Episode 4

[00:00] Sarah: Welcome to This Multidisciplinary Life, a podcast where we explore the nuances and uniqueness of multidisciplinary teams across the world. Each episode, I‘ll be chatting with experts who are involved in and leading multidisciplinary teams. I want to understand what makes these teams so special to build and be a part of.

Research from Harvard Business Review tells us that multidisciplinary teams outperform homogenous teams. I want to understand how and why this is the case.

My guest today is Jemima Harris. Jemima is Chief Legal Officer at Megaport and oversees two teams, the Legal and Compliance Team and the People and Culture Team. With deep experience leading multidisciplinary teams, she joined Megaport in 2021. Jemima has over 20 years experience as a lawyer and leader, and is an expert in legal operations, strategy development and execution, change management and continuous improvement.

She is often described as someone with a pragmatic approach, strong commercial acumen. Innovative thinking and enthusiasm for finding solutions. Ways in which I would certainly describe her as well. With her extensive experience in people management and enthusiasm for transformational leadership, Jemima is also chair of Megaport‘s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Working Group.

She is passionate about ensuring an inclusive environment for the team and supporting DEI initiatives both at Megaport and throughout the tech industry. Jemima, welcome. We have so many wonderful things to chat about today.

[01:40] Jemima: Thanks very much for for having me. I‘m really looking forward to the chat.

[01:45] Sarah: Wonderful, wonderful. So before we get into lots of multidisciplinary topics and questions, I‘m keen to maybe step back a little bit. And I‘ve always been interested in your journey to the law and what I guess what brought you to law school. to Megaport but particularly, why did you start, why did you study law?

What made you start?

[02:09] Jemima: That‘s a really great question. I‘m not sure I know exactly why. I wouldn‘t say that I grew up knowing I wanted to be a lawyer. That would be a little bit sad, but my, my dad was a lawyer. And so I did know as a kid, I had a sense of what being a lawyer looks like.

I grew up in Northern New South Wales and my dad had his own law firm. So I knew what that looked like. And we, yeah, I think I probably got that a little bit wrong initially. I thought as a young person that when dad went off to work, he was going to mow other people‘s lawns, but I learned that wasn‘t the case.

And I knew that he‘d worked in government before and we had family friends who were barristers. So I had some exposure to different ways of practicing law but probably had no sense of the type of work that I‘ve done over the course of my career. So, I toyed with a few ideas at one stage. I thought I wanted to be a dentist.

Glad I didn‘t do that. And then in my final year of high school I actually did some proper research about what it would be like to study law and I thought that sounded pretty cool. I applied for law courses and ultimately did that and I had a pretty great time at university, which was reflected in my grades.

But I think I probably was always a little bit. Not interested in the traditional path of going to work for a big law firm and wanted to do things a little bit differently. And it was a kind of the path into working in house revealed itself to me where despite not really wanting to work for a big law firm, I did apply for summer clerkships in my fourth year of uni and didn‘t get one.

And it‘s probably probably for the best because that led me to a job ad on our uni jobs board which back in those days was an actual notice board on a wall for a summer clerkship at the CSIRO working in the in house team that one of the divisions had offices near the uni and I applied for that and got that job and I think that pretty much set the trajectory for my career because I just loved it.

I got to work with an amazing team. Mentor lawyer there and working in a business with lots of smart people who weren‘t lawyers and learning lots of different things other than about. Just applying legal skills to, to work and yeah I was lucky enough to be offered part time work while I completed my studies after that clerkship in summer holidays completed and got to work on some really cool things.

And yeah that, that was probably the first time I‘d been exposed to the idea of, working with engineers and sales people and being part of cross functional project teams. And I just loved it.

[04:43] Sarah: That‘s really wonderful because it‘s. There‘s so many transferable skills that you learn doing a law degree that we‘re sometimes not necessarily made aware of in law school.

But I think starting your career, working with other disciplines and other professionals is such a fascinating way to. Yeah, think about your life in the law. That‘s really cool.

[05:06] Jemima: Yeah, I loved it. And I did go and work in a law firm for a few years after that. And I really enjoyed that experience as well.

And I worked with some really great people and learned a lot. But after I did that for around five years or so, I was really missing that. What being involved in a project and seeing it through from the start to the end, rather than giving advice and not really knowing what happened.

