#19 – Meta Matters – Learning to Learn
Part 4 – Three Senior In-House Lawyers share what has moved the dial for them in their personal leadership development
In last week’s issue (issue #18) I had trailed that issue #19 was going to be the last issue of the series of issues on Meta Learning.
Here’s the thing though.
I encourage my coachees to be open to the unexpected, and I try to practise what I preach.
So when the opportunity arose this week to talk about leadership to one of the great orchestral conductors of our time, Sir Mark Elder, I leapt at that opportunity.
It turns out that the parallels between leading an orchestra and leading a legal department are in some ways uncanny. Sir Mark’s insights on the acquisition and development of leadership skills were just too interesting to ignore.
To cut a long story short, I decided to extend this series on Meta Learning. The next issue of PC (issue #20) will feature my interview with Sir Mark. Sir Mark is one of the world’s most respected conductors. He has spent decades honing his art, and his take on the learning of leadership skills is fascinating.
This week I decided to ask a small but diverse selection of senior in-house lawyers to share their views on what has made a difference to them in their personal learning journeys. This was prompted by the email below from Kay.
I spoke to 3 senior in-house lawyers, one British (albeit with a Japanese last name – she is married to someone from Japan, where she lived and worked for many years), one American and one Indian.
The diversity of this trio’s learning experiences is illustrative, in my view, of the diversity of ways in which leadership skills can best be developed. To acquire C Suite level leadership skills requires a commitment to life-long learning, a personal learning journey and an engagement with learning and development that some in-house lawyers unfortunately, in my experience, lack. (I would qualify this by acknowledging that in-house lawyers often lack the opportunity, resources, and funds for training that are available to lawyers in private practice and are often incredibly stretched supporting their businesses, which may cause them to deprioritise their own personal development).
Enjoy reading, and please comment and contribute to the debate by posting direct on Practical Counsel. Also, please write in with your unique people issues to me (practicalcounsel@substack.com) - I unequivocally undertake never to reveal your identity and will change key details of your situation so as to preserve your confidentiality and anonymity (unless you don’t want this). I also undertake to write to you personally with my own thoughts and comments on your situation and am always happy to follow up with a call on Zoom or similar.
‘Dear Jonathan’ … and Jonathan’s Reply
Dear Jonathan,
I’m really enjoying the current series of issues on learning.
I am a Deputy General Counsel in a medium sized legal department in South Africa. One of the pleasures of reading Practical Counsel is reading the experiences of other senior in-house lawyers. I don’t get as much exposure to – or have as much connection with - senior in-house peers in other companies as I know some senior in-house lawyers do.
I’d love to read the experiences of some other senior in-house lawyers and for them to talk about some of the things that have really shifted the needle for them and made them the leaders they are today.
I certainly don’t subscribe to the view of the Down Low GC that leadership skills are only learnt on the job. I’ve definitely learnt some of my key skills ‘off the job’, for example through running a local Scout troupe and through involvement in lay leadership in my Church.
I will digest any stories from other senior in house lawyers with avid interest.
Best wishes
Kay (she / her)
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Jonathan’s Response
Dear Kay,
I love emails like this. They help shape the content of Practical Counsel, and help make it relevant to the needs of its readers.
I’ve written in the introduction to this issue, above, that the acquisition of C Suite level leadership skills requires a commitment to life-long learning, and I genuinely believe that this is the case. The most skillful in-house leaders that I have observed grab each and every learning opportunity and reflect deeply on how to improve as leaders.
I’ve taken up your challenge and spoken to 3 senior in-house leaders –
· Bea Miyamoto: Bea is a British In-House Lawyer whose most recent role was as the AGC at Panasonic. Prior to that she had a number of GC roles at GE, including in Japan. Her experience is a blend of legal and operational, and she has expertise in bringing smart operational solutions to legal.
· Phil Casey: Phil has a mix of private practice and in-house experience. He is currently a partner at Calfee, Halter & Griswold in Indianapolis, USA, and has had a number of in-house roles including several years as DGC (Regulatory) of NiSource, a Fortune 500 corporation based in Indiana.
