Courageous leadership: Brooke's story

With Dubai and Abu Dhabi booming Brooke Lindsay arrived six months before the 2008 crash, with just a suitcase and a determination to write a new and more exciting chapter in her legal career.

The plan was to stay for two years, maybe three.

But 17 years on, Brooke, now Chief Legal and Compliance Officer at e&, the global telecoms and investment group previously known as Etisalat, has established herself as a mould-breaker in the region’s legal industry, known for her authentic style of leadership.

“I’m big on authenticity. It’s something that I’m well known for. If I’m honest, I’m probably too transparent for my own good sometimes but my frankness, transparency and determination to be authentic is what has helped me survive here.”

She never had a doubt that she would one day be in a leadership role, and she fizzes with an infectious energy as she talks about it. “I’ve naturally been a leader my whole life, from school captain onwards. I thrive on it. I love it. I relish being better at it and I constantly take feedback on it,” she says.

But if leadership was on the cards, forging a career in the Middle East was not, and there were some key sliding door moments along the way.

Sliding doors

She grew up in a small country town in eastern Australia, one of four kids. With such a big family, her mother decided to be a stay-at-home mum while her father carved a career in business as the CEO of a listed company.

“In terms of work ethic and drive, we saw that day in, day out, seven days a week at home. I didn’t choose the same path as my mother. In fact, I’m the extreme opposite, although I do have three kids of my own and am happily married and my family are everything to me.”

After university she joined the biggest law firm in Queensland and spent a few years there, guided by a brilliant mentor, one of several male mentors that she says have been so important to her career. Quite quickly, she was told she had the hunger, the intelligence and the ambition to make partner.

But there was a problem.

“I was incredibly bored, to be honest. So, they dispatched me to a new office in Sydney with a couple of partners. I lasted all of six months and had to politely explain that not much had changed, apart from the view out of the window.”

By chance, her then partner was recruited to work for the sovereign wealth fund in Abu Dhabi and she reckoned that, if she could get a good job in the region, it was a sign that she was meant to go too.

She quickly landed a role with Herbert Smith Freehills and fitted right in, this time supported by a superb female mentor.

“I worked 17 or 18 hours a day most days of the week and these were some of the best days of my professional life. I put it down to the phenomenal culture amongst the group I worked with. It was such a privilege to work with those people and learn so much,” she says.

After about three years with the firm, she came to another turning point, with the chance to transfer to the London office to become a funds partner. She had already secured a UK visa, her bags were packed again, and it was time to tell a key client that she was leaving the region.

That client was Etisalat, now e&, and the reaction was immediate. They asked her to stay in the UAE and come and join their legal team.

Changing culture

Moving from private practice to an in-house legal team within a state-owned organisation, the contrast in culture was bound to be stark. All the more so, as a young Australian woman joining as the only female in an all-male team. People occasionally wondered if she was lost.

Her ways of working were entirely different to accepted practice in the organisation, staying late in the office into the evening, for instance, long after most people had hit the turnstiles at the official end of office hours.

“It’s honestly mind-blowing the way the organisation has positively evolved in terms of culture.”

One key change was the beginnings of a major shift in mindset within the legal function, critical at a time of huge growth within the group as it expanded to where it is today, operating in 38 countries across the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Central and Eastern Europe.

“We were not just saying no to everything. We had a legal function whose role was to work with the business as an enabler, to help it meet its growth objectives,” she says.

“It was an approach that was very much promoted by the general counsel at the time, but he was the exception not the rule.”

He was one of the main reasons why she joined the group and stayed on to progress from senior counsel to deputy general counsel, before finally taking on her current role four years ago when legal and compliance were centralised and moved up to group level.

Self-belief and courage

Taking on her current role (initially in an acting capacity) was, she says, the most critical and pivotal moment in her career because she didn’t fit the traditional demographic of someone in that position.

“I had to prove that I was the right person for the role. It meant having the courage to believe that I was just as capable as anyone else to do this job,” she says.

“I’m highly critical of myself. In everything I do, I always ask: could I have done it better? Having that self-doubt when you think everybody in the room is waiting for you to fail is obviously quite an extraordinary amount of pressure.”

A guiding principle all along has been a willingness to learn from any mistakes and realise it is okay sometimes to fail.

“Failure is a difficult word, because it has such negative connotations and it’s one that some leaders would never use publicly. But I think people who don’t recognise failure never get the chance to learn and grow from it. I just don’t think you can be the best version of yourself as a leader if you never learn.”

Leading authentically

So, how does her authentic style of leadership manifest itself, day-to-day?

Brooke was determined to lead with authenticity from the start, even if that meant breaking with traditional ways of working and of measuring success. Sometimes, it is these relatively small gestures that can challenge the traditional norms of leadership behaviour—and raise a few eyebrows along the way.

She chooses, for instance, to often sit out in the open plan office with colleagues rather than in a large, separate office which, traditionally, has been the mark of status and seniority. “Success for me has never been defined by my title, my office or other material things,” she says.

Instead, it’s about creating a sense of transparency and openness in the team.

She tells colleagues that she can give them “a flexible working environment and a culture where you love coming to work and you want to go the extra distance to make that happen.”

Members of the team get approached regularly with new job offers. Usually they will tell her—not to game her to bid up their pay, but because that’s the culture of the team. More often than not, they will turn down the offer and stay.

“That for me is the greatest success and it drives me,” she says. “I take it as a compliment, because it means my team are actually really good at what they do, and that I am doing okay at my job as a leader.”

She’s hugely proud of cultivating the most diverse team in the business in terms of important metrics: gender, nationality, religion and languages. And she is especially proud of the work she’s doing to develop UAE nationals as lawyers, including a strong pipeline of national female talent.

One of her priorities is to make sure they experience law in a wider context than would normally be the case, for instance getting experience of private practice through international secondments or getting a grounding in common as well as civil law.

“That’s why authenticity is one of my favourite leadership words, because a lot of things come with it. It means you’re transparent, very honest about your experience and able to build trust. It unlocks a whole host of things that define really good culture.”

Culture is the key. Part of that is about creating an environment where people can speak openly, are listened to and are heard, but she adds a condition:

“I’m also big on having a united front. The minute you walk out on that floor, we are all aligned in our views. We might have the greatest disagreement about what the approach should be, but we always have each other’s backs and are always united as one.”

Maintaining this culture requires a delicate balancing act and it can occasionally go wrong. If one senior member of the team bucks the trend or sticks to the old hierarchical ways, it can quickly have an impact on their immediate team and motivation can dip as a result.

The cultural issue is always high on the agenda when she is recruiting, making sure she is hiring people who understand these different ways of working and fully embrace them.

Staying grounded, staying well

Family remains her top priority in the end, and it is her three kids and her husband who have the real knack for keeping her grounded, never allowing her to take herself too seriously, she says.

But, with such a full-on life, how does she unwind?

“I do a lot of pilates, play a lot of tennis and I go walking. I specifically make a point of spending one or two hours every single morning exercising to mentally manage and balance the overall workload,” she says.

Brooke’s tried the working 20-hours-a-day routine, doing no exercise and living off takeaways. Now she’s on a much better path, with plenty of exercise and much healthier eating.

“I’ve learned that good lesson probably a little late in life, but it’s absolutely true,” she says with a chuckle. “The more physically and mentally healthy you are, the more you feel ready to conquer the world professionally.”