CX Webinar: WOW in conversation with Dara Redler

Hello and welcome everyone. Good morning from where I am, good afternoon, I see we have folks joining us who are in their afternoons, and good evening for those of you who may be in your evening. Hi, I'm Kate Broer, I'm our Global Inclusion and Diversity Officer here at Dentons, and we are thrilled to have you here with us today for our program, In Conversation with Dara Redler. As we get underway, just a couple of housekeeping items. First, to enhance accessibility for all our attendees, it is our standard practice to enable the live transcription function on all of our electronic meetings. If you're not familiar with the transcription function in Zoom, today's platform, you can display or hide subtitles or transcription using the CC button on the menu at the bottom of your screen. If you can't see the CC button, click on the three dots for more and you will find it there. You can then enable or disable the function in your personal feed. Please note the transcription uses AI technology and it is not always perfect, so please bear with us if there are any inaccuracies along the way, and feel free to laugh out loud if you see any because sometimes they can be quite funny. Again, thanks to everyone today for participating in the session. You will already have seen some encouragement from us to let us know where you're joining us from this morning in the chat. Please go ahead and do that if you haven't had a chance to do that yet, and we do encourage you, if you're willing, to turn on your videos so we can have a more intimate and engaged conversation today. So without further ado, let's get into it. Thank you for joining our WOW Women of the World Legal session as part of our Client Experience Program here at Dentons. A little bit of background to WOW: we launched our WOW program in earnest in July of 2020 after we had some smaller sessions with a dedicated group of senior in-house women who first met in person in London and wanted to form where they could come on a regular basis together to share career experiences, strategies, and tips through a connected community. Since then, we've had nine global webinars featuring incredible speakers from all over the world across industries and sectors and touching on a variety of topics of interest. Thousands have since joined the sessions, and we are very proudly gender inclusive. Aligned with the theme of the day in 2022 around change, slightly changing things up with this session and going forward to have more intimate, in-depth one-on-one conversations with high-profile leading in-house women. I am delighted to welcome today's guest, who will be kicking off our next chapter of WOW with our In Conversation sessions, and our guest is Dara Redler. I can't see her on my screen right now, but hopefully she's waving enthusiastically to our audience.

We are going to get into some details of Dara's fascinating career story as we dive into the conversation today, but I'm going to start off with some highlights. Dara Redler is currently the Chief Legal Officer at H&R Block, that tax company for those of you who have not heard of it before. Prior to joining H&R Block in January of this year, she was General Counsel and Corporate Secretary for Tilray. Tilray is a global cannabis company. At Tilray, she built a global legal function, developed a worldwide compliance program, led legal negotiations for transformative merger transactions to create one of the world's largest cannabis businesses by revenue. Prior to Tilray, she held various legal roles of increasing responsibility over 17 years at the Coca-Cola Company, and prior to that there was even more. Dara holds a JD from Duke University School of Law and two bachelor's degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, one in marketing from the Wharton School and one in Global Studies from the College of Arts and Sciences. So quite a career history. Again, one more note of housekeeping before we get into the discussion with Dara: please put in any questions you might have for Dara into our chat in real time. We're going to get to some of those questions near the end of the discussion. And as we kick off, as we always like to do for those of you who are WOW veterans, we're going to start with a poll from our incredible pollster, Romana Bruer Schwab. So I'm going to hand it to Romana to take us through our first poll. Romana, over to you.

Thanks, Kate, and thanks to everyone for being here today. I'm especially excited to hear from Dara, as I'm sure you all are. But we always like to start with a little poll to just get a feel for where we are right now, and keeping in theme with the session. So you'll see the poll in front of you just now, also on the screen that I'm sharing. This is really asking you to reflect on your own career. It's asking whether you think that you'll be in the same role in 12 months, in a year's time. Our esteemed speaker today, Dara, you'll hear momentarily, has truly had an incredible career journey. She was a veteran of one organization only to then do a complete 180 and change industries and organizations, and we'll hear more about that from her and how she's navigated it. But for now, we want to hear from all of you and what you think your career journeys and trajectories might be in the next year or so. That's about 85% of you who have responded to the poll. If you could get your responses in in the next 5 seconds before I close out the poll, that would be amazing. I will be closing out the poll and sharing the results with you all in five, four, three, two, and one. I am ending the poll now and I will share the results with you all. Very interestingly, the majority of us, 41%, have said yes, we do think that we will stay in the same role in the next 12 months, although that is also closely followed by many of us who say no. I think that really speaks to this time of the great transition where there is a bit of churn out there, and clearly we're all feeling it. But let's get inspired with Dara's journey today. I will hand it back over to Kate now. Thank you all for participating in the poll.

