Links:

'Reclaim Time to Read' 2022 reading challenge:  https://www.helenbeedham.com/2022-reading-challenge

The Authority Gap: why women are still taken less seriously than men and what we can do about it, by Mary Ann Sieghart

Brick Lane by Monica AliHelen's business book:

The Future of Time: how 're-working' time can help you boost productivity, diversity and wellbeing

Receive an exclusive advance invitation to join my June programme Time for the things that matter - get on the mailing list here.

Leonard on Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leonardng123/

Leonard at Sidley Austin: https://www.sidley.com/en/people/n/ng-leonard

Smart Collaboration: how professionals and their firms succeed by breaking down silos, by Heidi K Gardner

Transcript:

Helen: This week, I'm speaking with Leonard Ng who's a partner in the international law firm Sidley Austin, where he's worked for 24 years in New York, Singapore and in the UK. Leonard is a member of Sidley Austin's Executive Committee and he co-heads their UK EU Financial Services Regulatory Group, advising global financial institutions on complex regulatory issues including the regulatory framework established after the last financial crisis, Brexit, sustainable finance in ESG, and crypto asset regulation. Leonard is a past member of the Global Trade Association for hedge funds, a frequent speaker at industry conferences, and he's featured regularly in national and industry publications.  Welcome to The Business of Being Brilliant Leonard!

Leonard: Thanks so much Helen for inviting me. I don't know if I am brilliant, but I'll participate anyway.

Helen: Yeah, all our guests are brilliant and, and we love hearing all the stories they share about their careers and their organisations. So I'm really glad you can join me. And I've given our listeners a very brief snapshot of your very successful and relatively long career. Is there something behind the official bio that might surprise people to learn about you?

Leonard: Well, I think somewhere in the internet there's a photograph of me rehearsing with pop superstar Sia of 'Chandelier' fame because some years ago when I first moved to London, I was was very much a musician and playing the circuit and I got in with a bunch of people including Sia and some friends. And that was before she shot to superstardom and when she moved to LA and the very successful career she's had.

Helen: Wow. That's fantastic!That's a great story to tell people. And I imagine your family and colleagues that are pretty impressed by that bit of history.

Leonard: Oh, I don't know about that.

Helen: And can you tell me a little bit about how you have got into your leadership role? How did you establish your career?

Leonard: Well, as you said I've been doing this for almost 25 years now, in fact. And I joined Sidley in 1997. I think the way I think about my career has been always to just accept opportunities as they come along, accepting that there's no one perfect thing. And sometimes, the thing that you ended up getting really good at and developing into, it might be very far away from the thing that you thought you wanted in the first place.

I grew up in Singapore, I did a law degree in Singapore and at first I wanted to be an academic. And so I applied for an LLM programme at Yale, and the University of Chicago. I didn't get into Yale, but Chicago did give me an offer so I took that. But of course having graduated, I thought, well, now I've got a massive student loan on my head, I can't really be an academic. So I had developed an interest in telecoms law so I applied to Sidley, which had a strong telecoms practice, especially long history with clients for AT&T. And, and so that sounded like a good idea to me. But I came to London and the telecoms practice was relatively small.

And so I decided, well, they need me in structured finance so I'll do structured finance instead. And after a few years it was, well, actually we think we need people to focus on regulation. So I said, that's fine, I'll do it. And so along the way, it's always been just saying yes to things funnily enough, and I think when you do that, you open your eyes to new things that you weren't really thinking of at the time. Whereas if you have a very fixed view or tunnel vision of what you think you want, you actually don't end up exploring things that might be very good for you. Now, of course, it doesn't always work that way. Not every 'yes' to something results in something positive, but I'd say in my experience, at least almost always there is something positive I can take away from saying yes to something.

And the joke within Sidley is that I show up at the opening of an envelope in the sense, I just say yes to everything, I participate in everything and I always find something that's good from that thing. Even if it didn't look apparent at the time, it might be five years later, someone I met in an event whom I said yes to now becomes a client or asks me for help. And that's I think the way; well, that's how I've done it anyway, it doesn't mean it's the right way.