· Tejal Patil is currently Senior Legal Adviser of OYO, a unicorn start up in India. Prior to this she had nearly 19 years of experience working in senior in-house legal roles at General Electric (GE), from 2012 to 2020 as Group General Counsel, GE South Asia. She has had the interesting experience of switching in the last couple of years from an iconic US global corporate, to a highly successful unicorn start up, Oyo. Oyo is an Indian multinational hospitality chain of leased and franchised hotels, rooms and living spaces, founded in 2010, with assets (as of 2021) of over US $1 billion.
I hope you’ll enjoy reading their experiences and insights.
Best wishes
Jonathan
Three Senior In-House Lawyers Share Their Learning Experiences
I asked three Senior In-House Lawyers to share some of the learning experiences – or environments – that have been particularly significant in their journeys to acquire, develop and strength their leadership, management and relational skills.
Here’s what each of them said (a brief summary of the background of each is above):
(1) Bea Miyamoto. Most recent role – AGC, Panasonic.
I’d like to focus on two learning experiences that were key to my development.
The first was on a leadership training course where the penny dropped for me about the difference between being a ‘manager’ and a ‘leader’.
I was in Japan at the time, where I worked for GE. A Japanese Professor put on a video about a remarkable young woman who suffered from disability and who had, of her own initiative, started an awareness and fundraising movement to help those in a similar situation to her.
The point for me was not so much that this was a start up. It was about the difference between managing and leading.
Leadership involves inspiring others, communicating a vision, taking accountability and ownership for driving that vision.
Earlier in the course I had been asked to present on my ‘leadership journey’ and I presented the job titles I had held and the number of people reporting to me in each of the roles I had held up to that point in my career. Someone pointed out that I had presented my ‘management journey’ not my leadership journey.
To be honest I was a bit non-plussed and didn’t understand the distinction. The penny dropped when I watched the video about the young girl - her leadership wasn’t about corporate labels, status or managing tasks - she had shown true leadership by inspiring others and getting them to buy into (and help her to realise) her vision.
The second is my reading of the book ‘How Women Rise’ by Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith. I found the book remarkably insightful and have since recommended it to many others who have also found it incredibly helpful.
The premise of the book is that many (or most) leadership books include a myriad of case studies selected from an overwhelmingly male pool of successful leaders. This book, by contrast, recognises the differences in the starting mindsets of many women in the workplace compared to their male peers and sets out to identify the barriers and behaviours on which women can focus, in order to rise as leaders.
The book should, in my view, be required reading – not only for women wanting to progress their own career, but also for male or female allies who want to support junior women to grow their leadership skills.
Even the simple acknowledgement that women joining the workforce might have a different mindset, and that compared to their male peers they may experience different journeys to achieve leadership success, is very empowering. Having started my career at a time when the handful of visibly successful women seemed to have to be more masculine than the men around them to be taken seriously, this book came as a breath of fresh air to me.
(2) Phil Casey – ex-DGC, NiSource (a Fortune 500 company)
Two books that I have found influential are ‘The 3 Minute Manager’ and ‘Managing Your Mind’. ‘Managing Your Mind’ helped me become better focused (pushing aside distractions, to focus on what’s “important”). The ‘3 Minute Manager’ made me a better communicator regarding assignments and the setting of expectations. Taking the time up front to set expectations is more efficient and results in better outcomes.
Leadership training has also been very impactful for me. As a result of the training I was far more deliberate and intentional in how I went about day to day interactions, as well as larger projects. The important thing was not to come across as clinical, but to take the learning and humanize it.
Lastly, I have worked with and for several impactful leaders who have had a variety of styles and strong attributes. I don’t think I can say that there was one specific leader who was ‘my mentor’. Rather I have poached some good attributes from several different people. Putting into practice some of these good leadership attributes came naturally, while putting into practice others required greater, and more intentional, application on my part.
(3) Tejal Patil – current role, Senior Leader Adviser, OYO (India)
I’m going to focus here more on leadership experiences that I’ve felt have been very important for my teams than on leadership experiences that I personally have found helpful.
The role of GC nowadays often expands way beyond legal. In quite a number of corporates the GC additionally looks after other teams, for example compliance, Company Secretarial, Government Relations or cyber security / IT risk. It’s also crucial for the senior in-house lawyer to be close to / integrated with the business, which isn’t always the case.