Thanks very much, Romana, and thanks to all of you for the poll. Fascinating result, without a doubt. And Dara, thank you again for joining us. So if you don't mind, I would like to start at the beginning, right at the beginning, because you have had this fascinating career journey. Not right at the beginning, not at birth, that might be a little much. But you finished law school, or you chose a path through a career in law. I'd be really fascinated to know why a career in law. I think a lot of us get down the path and maybe it's accidental and sometimes it's really intentional, but it would be really great to hear from you what set you on this journey.

That's fascinating to me because I think in 2022, the in-house path is one that is sort of on the menu for people when they're embarking on their law careers, but it was a little while ago. You were in law school, you were kind of... Well, I was there around the same time, so we're all good. But it was quite unusual at the time, relatively speaking. But you did start in private practice.

So you spent just a couple of years doing that, and then you made the leap. That was always the plan. And your first leap, I think it's fair to say, was again maybe a bit novel in the moment, but online retail. Would you describe it as a TMT company to what is now Travelport?

And you were there for a while, Dara, but I think if one thing I've learned, you can be restless or you're always looking for that next challenge. But you spent some time at Travelport and then moved over to Coca-Cola, that we talked about.

So this is industry change number one. It was the legal function that experience. Were you intimidated by the change of industry?

And that again, Coca-Cola was quite a long stint, lots of opportunity to move around. That's right, lots of opportunity to make changes. But eventually, 17 years at Coca-Cola, you made another change. I don't know if this is change number three or four, but another change.

I'm going to throw out, if you don't mind, Dara, one of those buzz phrases that we hear. You've just counseled people to have a little courage to put their hand up. So talk to me about impostor syndrome. I mean, how did you have those moments of thinking, whether it's Coca-Cola and I know we've got lots of other opportunities where we could maybe think that impostor syndrome would come in? What about that specter of 'I don't have the qualifications' or 'I'm not up for the role'? Did you face that, and if you did, how did you tackle that self-management piece?

Thanks for that. Maybe it's a great segue into: so long career at Coca-Cola, now I would think we all get comfortable, we feel pretty good, we know everybody in the team. And then along comes Tilray. For those we mentioned, Tilray, cannabis company, really cutting edge. Coca-Cola, long-standing established company. You were going to have a geography change. Tilray is based where I live, headquartered in Canada. You've been working in Atlanta, so that's a pretty courageous move. So tell us a little bit about the Tilray ring. It's probably one of the things people ask me most about because it's not a typical career path, and I recognize that. I had 17 years at the Coca-Cola Company, and you've described it perfectly. You get very comfortable, even changing roles within the company, you get comfortable. You know the industry, you know the business, you know the people. So it does take some courageousness to jump to a new position, let alone a new industry. For me, it was about I had done a lot of the roles. I still felt like I had a long enough career in front of me, and as I mentioned, I love learning. Frankly, I felt I was ready. I led teams at Coca-Cola, I was ready for that GC role and wanted to reach for that. So I was interviewing with a number of companies probably more in line with the Coca-Cola Company, and a recruiter called me about this global cannabis position. At first, I laughed on the phone and said, 'I'm not sure why you're calling me because I just spent 17 years at the Coca-Cola Company, consumer product goods. I know nothing about cannabis. I'm coming from a very large company, very large legal function. Tilray was a public company but on high growth, and so I just didn't see how I could add value.' This was a great learning for me. The recruiter said, 'Will you have a conversation with the CEO?' I said of course, and I sat down with the CEO, and he said to me, 'I don't need someone that knows cannabis. You can learn that. I need someone who knows where we want to go, who understands what great looks like.' He felt like my Coca-Cola experience would bring that, and he said, 'Help us just get there. Have that vision for where we need to go.' The more I thought about it, the more exciting that became. Here was an industry literally coming out of a state of prohibition into the light from a global perspective. This was a global company, and an area where regulations were literally changing week by week, month by month on a global basis. I thought for a lifelong learner, this was going to be the challenge for me: learning the industry globally, learning a high growth company, something I hadn't done before. To me, it was just going to be that exciting opportunity. So I made the jump, surprised a lot of people, but never looked back or regretted it. To me, it was just an opportunity to learn and to put the skills to work.