Helen: That's so interesting. It sounds like you've been very happy to let your career evolve and be a little bit spontaneous about the direction it's going in. And as you say, being very open to opportunities and I love that mindset of just saying yes to things that perhaps we often feel we're focusing too much on the plan we've got in front of us and we haven't got room to do other stuff. How do you balance that very open mindset with managing your energy and managing your time and not overstretching yourself? Because undoubtedly you play a very significant role in the firm, very busy with client work and managing colleagues and others. So how have you walked that line over the years?

Leonard: Well, I think it's not easy obviously and I think perhaps, I have the benefit of obviously being a bit older. And as a young lawyer, I wasn't of the current world where you were tied to an iPhone or some other device 24 hours a day, and there were very fixed times that you were due at work and fixed times where you were not at work.

So for example, when I was a junior associate at Sidley, I had some, well a few evenings free. We worked pretty hard, but the point is when you were outside of the office, you were actually your own person. And I was a musician outside of that, and I was doing other things. That doesn't exist today. And I think the way I manage it today is to think about those times when I did have that structure.

And if I were to give advice, if anyone would listen to me, it would be to try and replicate those structures, to try and have discipline and this is ironic because lawyers are generally a pretty disciplined bunch of people, right? But we need to set those disciplines to our personal lives as well, to actually say no, I'm going to put the phone down or I'm going to have dinner with my family, I'm going to do something which will help me take my mind off the incessant work that's always there because the nature of the beast, so to speak, is that it's always there. And if you don't draw some boundaries, you won't actually perform as well as you think you might. At some point you will burn out. 

And I think at the levels we are playing at - Sidley is one of the largest firms in the world, certainly the top 10 or top 15 - at these levels, you're almost like an Olympian. Every small thing makes a difference. If you added five grams to Usain Bolt's right shoe, he'd notice that. If you added a, I don't know, a 1 or 2 degrees shift to the balance beam, Simone Biles would feel that.  And same for us. We're very, very finely tuned, but they have a huge team and you've got to recognize you need a team around you to do this. So I think setting structures for yourself, having the discipline to set those structures, but also accepting help from other people is really the only way to do it because I don't know how quite frankly, you know, young people today are able to manage all this without having serious mental health issues.

And in a big study last year, 70% of lawyers listed as in this country have had some mental health event. I, I have had one, you know, it's, it's not unusual.

Helen: I think that's so true. I too remember a time when early in my career we could switch off when we left the office and when we went on holiday and genuinely not expect to have to do any significant amount of work or even to be contactable and that's changed so fast in the last 10, 15 years and it is worrying how normal it feels now for so many people to just be contactable and available to their employer in the evenings, at weekends and on holidays.

And I totally agree with you that part of managing that healthily is for us to think about how we want to spend our time, what really matters to us and be quite intentional about that and put some boundaries in place and structures. But I'm also interested in your comment that this is a kind of 'beast', our world of work is always churning away, it's always demanding things from us. What's your view on individuals managing that with their own boundaries, but also how we help within organizations create better habits and structures that work for everybody, rather than just leaving it to the individual, to push back against that tide?

Leonard: Yeah, I think that that's important. And look, you know, we're a big law firm, we serve our clients and you asked earlier about how I came to this point in my career. It's because I really serve my clients well, at least I try to, and I'm always available to them. I'm always on call so I'm a bit of a hypocrite, so to speak to say that. Well, I haven't set many boundaries myself, but I'm conscious of them.

I think having that consciousness and having a firm that says to people, listen, you need to understand that yes the work is really important, but actually, you have to go and exercise, you have to do this, you have to clear your head.

S

o I think that push from the environment around you is important. Last year we had, I think really for the first time, a real focus on trying to let people know that mental health is important. Four of us as partners shared with everyone on Zoom what are our own experiences, just to try and normalize that. And to be clear, I am very demanding of my team too, and myself, of course. So if I'm very demanding of myself, yes I will be one of those people that might send an email very late at night to someone my team but I think it's important for them to realize that they don't always have to respond at that time unless I say, look, this is really urgent. That's fine. But many things are just done, and you need to say, that's fine, I'll look at it in the morning and I try to remind people that's okay. You have to try and find that balance because sometimes it's not okay, sometimes you do have to respond and unfortunately that's the nature of the beast.

