they won’t follow.

You have to be willing to confront both the external world to protect your staff and, occasionally, confront one or two of your staff, who, for whatever reasons, may have fallen off the bus for a while. 

Everybody is capable of corrective behaviour. Sometimes it’s self-correction and sometimes you have to explain to them where you need them to be.

It’s their choice and if they choose not to be part of the vision of the organisation, then it’s your role to confront that and to make sure that everybody is still aligned.”

“The thing that I’m really proud of is that all the staff believe in what we’re doing,” he says. “That the ‘others before self’ principle is alive and well at La Trobe Financial and we share it with our customers every day.

You can remove three of the senior executives, including myself, and that culture is embedded in the next group down, and the next group down. This is a business that now has sustainability for the next 40 to 50 years and we’re very proud of that.”

While it may be easy to point to an influential person or world leader as a source of inspiration, Greg is instead inspired by the 308 people who work at La Trobe Financial. “They are so passionate, so committed and actually believe in the journey,” he says.

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