Jodi Norman was determined to model a different and more diverse kind of leadership when she achieved her life ambition to become a law firm partner. She did it by revealing her unique life story for the first time.
It was the ambition of her lifetime: to make partner in a big international law firm and take her place at the decision-making table.
But she quickly saw something needed to be done to prove that there were many more ways than one to become a leader in the corporate world.
“When I saw how decisions were made in the corporate world, I said to myself – something has got to change. And I’ve dedicated pretty much my entire partnership to trying to make that change.
“I started from a very high and isolated platform, and I’ve spent all the years since falling off that platform, getting a few bumps and bruises along the way.”
Ways to make change
But how to go about affecting that change?
She started by taking a leadership role in the firm’s inclusion programme, becoming inclusion lead for the Middle East, Turkey and Africa practice.
Jodi began talking openly and transparently about her experience as a woman in the senior echelons of law.
But there was part of her story that she had never shared publicly – how she overcame extraordinarily tough challenges to forge her career.
She grew up on a council estate in the UK where Jodi and her two brothers were brought up by her dad, a single parent. Though he worked hard to look after the family, his work as a long-distance truck driver meant he had to be away from home regularly, making their life unsustainable.
Aged 12, Jodi moved away to live in a care home where she stayed for four years. At 16 she began supporting herself independently, first through school and then university by working shifts at a fast-food chain long into the night before getting up early next day to make it to classes.
Her intelligence and academic achievements carried her through and eventually she emerged from York University with a first in philosophy, politics and economics.
She chose law as a career because of a lack of imagination, she says with a laugh. Actually, the professional options suggested to her were limited – an accountant, a doctor or a lawyer. “I can’t count, and faint at the sight of blood, so I ended up a lawyer.”
She received a training contract at Clifford Chance before moving to Allen & Overy where she made partner in 2019 and now leads A&O Shearman’s financial services regulatory practice in the META region, based in the UAE.
Choosing to be vulnerable
It’s a story that she shied away from sharing professionally but she was made to think again by a much-admired reverse mentor. “He’s a wonderful, well to do, upper middle-class public school boy who is one of the very few people I know who is happy to say I am privileged and can seek to do good from that position of privilege.”
He knew Jodi’s story and challenged her, saying: “Your female-related inclusion work is great, but that’s not the most interesting thing about you. You’ve got bigger stories to tell.”
Confronted by the challenge, she set off on a journey of self-reflection eventually deciding to open up. But it took courage to present an alternative picture of leadership.
“I thought people would look at me or treat me differently if they knew my back story. Sometimes it could be positive, sometimes negative, but definitely different. I was scared of doing it,” she says.
“But then I thought, I have the privilege of being in a senior position. I can reconcile telling my story if that difference is, hopefully, compensated for by change.”
She admits to being naïve at first, thinking she could institute wholesale change. Over time she’s accepted that making many small changes – helping individuals to reflect on their own stories or even providing a wider call to action to embrace difference – would be enough.
“The little changes have become my big change,” she says.
Letter to my younger self
The vehicle for her “first act of public vulnerability” was a unique campaign, a series of letters written by 30 women in the firm to their younger selves, of which hers was the first. It began to lay out the details of her life story, a story that she has gone on to be increasingly transparent about in articles, interviews and podcasts.
Still nervous about how it would be received, she bounced it off her husband, a few close friends and professional allies. Their reaction was disheartening. They worried that she was sharing too much, that it might end up wrecking her career – ironic since the point was to be honest and show vulnerability.
She made some edits, taking on board some of their concerns, for instance that it might offend some male colleagues. Then it was posted, firstly to all her colleagues in the Middle East, then into the inboxes of colleagues right across the firm and later to the wider world on LinkedIn.
Much of the reaction was positive. People said it was inspirational. Many reached out to say they’d never read anything like it before or come across someone willing to be publicly so vulnerable.
Despite that she is realistic about its impact and the degree of change it can bring about.