Helen: Yes and of course, with more flexible and remote working and work becoming less synchronous, it often suits people to be checking their email, sending them late at night because maybe that's for them some quiet productive time that works best in terms of how their day pans out. But I think, as you're saying, it's so good to have those very open conversations about, I might be doing that, but unless I explicitly say so I'm not expecting a response and to make sure that that's very transparent.

You've talked a little bit about how you help coach others around making best use of their time. Are there any other particular habits that you've adopted over the years or challenges you've encountered that have led to the way you manage your time as a senior leader today?

Leonard: I would say, there's no perfect way to do this and everyone has their own style. I tend to work very long hours, but on the other hand, I try to leave my weekends free, wherever possible. So I try to draw some boundaries around that.  I try to have some time, not every day but when I can, to try and do a bit of meditation. I certainly try to exercise as regularly as I can, sometimes it's incorporating exercise into your daily commute, cycling to work, or in my case, sometimes running to the tube station on either end and if you have four of those runs, that's a decent, short run for a day and doing these little adjustments, makes a big difference I find. I think having that is very important. Clearing your head, having something outside of work and it could be any kind of hobby. In my case it's music, it's rock climbing. One of my associates does pottery. Again, something that helps you focus on the thing you're doing at the expense of everything else. In the case of pottery, if you're not focused on it that thing's going to come up pretty horrible. In the case of rock climbing, if you're not focused on that, you might slip and fall. And although you're safe if you have a rope, there's always that 1% risk that a rope wasn't tied properly so, you know, you have to focus. Or skiing is a good example. You have to focus on that thing, and that's very different from surfing the internet when you're free, because that doesn't really take your mind off it. It's the same activity you've been doing all day: sitting in front of a computer, looking at things and information. So information overload is, is very important try to manage.

Helen: Yes, that's so true. And is there, are there things you do collectively in your organization that are based around interests and hobbies? I know you're into music, do you just leave it for time outside of work or do you do it together with colleagues sometimes?

Leonard: Well, we try to track a balance. I mean, the reality is, and especially in the current environment, you know, last two years of through the pandemic, big law firms have been extremely busy. So the reality is I'd be lying if I told you that we had some kind of wonderful, perfect balance where every month we go out and do something together, it doesn't happen very often. But what we try to do is to put something in the diary, having a group event, just to get outside of the office and do something together. And of course, now that we're more or less back in the office - albeit today I'm actually at home - that flexibility has been good I think for people, but also coming together is equally important because you learn from being open to other people. If you're not interacting with other people, you don't get new ideas. And honestly, you know, it's quite hard to do that purely on a zoom call, because what happens is, it's the things that happen in between the meetings that are almost as important as the meetings themselves. That five second conversation/chance meeting you have on the way to lift or in the pantry or ... those things are very important. I think we need to create that kind of structure again, so trying to get back to the rhythm of having events that you plan for and attend.

So for example, I chair our London Diversity Committee and what we try to do is have something in the diary every quarter, we will have an event. It's in there, we're going to show up, we're going to have some fun. You try to do that because it then puts a structure, to my point earlier about something outside of just doing the work. This July, for example, our firm's having something called the European Lawyers Conference where all the lawyers in Europe and our European offices will come together in London for an offsite.  We're going to sit together, we're going to brainstorm and think about the strategy of the firm and how we can best execute that. And one of the things we're going to do is put on a big show, and I'm responsible for that! And so again, that's nice because it forces people to think outside of their sitting in front of a screen, replying to emails, they're answerable to me now (laughs) as the band leader to rehearse and to learn some parts. And I think the nice thing about that will be that, hopefully fingers crossed, you get on stage and all your colleagues are looking at you going 'wow, you're trying to do something for us'. And that kind of camaraderie can't be bought. You can't pay people and obtain that kind of togetherness, that kind of feeling of, of actually being invested in something. someone has spent hours and hours rehearsing to put on this big concert, people know it. I mean, certainly the people who are doing it know it but everyone else knows it. And everyone else appreciates that.

