Vice president legal and compliance | Singapore Airlines
Natasha Sulaiman
Vice president legal and compliance | Singapore Airlines
What are the most significant cases or transactions that you have been involved in over the past year?
Aviation as an industry is exciting and dynamic, and I’ve had the opportunity to be deeply involved in an incredibly diverse range of global legal and regulatory matters. These include the following: commercial ventures, disputes management, crisis handling and investigations, privacy, cybersecurity and AI risk management, sustainability initiatives and reporting, sanctions compliance, and consumer protection regulations.
How do you motivate and manage the other members of your legal team well?
Successful collaboration is highly dependent on having built trusted and effective relationships. This does not develop overnight, so I constantly encourage my legal team to actively engage with the business teams so that they can better understand their motivations, their challenges and pain-points, and the outcomes they are striving for. Building this foundation enables both teams to work synergistically towards aligned goals, and hopefully feel genuinely excited and energised when breaking new ground or overcoming challenges together.
Of course, this requires the legal team to first feel motivated to drive such engagement, and not everyone is immediately enthusiastic. It is incumbent on me to build these same relationships and drive such engagement within my team before I can even begin to ask the same of them, so I put in the time and effort to try my best to understand their own aspirations and challenges, both professionally and personally. I find a mix of scheduled check-ins and informal interactions to be most effective in facilitating communication, and I go into each session ready to have an open and honest conversation. These interactions help me structure their learning journeys and exposure, so that I can better support their growth.