And so I tempted back into an in house role at that point, and I‘ve hung around. In house teams ever since.

[05:39] Sarah: I love that. I love that. And it is true of being in house, you really get to see through what happens to the advice that you provide and understanding the impact on the rest of the business as well.

[05:52] Jemima: Absolutely. That‘s, and it‘s incredibly rewarding because it also, I think getting to know the business and understanding the business, I think you give better advice. It‘s not in a vacuum and that‘s not to say that lawyers working in firms can‘t do that as well, but it‘s, I think it gives you a unique perspective to really know your client really well and to really give advice that is sometimes not strictly legal advice, but that, is really focused on the business strategy.

[06:22] Sarah: It‘s interesting. I was, I was thinking about this next question that I have for you in relation to your role at Megaport, because I think, if you take one perspective, a lawyer who is responsible for a legal and compliance team makes a lot of sense, but a lawyer who‘s also responsible for and oversees the people and culture team, is possibly unusual in, in some executive teams, but knowing you and knowing the type of person that you are, and even understanding more about your background and your start at the CSIRO, that‘s, that seems perfectly natural in, in some ways as the type of person that you are, the type of professional that you are.

What‘s it like for you overseeing those two teams?

[07:04] Jemima: I think it probably is an unusual combination of of organizations, but it just does seem to work, I think. And it‘s, I have in a previous role had HR responsibilities as well. So it was in my toolkit. And now I apply it in a different way.

But I think it‘s it works well in that, I was a bit nervous when I first took on the role of leading the HR team because it was a different group of professionals than I‘d been responsible for previously. And I spent a lot of time trying to learn as much as I could about how the team worked, processes and roles and and found that really helpful, rolled up my sleeves and got involved.

And that was incredibly helpful in understanding really like all of the other things. I don‘t have to be able to do the job to be able to lead the team. I just need to understand what they need in order to execute their roles and provide that support. And that‘s been, I‘ve learned a lot in the process.

And I think actually and it‘s something that I‘ve seen in my consulting work outside of in house roles, that having somebody, External to the team come in and look at things afresh is actually really great way of challenging or why we‘re doing things this way. Sometimes it makes sense.

Sometimes it‘s a really good way of finding opportunities to do things better. Because when you sometimes when you have to explain something to somebody who‘s unfamiliar with the process, you realize that it probably doesn‘t. makes sense as, as much as you thought. And so there, there‘s been a lot of opportunity for improvement in that space as well.

It‘s, I think it, it‘s worked really well. I‘ve had to, been humbled a few times in some of the things I didn‘t know, but part of what I love about it is how much I‘m, how much I‘m learning and how much of the stuff that I‘ve been doing outside of that environment has been transferable.

[08:51] Sarah: Yeah. Wow. It sounds like you‘ve taken a very, Curious approach to taking on the new role and really understanding the team as opposed to bringing in your perspective and leading with your perspective rather than a curious approach.

[09:08] Jemima: Yeah, I think that‘s probably right. I hadn‘t thought about it like that, but I‘ve found one of the things I‘ve picked up over the years in the various places that I‘ve worked.

And I think it‘s one of the great benefits you get from working in house is working with engineers and marketing people and salespeople who have all sorts of other training and I‘ve been lucky enough to pick up training and things like agile and design thinking and Lean Six Sigma and bring those sorts of disciplines from outside of the law into the law and then into other areas and I think that‘s really helpful and one of the things that I think about a lot and draw upon is The ethos behind design thinking theory around empathy and trying to really understand where people are coming from, what their challenges are and as best you can put yourself in their shoes so that you can help get to the best outcome.

And I try to do that as best I can and keep that in mind when You know, everything from looking at how we design the structure of the team to how we communicate information to the business in, in policies, whether it‘s an HR document or a legal contract or that sort of thing and try and really rather than come in and say here‘s how it‘s going to be.

Here‘s the information. Good luck to really try and make it as digestible as possible.

[10:25] Sarah: It‘s so important as well, because as you say, when you are working with and talking to different people from different skill backgrounds, there is that mismatch in, in language in, in a way, because marketers have a different frame of reference than engineers, than lawyers, than people and culture specialists.

And so it is, Yeah, it is really interesting to apply those design thinking principles that really look at the human aspect first and ensure that the message can be understood by many people, not just a particular cohort.