I think that again, as you know, the legal industry right now is very busy and law firms are really paying huge amounts of money to attract and retain associates. But if the law firm simply becomes a number to a lawyer, then when the slightly bigger number comes along, that lawyer is going to go somewhere else. So having things that give you a reason for being there are important. I've been at the firm for almost 25 years now. Regulation has been very fashionable for the last 12 years. And I could have gone anywhere. I haven't really left because I, quite frankly, just like the people. I like the people I work with. I like the culture of the firm. And so developing a culture that's independent of the work you do and independent of the salary you're paid is actually critical to developing an organization that feels that it's moving in the same direction and where people are respected for what they do.

Helen: I think that's so true and you make some really great points there. And I love hearing about the play that you're preparing to put on and I think that's a wonderful example of how people will take notice that colleagues have invested their own time and effort to create something enjoyable and fun and an opportunity to come together and celebrate whatever that is that you're celebrating together.

And I think that is a really challenging thing for fast paced, busy industries, like the law, where time is measured on daily time sheets and accounted for rigorously throughout every day.

To what extent can organizations show that they value time for social connections, time for building those human relationships that aren't task-focused, it's not just around a task or a piece of work or a piece of client work. That absolutely is essential to creating, as you say, that culture of belonging, of a shared community, that you get something else from work aside from a good pay packet and career advancement and interesting work. It's that something else that people really need and value, isn't it?

Leonard: It is and that's why the culture of the firm is so important. We've been hiring laterally as partners and one partner said from my former firm, the head of the firm would famously say 'everyone has a price'. And he said it was a pretty awful way to think about it because it simply means you are a number to the firm. Now, of course, we all are numbers to the firm right? We are here to generate revenue for the firm and literally that's our job, but then you also spend 12-15 hours a day at this job and you try to do this for 30 years. You're going to fall apart if you are just a number. So when I was thinking about our structure going back 10 years, 20 years, it was very much about producing a billable hour, right? Lawyers charge by the hour so the only way to get more billable hours is to do more hours. It was very binary. But you begin to discover that if you only run a firm that way, then there's no particular reason for a lawyer to stay there. If another firm is going to give them just a little bit more money, because it just becomes a race to the bottom, so to speak in terms of who's going to pay the extra couple of thousand pounds that will make it worth your while to move. If that's your only value to the firm, then it's kind of pointless, which is why we actually changed the way remunerate people when people are doing pro bono work, when people are doing certain business development activities, or some other activities that are valuable to the firm's culture, helping recruit people. These are not billable tasks, but we have to set aside our pot to recognize people for those things.

And even as partners, you know, it is in some firms very much what you might call the 'eat what you kill culture' right? So you bring in this time, you're responsible for X amount of billings from that client and then you look at yourself 'well I should take X percent of that'. It becomes very, very binary. In ours, we try not to do that. Of course, we still have to recognize that people are paid literally to go out and generate business. That's really important. But equally we ask people, well, what have you done for other people?

In other words, have you only just looked after your own business and your own book or have you created opportunities for other partners in other parts of the firm? Because that way the firm grows as a whole, because it isn't a zero sum. The economy, well hopefully, the economy is growing most of the time unless you're going through recessions, but generally speaking, the economy is growing, which means the pie is always getting a little bit bigger each time.

It's not a zero sum game where if I share this work with a partner in another group, it means I have less for myself. It definitely doesn't work that way, because if you share that work and you involve other people, then the firm as a whole gets better at it. And as a firm we've been increasing our revenue every year for the last... since certainly the last financial crisis. And you don't get that unless you reward people for involving other parts of the firm and not just being a bunch of sole proprietors.