I'm really intrigued, and we talked a little bit about this before we all joined together with our audience, but you mentioned that you surprised a lot of people. Just talk a little bit about that because we all live with these expectations that people have of us, and that's something that sometimes we have to overcome.

Thanks for that. So my next question actually leads us into where you are now because of course you just talked about this fantastic transition to Tilray and what motivated you, and this fantastic leader, the CEO, who you talk to as somebody who you really identified with and you could work with. But looking back on it now as you jumped into that role, and maybe this is something you took forward as you jumped into your current role with H&R Block, is there anything you would have done to prepare differently for that leap than what you did, knowing what you know now? Are there different approaches you would take?

Thanks, Dara. I don't profess to be an expert, but I've certainly heard not infrequently that particularly when people first step into a GC role, that board management piece and understanding their role is actually quite a common transition learning point. So at least from what I've heard, I think that's a really good observation. So now we are here, 2022, H&R Block. You've been there for now 10 months, so transition number, I guess this is fourth industry, any number of transitions. So just what's that? This is another, I don't know if we're now 90 degrees or 180 degrees from cannabis. I think US taxes is about as 180 degrees as you could get.

Well, thank you for sharing that. You mentioned it a little bit earlier, and I think this is a great segue into a topic that we wanted to talk about, which is about leadership and transformation. You mentioned that you really prioritize authenticity. Maybe you can talk more generally, but also about authentic leadership. What is it that you prioritize in your role as a leader now? You've been in multiple situations where that's been your role in the organization.

I really love that, that permission and advocating for others to do the same, and conveying that to your team. I know our audience is listening intently because I'm getting some messages in the background saying this is great conversation. But I'm going to pause us for a little commercial break because I'd love to get the audience engaged. Our pollster Romana is going to put up another poll. Audience, this is your time to shine. Romana, can you put up the poll and talk us through it?

Great, thanks Kate and thanks Dara again. Dara has really spoken a lot about inclusive leadership in the last 30 minutes. She was talking about having a great mentor when she was in private practice, and she talked about having this incredible sounding CEO at H&R Block who was really in her corner and really wanting her to join the organization even though on its surface she didn't seem to have any experience in the financial services or tax industry, but he saw beyond that. Dara also talked about the own actions that she takes on a day-to-day to model that inclusive authentic leadership. So we want to know from you all, what do you think about authentic leadership? Is it something that you find easy to do? Is it maybe a challenge in certain contexts? Is it a diamond in the rough, a rarity to find amongst people, amongst colleagues, amongst teams? And or is it a pleasure when you see it? About 70% of you have answered this poll thus far. I'm going to leave it again for another five seconds just so that we can be sure to get as many responses as possible, because we're really always interested to hear what you think, what you feel. About 80% of you have now voted, you've submitted your responses. I'm going to end this poll and share it with you all. It seems that the majority of us say that it is a pleasure when we see that inclusive authentic leadership, and that's closely followed by it's something challenging to find and it's a challenge in some contexts maybe to even model. So I think as we progress in this session today, we can maybe even go a little bit more in depth on those everyday actions that one can take to model that sort of inclusive behavior. I'll stop sharing for now. Thank you all for engaging in this.

Thanks, Romana. I think that's a fascinating result. What I took from that is we see generally we are yearning for authentic leadership, but it's something that people continue to find difficult, whether they're finding it difficult in their own role as a leader or maybe they're not seeing it. I'm going to throw it back to you, Dara, just for your reflection on those results, and maybe ask people to put in the chat to expand a little bit on how they answered that poll, because I found it absolutely fascinating. What's making it a challenge in the current era? But over to you, Dara, for your reflection.

So you know, I don't know the career stage necessarily of all the folks who are on the call today, but one thing we often hear is with the benefit of experience and longevity, these things can become easier. Individuals become more secure in themselves, more secure in their capabilities. Is there any advice you would give to somebody in the earlier part of their career, maybe where they're a little more tentative about some things, that they might want to think about around their own authentic self at work?

