How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with the broader business strategy to ensure the organisation’s resilience? 

I’m a firm believer in following a structured approach when managing crises or even during times of instability. Whilst you may not be able to control the circumstances you find yourself in, one is fortunate enough to be able to control how you manage your approach to these kinds of situations and influence people to bring out the best in them and the best result for your company in times such as these.  

The approach which I employ, and which works well for me, my team and the business is the “three L’s approach”:  

Legal Risks: Identify and understand the legal risks you’re faced with during this period – this includes recognising the different types of legal challenges you may potentially need to deal with. 

Identifying the stakeholders you need to engage and collaborate with. 

Consider if there are any legal constraints example  

Ensure you and your team monitor compliance with applicable laws, regulations as well as contracts which are affected by the crises  

Legal Risk Assessment: Your team and you now in a position to be able to develop a sound framework to assess the identified legal risks and prioritise how severe they are and what their potential impact may be on the organisation. 

Implement an appropriate risk mitigation strategy based on the developed framework with effective controls, safeguards and mechanisms 

Effective communication between the identified stakeholders: streamline your response by ensuring collaboration between these stakeholders to ensure a cohesive and impactful response to the problem.  

Learnings: At all times to be ready to adapt to circumstances which may change at any given instance thus learn from past mistakes, learn from current challenges and take all learnings from the situation you find yourself in and have a debriefing session with your team to update all risk management plans, identify what worked well and what could be improved.  

Communicate relevant learnings to the stakeholders and respective teams.  

How do you manage and motivate your legal team to ensure high performance and professional growth? 

My legal team may not be vast in number, but they are dynamic and adept, and I know that trust, communication and collaboration are the fundamental keys to managing and motivating this high performing team. I strongly believe that you should allow each team member to play to their strengths and provide guidance and challenge them in areas where they can improve on. People flourish when they have a supporter in their corner. When problems arise and your team can depend on you to face tough times together, it cultivates a trust-filled environment which encourages them to work hard but also be accountable for what they do.  I believe in being solution orientated.  

I’m also fortunate enough to be the executive of HR and be able to influence how our Cloverites are managed – I advocate for this management approach to be adopted and used as I believe it will see our organisation go from strength to strength as people are our greatest asset.