Helen: Yes, I think that's so true and I'm definitely hearing from lots of different conversations there's much more of a shift now towards that more collectivist approach where people are measured and rewarded, not just on the numbers and not just on their own individual performance, but actually how they've helped support others and contribute to non financial activities that are equally important and valued by the organizations. It's really interesting to hear how you're describing that within the world of law which has, as I understand it, has always had a fairly traditional commercial model around billing time and stuff.  So it's really interesting to see how you're exploring that and pushing the boundaries of that a little bit differently around what you reward people for.

Leonard: If you reward people only by the amount of business they bring in, then culturally it might not be a very attractive place, at least from my perspective, to work. If you convince people, if people believe that you're actually rewarding everyone fairly and on the basis not just of a number next to their name but also what are they doing for other people in the firm? What are they doing for the firm's culture? Then I think you create something which will hopefully be more sustainable than something that's just purely numbers driven. Because again, if the numbers start to drop, people will start to leave simply because the numbers are the only metric by which they value their time at the firm.

Helen: Yup. So it becomes a really important aspect of your retention strategy.So, is there a particular resource, a book or a video or a talk or, or anything that's been really helpful to you at certain points in your career that you would recommend to any of our listeners?

Leonard: You know, I've gotta be honest with you, I'm not much of a reader of management or .... I lie.. There was actually one book that we were given last year called 'Smart Collaboration', I don't remember the name of the author now. That was given to us as part of one of these gatherings so we were just sitting around thinking about collaboration because how do you develop an organization and collaborate? How do you reward people in a way that encourages collaboration? That was actually quite useful because I've been given over the years, many books, management books and stuff like that. And I flicked through them and, and quite often they seem to seem quite obvious things. So I just put them aside. I thought that one was actually quite good in the way of being a bit more detailed because it's very easy to write a fluffy book that says all kinds of nice sounding things, but actually doesn't go into the detail of how you achieve those things.

And I know you've written a book, which I haven't read yet I'm afraid. will! Because I think it's something that's actually very close to my heart, this whole of effective leadership and trying to be brilliant. I mean, all lawyers in the nature of our job do try to be just that bit better each time. And I say to my trainees, look I'm still learning stuff, there's still mistakes that I make today.... and how to be a better human in a sense.

And the last thing I was going to say actually, is that I like to think of the group that I work with we're a bit of a family, right. So there are going to be days when every family has their family squabbles. Sometimes the sister's going to scream at their brother, the father's going to scream at the mother, because it's a family. And the important thing is you realize that that's not done maliciously. It's done in the heat of the moment and you need to apologize for it and you move on. Like any family out there, every family has their own problems and you have to try and solve them.

Helen: Absolutely. Particularly when we're spending so many hours a day in one another's company, virtually or in person . It's very much like family relationships, isn't it? And you may get on more or less with different colleagues or have moments of stresses. And I think so true to just think about in your career, at whatever stage you are from the beginning to mid career to leadership levels and late stage career, it's not just about your expertise and how you demonstrate that, but it's about the way you are with other people and the values you live and demonstrate in your conversations and your behaviours. And I think the more that organizations are attentive to that side of things, as well as the work, the numbers, the intellectual capital, the more people will find they're in workplaces where they can flourish really genuinely regardless of their background or profile or whatever.

Leonard: Yeah, absolutely. I don't speak for the firm obviously, we have a big management structure. I can only talk about this from my personal perspective and how I've done this. I'm sure every other partner out there will have their own story. So I hope this has been helpful in some way.

Helen: Yeah, thank you so much for sharing that. And how can listeners connect with you after the podcast if they'd like to get in touch professionally?

Leonard: Well, I think if you just Google Leonard Ng at Sidley, you come up with my Sidley page or my LinkedIn page and always happy to connect with people.

Helen: Wonderful. Thank you. So I will put some links to your organization and the book you mentioned in the show notes as well, so people can access those easily. Thank you so much for joining me today, Leonard and talking about your career and Sidley Austin and the things you're doing there to create a really inclusive high-performing organization. It's been wonderful to hear your stories and thank you for sharing your wisdom. It's been brilliant having you on as my guest!

Leonard: You're welcome Helen, thank you so much.