[11:03] Jemima: Definitely. And that that, that‘s a really interesting thing that‘s come up in lots of different contexts.

And one example of that is even just, we‘re a global business at Megaport and sometimes I‘ve found when I‘m discussing The ins and outs of a deal with some of my colleagues in North America, the way they refer to, particular types of or groups of people who, might be our partners that we‘re working with.

They use completely different terminology to what we use here. And that can get really confusing. And I‘ve a bit of a joke here at Megaport, but I‘ve become known for my diagrams because I really Sometimes the words are not important. We just need to understand who‘s going to do what, and then we can put the words around it later, rather than being focused on you call it that and we call it this.

And, only one of us can be right. But I just think breaking it down and really understanding how something is going to work is a really good place to start. And I find maybe I‘m just a very visual thinker, but that sort of thing is a really great way to break down the, No, the, not necessarily legalese, but the people getting quite wedded with their own terminology.

And that can be a bit of a challenge and a kind of a blocker to getting things done.

[12:14] Sarah: It also flattens the room in terms of knowledge status or tenure status, because as you say, like people do have their own set of terminology and their own phrases and words. And that could be geographic, it could be team centric, but actually creating diagrams or even metaphors really flattens out a team‘s understanding of this is what we‘re trying to say, or this is what we‘re trying to do.

And that can only be I think a good thing for especially multidisciplinary teams, but especially when you‘re sitting across different teams in the business and driving change.

[12:48] Jemima: Yeah, absolutely. And working in the tech industry is full of acronyms and half of them, I don‘t know what they are, but so you have to keep a glossary of what all these things are.

So when a new person starts in the team, they actually know what anyone‘s talking about. And it‘s very hard to get away from that. I think. As much as possible, speaking and, communicating in slightly different ways makes information a lot more accessible. And whilst we have lots of really smart technical people in the business, there are, lots of teams are not in the technical space, but we do still need to have an understanding of how the technology works and how the go to market function works in order to be able to support it.

And I think a large part comes down to communicating in ways that are. Can go across teams.

[13:34] Sarah: So true. So true. Jemima, I‘m going to change direction just slightly probably on a similar theme, but I want to talk about leadership for a moment and the, I guess the multidisciplinary skills and background that you have accumulated over time, how has that specifically helped you be a better leader?

And even thinking about the two different teams that. That you‘re working with at the moment, how has that that the multidisciplinary aspect improved your leadership?

[14:08] Jemima: Oh, that‘s a great question. I think having experience working across multidisciplinary teams helps you lead one because you understand how they work and how to drive collaboration and avoid silos forming within the teams because there are, of course, within any business function specialists in their particular area in the people and culture team, there‘s Part of the team involves the payroll team, and they have a very specific set of tasks that they do, but that fits in upstream and downstream of other processes that are incredibly important.

And everybody needs to communicate well. And so having an understanding of of process and Things that might not strictly be within an HR discipline and equally within legal processes, having an understanding of good process design and how to streamline processes, I think is really important because ultimately, I think a lot of lawyers would probably be offended by this suggestion, but a lot of what we do as lawyers and as HR professionals is process driven.

And there‘s, there‘s obviously a lot of brainpower involved in the process, but there is a process and that you can have a process that you know, a number of different people within the team apply a different process and achieve the same outcome, but one of them will be more efficient than the other or miss, if you miss steps, then that can cause problems elsewhere and Really understanding from, the bird‘s eye view first before getting into the detail.

What is the process or what is the thing that is being done and how does it fit in elsewhere to make sure it is the information or. is flowing in the right directions and getting to the right places. Hope that makes sense.

[15:51] Sarah: Yeah, it does. And I think that bird‘s eye view is an interesting one. And I think it also comes back to curiosity because being able to zoom out of a situation and look at who is in this discussion and what are we trying to achieve also requires a curious approach to know, is this person understanding what we‘re trying to talk about, what we‘re trying to solve?

And if not, How do we explain it differently? How do we talk about it differently so that common understanding can be achieved as well?

[16:23] Jemima: Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that that has been a recent learning for me has been as the legal and compliance team has grown, we now have an equal number of lawyers in the team to allied professionals or people who are not from a legal background because of, they‘re cyber experts or privacy intel co regulatory experts and it‘s no longer appropriate to refer to the team as a legal team because that excludes half the team.

