Kenny Robertson on being a cultural architect for your team

Lessons I Learned in Law

In this episode of Lessons I Learned in Law, Scott Brown speaks to Kenny Roberston, Head of Outsourcing, Technology & IP legal team at NatWest Group. In his role, he leads up a team which supports some of the largest outsourcing transactions in the UK and which continually pushes to be innovative and progressive and provide great customer experience for stakeholders. He is also Chair of the Law Society of Scotland’s Wellbeing Steering Group.

Kenny shares some of the lessons he’s learned in law including:

· Be Yourself! Giving legal advice is a relationships game, and its hard to build relationships without being authentic.

· Play with your head up (to use a sporting analogy). Be aware, be able to identify opportunities, adapt to change and be ready for whatever might be around the corner.

· Create and nurture a positive culture within your team.

Kenny admits that early on in his career he tried to live up to his pre-conceived ideas of what a lawyer should be, and how damaging this can be for lawyers’ wellbeing. He explores where these ideas might stem from, how the legal profession is changing and how developments such as AI may even alter the skillset required to be a lawyer in the future.

Kenny shares details of his pioneering initiative in collaboration with the Scottish Ethnic Minorities Law Association. Kenny also reveals how he’s worked to cultivate a transparent and psychologically safe organisational culture within his team at NatWest. He elaborates on the three pillars that form the bedrock of his team's ethos: High Performance, Progressive Mindset, and Teamship, and how they factor into the bank's ESG agenda and climate goals.

Presented by Scott Brown of Heriot Brown Legal Recruitment.

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