At General Electric I ensured that the lawyers I was managing spent a significant amount of time being formally educated about the business. The course I laid on for them ensured that they understood what was of key importance to the business in terms of making money, what the business felt passionately about and the Crown Jewels that the business was most concerned to protect. In other words, a course teaching business understanding from a finance point of view.
This type of course was (and is) very unusual in India and definitely not the norm. In my view, it provided a very important learning experience and environment for the lawyers I was managing.
Another thing I did (which was also, I believe, an important intervention) was to give people very clear responsibility – in order to create accountability. I’ve always believed in letting people own something, to enable them to take accountability and to grow. So, for example, I would always attach a business client to my most junior lawyer. Ownership isn’t always an easy thing to develop in house – and by defining a role and giving it a lot of accountability, this did indeed develop ownership. And moreover it set up a situation where the in-house lawyer would hopefully punch well above his or her weight.
I would also always encourage my team member lawyers to try to ensure that they were recognized as valuable not just for their legal inputs, but also for their general business inputs. So I would also encourage my lawyers to call out an idea that they didn’t agree with when attending a business meeting, if indeed they thought the idea sounded very risky.
These are just a few things I did to set up an environment where my lawyers would learn and develop. I also always tried to ensure that my lawyers developed their ability to make people understand what they were trying to say – in my experience some lawyers struggle to adapt the way they speak, in order to communicate more effectively with their audience. I regarded my task as being to help my lawyers develop an ability to communicate with people more effectively so that those people would understand what the lawyer in question was trying to say.
This week’s key takeaways
1. This issue of Practical Counsel is the fourth in a series of issues on Meta Learning – exploring the best approach to learning for in-house lawyers with regard to the acquisition and development of leadership, management and relational skills.
2. In previous issues a Global GC (Martin Wilson of Phillips) shared his views about the process whereby senior in-house lawyers acquire the above basket of skills; the Down Low GC (DGC) expressed his scepticism about the ‘trainability’ of these skills and argued that the best way to learn these skills is on the job; and a Law Firm Managing Partner (Mark Schaub, King Wood & Mallesons) argued, to the contrary, that these skills are, indeed, trainable. For my part, I have advocated learning from a wide variety of sources (see Issue #17).
3. This week’s issue presents insights from 3 senior in-house lawyers with regard to their own learning experiences that have had a significant impact on their acquisition of the core basket of leadership, management and relational skills - or that have had a significant impact on their teams.
4. The key takeaway is the breadth and variety of different learning experiences that have made a difference – these range from an intervention to develop understanding of the business (Tejal Patil) to learning from management books (Phil Casey / Bea Miyamoto) to learning from a video account of a non-lawyer’s leadership journey (Bea Miyamoto).
5. It is implicit in what each of the 3 senior in-house lawyers talked about that they regard the basket of skills as ‘learnable’ – and in the case of Tejal’s contribution ‘trainable’.
6. Next week’s issue will be an interview with a leading orchestral conductor, which will hopefully provide further insight as to the process whereby leadership skills are learnt.
7. The following and concluding issue will be an input from two learning professionals – who will share some of the research and science around Meta Learning and their own thoughts about the best ways to stimulate learning and development of the core basket of skills.
And now …
Contribute to the debate and write in with your comments and observations. Also write to Jonathan with any other people issues you face as an in-house lawyer.
Jonathan can be reached by email at practicalcounsel@substack.com
A note for you picky lawyers; and a plea for tolerance
I am a British lawyer by background and went to both school and University in the UK. So my English is British English. I have taken a conscious decision to write this newsletter in British English, but to try to avoid phrases that aren’t common outside the UK. Sometimes, though, I’ll use a phrase that isn’t commonly used outside the UK, without realising that it is a Britishism. I also endeavour to use the vernacular spellings of my contributors (e.g. to use US spellings for a US contributor), but won’t always get this right.
My plea is for you to tolerate the British spellings and grammar and the occasional Britishism. And to focus on the substance of the newsletter rather than the occasional (to you) annoying turn of phrase, bit of grammar or unorthodox spelling, or the occasional inconsistency in spelling as between, for example, UK and US ‘standard’ spellings.
Thank you and best wishes,
Jonathan Middleburgh