We were delighted to have as our featured guest, Rob Booth, formerly General Counsel at the Crown Estate who moved into a business role in 2021 and became Head of Assets and Operations. In this role he managed over £6 billion of assets and was responsible for covering revenue/capital growth for diverse geographies and industrial sectors - including the UK’s globally leading operational offshore wind fleet.
In the session, Rob discussed the key learnings from his time as a business leader including the ways in which his GC role prepared him for the business role and the ways in which it didn’t!
We then hosted a group exercise, where guests worked together to fulfil the role of a business leader compiling a team for a difficult and commercially sensitive transaction.
Some key points from this event:
If you wish to be in a more expansive role than legal you need to be intentional about this long before you wish to make the move.
This includes being proactive about looking for projects and opportunities where you can step out of a purely ‘legal’ role and showcase other skillsets even if they are skillsets you use as a lawyer but applied in a different way.
Lawyers can often be ineffective in understanding and communicating the transferrable skills they have. Train yourself to do so by thinking about your expertise in the broadest way possible. Also consistently think about the impact your work has on the broader business and what goals it helps them achieve.
To become an effective business leader, Rob shared that he had to become comfortable with not being ‘the smartest person in the room’, and being able to value expertise others had which might be very different from his and might not be ‘intellectual’.
This point was a significant aspect in our workshop task where assembling the team was not just about obvious skills but expertise, relationships and who would work well to ensure the objectives were realized in a very tight time frame.
Planning for and understanding the full spectrum of risk factors including the risk of not doing something and foregoing a reward is a key skill needed when leading a business team.
Effective business leaders need to understand the need for sustainable practices, including doing the right thing; for lawyers a key skill to flex their business understanding are being able to articulate the ways in which these cultural aspects aligned to law can drive return on investment (ROI) and that this is not just about money.