That‘s not and maybe they don‘t want to be branded as lawyers, which is more than reasonable. It‘s a pretty simple change to just use more inclusive language to, to make it clear that this team consists of more than just lawyers. And that the Everybody‘s contribution is equally important and that‘s a pretty easy change to make which has a real impact.

[17:11] Sarah: It‘s interesting how important labelling is for teams, but also for leaders applying those labels because it creates the frame of context for you as the leader to know this is not just a team of lawyers. This is broader than that. And we need to be inclusive, as you say.

[17:29] Jemima: Exactly. And I think it is the fact that it is a group of varying professional disciplines that makes the team as effective as it is.

And the fact that we work closely together and not in silos, even though we‘re organized in a particular way is why the team works so well.

[17:45] Sarah: So Jemima, I‘m conscious that the teams you‘re describing work beautifully together. It‘s, it sounds like there are, there‘s a lot of harmony within the teams, but also across the teams in how you‘re leading and how you‘re working with both teams.

I know, however, that is not just by accident. Some, there can be a lot of work then, and often needs to be a lot of work that goes into the leadership of a really well honed multidisciplinary team and ensuring that people are performing at their best and feeling great about being in the team.

From what you‘ve described, It sounds like there might be proactive activities or ways that you‘re leading the team that maybe are preventing some challenges that might typically occur in a team. And I‘m curious to know your perspective on that. What do you think?

[18:40] Jemima: I think in large part, it it‘s not an accident, but it‘s probably also down to, The people in the teams who are genuinely committed to working as teams, rather than just groups of people who happen to sit in the same part of the organization.

But I think that‘s part of it is down to the way. As a team, we try to have, a common purpose for what we‘re all doing. And what I do with each of the teams is annually and then with check ins, we‘ll get together and develop a team strategy aligned to the corporate strategy that sets out what we‘re going to do as a group, and it will feed into projects that we‘ll work on across the, the different areas within each team to help us.

To help support the business execute on its strategy and ensure that we‘re all driving in the same direction. And those, we usually do that over a couple of days of brainstorming and planning and bringing in feedback from across the business on how their interactions with our team are going well, what could improve, what things should be a priority.

And then that feeds into our work for the year. And then that feeds into. goals and KPIs for the team. So that kind of really gets people engaged because there‘s, there‘s a financial incentive to do so as well, but it‘s knowing that you‘re involved in a joint project I think is motivating as well because people intrinsically want to do well, I think, and to be to, to support their colleagues and to be rewarded for that.

So I think that really helps to highlight how the impact of one part of the team will flow into, to others. And if everybody understands that, I think that‘s, that really drives the right behaviors.

[20:21] Sarah: Absolutely. And you mentioned common purpose. earlier too, in, in how you‘re describing some of these actions.

Is that something that you then talk about regularly among the team? Does it get revisited?

[20:37] Jemima: Yeah. So in our team meetings we‘ll talk about how we‘re tracking on our projects and and part of what I like to do is to share that with the executive team to highlight what the team‘s doing.

Because sometimes with some of these projects, particularly in support functions, like the 2 that I lead, the work is often not really visible because you‘re preventing problems rather than doing the work. The success is in the fact that things are working really well. So I think it‘s important to shine a light on all of that work as well.

But yeah, I think it‘s, it is something that we revisit because in a business like Megaport, it‘s a very dynamic business. Things change. Sometimes priorities need to change. And we realign. our plan accordingly.

[21:21] Sarah: It‘s a really interesting point that you make around when you are doing work that is preventing issues, how that work doesn‘t always get celebrated because it‘s not necessarily firefighting work, it‘s work that happens in order to prevent the fires from starting in the first place.

[21:38] Jemima: Exactly. It‘s very hard to measure. So we, we try when we come up with our team goals to have things that, to have smart goals so that we do have something to point to to show, look what we‘ve done. This is great.

[21:52] Sarah: It‘s a really refreshing way to be thinking about leadership and especially different types of disciplines within a team and how they come together.

The common purpose is super important for sure. Jemima I‘m interested to maybe focusing on being an in house lawyer for a moment and look at some of the multidisciplinary skills and the different types of skill acquisition that I know we‘ve talked about that you‘ve accumulated over time.