But an enduring aspect of the letters campaign is the sense of strength she and the other 29 women who took part continue to draw from it. “One of the upsides is this idea that courage compounds. I wrote my letter, then another woman wrote hers, then another and another and at the end of it a kind of collective courage just built and grew.”
So, what pushed her to publish in the first place?
“I am a girl from a council estate in southeast England who is a partner in a global law firm. You’ve got to pay that back to the universe, right?”
And there’s a power in role modelling which she insists isn’t about “perfection”. Rather “it’s about giving permission.”
“Anyone who thinks they are totally refined and can’t benefit from getting a different perspective, is wholly wrong,” she says emphatically.
New challenges for a new generation
Recent years have seen her thinking more deeply about the challenges that a new generation of leaders will face and what courage will look like for them. As time has gone by, her thinking has matured, she says.
“Early on as a leader, I thought that courage was the ability to say no when making a decision, notwithstanding that could mean a loss in revenue. Now I’m at the point in the maturity curve where I think it’s more about creating clarity amid ambiguity.
“It’s less about a single person standing up and saying no and more about creating shared accountability and transparency in decision making and in how you operate as a business. That’s not necessarily how corporate enterprises run, is it?”
The present is already very uncertain, and the future will probably be even more so, she adds. “Leaders of the future will be operating in an environment that is more and more ambiguous and the courageous ones will be those that remain principled, accepting that there will be trade-offs but taking responsibility for the outcome of their decisions.”
It’s about values versus outcomes, she explains. “I want it to be about process rather than just whether the outcome is good or bad, because the way you get to the outcome matters.
“In the corporate world the end result tends to be the only thing you focus on. In an economic sense, the outcome is very important, of course. But lots of studies in all sorts of disciplines show that good inputs increase the likelihood of a good outcome. We choose to conveniently ignore that sometimes.”
Emotional intelligence, empathy and self-awareness are the key characteristics of the best leaders and the qualities that will help them make principled decisions. “I’m talking about that emotional intent, the diligence, about bringing people along and doing it in a self-aware way. And then its about learning from those actions through reflection and embedding the lessons learned back into the decision-making cycle.”
All that, she concedes, is difficult as the pace of work accelerates rapidly, not least with the advent of AI which if not handled carefully could exacerbate an epidemic of burnout already apparent in the professional world.
“The biggest challenge for future leaders is the sustainability question – the ability to continue to show up and be your best. Logically, everybody showing up at their best has to create the best outcome.”
Does she, these days, see more leaders exhibiting these qualities of good leadership?
She “finds it in pockets”, she says, and those pockets are empowering.
“I see some great leaders out there, and they are self-selecting and naturally gravitate towards you,” she says. “But they’re not always in leadership positions and I think that’s where the equation is maybe going wrong.”
Standing on my head
The yoga studio is where she makes room to slow down and sustain herself. It is her safe place and one where she finds significant contrasts with the corporate world.
“I’ve spent years trying to stand on my head, just for the sake of doing it, surrounded by people who support me without wanting to see me fall flat on my face. Why is it different in the corporate world? Why are we waiting for, almost willing, people to fail? Why can’t we choose a different way? The answer is we can but choose not to. That means things can change.”
Jodi continues to tell her story and recently has reflected on the influence of her father. Though she lived separately from him from an early age, she would always turn to him for advice when big career decisions needed to be made.
On one occasion, he simply told her that she had outgrown him and that he couldn’t help her decide apart from to say that he totally trusted her to get it right. Then he quoted a famous line from Winnie the Pooh: “You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem and smarter than you think.” It’s a piece of wisdom that she threaded through the letter to her younger self.
Perhaps that was an early lesson in leadership – the ability to communicate with humility and vulnerability, placing your trust in the skills and judgement of others?
“The relationship with my family was a very difficult one. But my dad always did the best he could even if things didn’t turn out happy ever after. He was a modest man, a humble man, and the smartest man I’ve ever met.
He just tried his best and that’s the biggest lesson I learned from him: try your best and it will be ok. That’s all you need to judge yourself by.”
