Based on your experience, what is the key to collaborating successfully with business partners?

After I moved to GE Global Operations (based in Hong Kong) I received numerous praises from commercial colleagues and many accolades from the company. I was pleasantly surprised since I didn’t get that much attention during my previous time practicing in law firms. Colleagues told me that I am a good solution finder with a pragmatic mentality, and they appreciate that I would always take a flight with them to engage our customers in person until we seal the deal.

Whilst at law firm I’ve focused on providing clients with various options and solid legal strategies, as an in-house lawyer at Sanofi I had to quickly shift my mindset and wear both commercial and legal hats, listen to colleagues who will potentially be affected by those legal decisions, build trust with both stakeholders and other functional heads. It’s a complex yet crucial process to get a clear understanding as to why sometimes the best legal solution does not produce the optimal outcome for the business.

I would say continuous learning and listening, curiosity on how to run a profitable business, transparent communication and solid trust are the key elements for me to build a successful collaboration with my business team.

How do you motivate and manage the other members of your legal team well?

I’m very fortunate to have received excellent management training courses from world renowned institutes, such as Harvard Business school, and highly regarded coaches, leaders during my time at GE. At work, the facts that we often receive incomplete or imperfect information, we face multiple unknowns (especially during Covid-19 period), and the need to identify responses quickly, reinforce and highlight the advantages of the adaptive management method that I’ve adopted in recent years.

As an illustration: at Sanofi our team develops a routine that after I’ve attended weekly meetings with commercial stakeholders, the team would meet to discuss, and predict, future needs which flow from the commercial strategies. We then collectively build an action plan with certain flexibility so that we can tweak it at any point to address new information coming in and/or sudden changes. Apart from a high-level risk assessment, our plan also addresses cross-functional accountability, who are the decision makers, etc. Apart from domain expertise, we always put transparency, timely communication and the ability to adapt and adjust as the team’s goals.

At Sanofi, my team and I feel highly motivated and collaborate very well as we have clarity about our common goals, we know what we want to achieve individually and what it takes to get there. How to get there, in many cases, is an open path, there’s room for exploration, for imagination, for innovation which certainly add a lot of fun to our daily work.