But also, your perspective on what you think. other in house lawyers might benefit from if they are incorporating different skills and how that makes them a better in house lawyer by becoming maybe slightly more multidisciplinary in their approach. What do you, what‘s your take on that?

[22:39] Jemima: Working in an in house environment really forces you to be, to work cross functionally, there‘s, you don‘t do very well if you want to stay in your silo, so I think it ends up being required, but I think the sort of advice I would give to somebody new to in house is to talk to as many people as possible, to build relationships ask questions and learn as much about the business as possible, because that‘s the best way to understand what‘s important.

And as an in house lawyer, your, your ultimate client is the company, but it‘s really the people within all of the other business units who are going to come to you for advice or help on various things. So the more you can get to know what‘s important to each of the functions separately as distinct from the overall business that‘s incredibly important.

And then that helps, I think one of the unique One of the things I love most about working as an in-house lawyer is you are, you do work with every business unit across the business, and sometimes you can be that connector for this team over here that‘s working on something and this team over here is too, but they don‘t know that.

And you can connect the dots. You the very friendly spider in the middle of the web bring, bringing all of the pieces together. And it it‘s really great to have you, you get a really unique insight into. How the business is working and all of the different things and can be a connector.

And that‘s not a purely legal skill, but I think it‘s it ends up being a little bit project management like, and, just helping other teams to collaborate as well. So I think it‘s about being curious, asking questions and just trying to understand how all of the departments tick, what they‘re, their particular common purposes with what they‘re doing.

[24:23] Sarah: I guess it would also give you. a different perspective on risk within the business. Cause as lawyers, we‘re, we look at risk a lot and we think about risk a lot and we‘re trained in looking at risk and there is something interesting in, understanding the different teams because they would have different tolerances for risk and different levels for risk.

And even then understanding the company as a whole and where the company sits with respect to risk and the company‘s tolerance for risk, you‘d get a really interesting insight into how that all fits together and how that plays out day to day as well.

[25:02] Jemima: Oh, absolutely. And one of the things that is common when I think you know, I think a lot of lawyers come in house from working in a law firm is having to, it‘s quite a mindset shift from applying their personal lens on a risk assessment to what the organization‘s risk tolerance or risk appetite is.

And, If you work for a sophisticated organization like Megaport, there‘s a, a board risk appetite statement that very clearly tells you what that is, but that on a piece of paper in a vacuum is, doesn‘t help you make decisions day to day, you do need to still understand the commercial drivers and how, because it‘s not, when you‘re looking at a situation, it‘s never just one risk that you‘re actually looking, you‘re weighing the risk of breaking the law in a particular country with the risk of, commercial risks and upsetting customers and those sorts of things and weighing them all up.

And obviously that, one of those is going to have a much lower risk tolerance than another, but being able to, you need to understand the business to understand how those risks will play out and how to juggle them.

[26:08] Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. And super important then to be able to influence and communicate that risk profile to different audiences, as you say.

[26:17] Jemima: Yeah, absolutely.

[26:19] Sarah: So Jemima, this has been a fascinating chat and a different chat to What we‘ve had so far on this multidisciplinary life, which is super exciting because I think the different perspective and the unique perspective that you have brought to this conversation is really wonderful.

And I know that I‘ve learned so much already about how you lead and the different types of ways that you can do that. Bring people together, which is super important. So thank you so much for the conversation. And I can‘t wait to have you back.

[26:48] Jemima: Oh, thank you. It‘s been great.

[26:57] Sarah: That wraps up our episode of This Multidisciplinary Life. If you enjoyed this podcast, please give it a thumbs up, a you know the drill, and subscribe for more episodes. And if you‘re interested in being a guest on the show to share your multidisciplinary life, you can get in touch with us through the links in the show notes.

This podcast was recorded on Wurundjeri land and brought to you by Sarah Alatom, researcher, consultant and speaker on multidisciplinary teams. It is created in collaboration with Balloon Tree Productions and Marketing Expertise from August, with special mentions to Daniel Banik, Andrew O‘Keefe, Mike McCusker, Nina Wan and Stefan Imbesi.

This multidisciplinary life wouldn‘t be possible without the support from the wonderful guests who share their stories and perspectives.