Thanks for that. And Dara, as we often say around here, and at risk of oversimplifying it, it's a heck of a lot more fun when you're working in an environment where you have that kind of free flowing dialogue and opportunity to participate. I just wanted to pick up on a couple of points. I'm just going to encourage our audience again, if you have questions, maybe I'm doing a brilliant job of asking all of the questions that are coming to mind for you, and Dara is doing an incredible job of answering them all, but if you do have questions, please do put them into the chat and we will do our best to get to them for you. But you talked a little bit about maybe the relationship between authentic leadership and transformational change. I think we'd all agree it's pretty hard not to agree at the moment that transformational change is our collective every day all over the world and in just about every aspect of who we are as residents of planet Earth at the moment, not just in our work lives but more broadly in our lives. As a leader, how do you approach the challenge, and I'll say the opportunity, that transformational change can bring?

I think that's terrific, and I really love that comment about what should we keep doing but also what should we stop doing. It's actually wiser to abandon ship when it's sinking sometimes than to try to resurrect it. So I think that's a great piece. I'm going to do one more speed round question between you and me, and then I think we have a question or two from the audience. So great, a last one, very quick. Purpose. I know that's a really important thing for you, finding purpose in your work. You've worked in a lot of different sectors, a lot of different industries. How do you find purpose in what you're doing in your career, particularly as you've hopped from place to place?

Perfect. I hear that strong theme through your comments. I know Romana, we have a question from the audience that came to you, so I'm going to hand it over to you if you don't mind to ask Dara that question.

Sure, we'll do so. Dara, we did get a few audience questions, and I think this one is quite interesting. So I'll just read it in full and then turn over to you. This individual says, 'Thank you, Dara, for sharing your experiences and lessons learned in so much detail. Could you please share your views on taking up a job not related to law when someone is moving from one country to another?' This person then goes into a bit more detail and says they recently moved from New Delhi, India to Toronto, and they're in the process of building a career in law in a completely new jurisdiction. They feel that if they might be constrained to take up a job not related to the law to make ends meet, would it have any impact on their long-term career trajectory? What do you think about that?

Thanks, Dara. I think that's a great response, and I have to say quite uplifting too. Makes us all feel better, you know, we can maybe have our hands in different cookie jars and try out new things. Absolutely. I realize that we're coming up to time here, so I think we don't have any more time for specific questions. But if you do have some, I recommend you can ping me, you can ping Kate, and we can try to get those questions over to you after the session. I'm happy if anyone wants to connect with me on LinkedIn or continue a conversation. Let me just put that out there, always happy to do that.

That's awesome. Thank you. That's authentic inclusive leadership at work right there, folks. Thank you. So I'll just put up our fourth poll of the day, or excuse me, our third poll of the day. I think this kind of fits in nicely with everything that Dara was saying today, really talking about her experiences and her career trajectory and also answering that great question from one of our audience members just now. So the question is asking you, how are you feeling about the trajectory for women specifically in in-house roles? I think this question definitely has a bit of inclusion, diversity, and equity flavor. Kate and I, we work in the Global Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity team, so we always like to look at things through a lens of that, right? So we'd love to get your read on this. About 70% of you have responded. I'll give it another 5 seconds as per usual, and then we can close it out. I know I'm going a little faster than usual, but I do want us to have time to just wrap up the session and get some of your ideas on what we might do in the future for future sessions. So I'll end the poll just now and share the results with you all. This is great. I think the majority of us feel positively about the trajectory for women in in-house roles, and we're hopeful about what the future might hold. A small minority of us, but still there, are maybe less positive, and I would say that that's not wrong. I think there's a lot still left to do around the world in this space. So I'll stop sharing that poll just now and turn it back over to Kate for a few parting words.

Terrific. Thank you, Romana. I would just like to say, can I just one shout out? I saw a couple men here in the session, and I just want to do a shout out to you. Thank you for joining and being a supporter. So great to see you on it.

Great, thanks. So yes, like Kate said, the team behind the Client Experience program, all of us, we love to get your views on what we might do in the future for similar sessions. So you should be seeing this poll up on your screen, and we're really wanting to know what you think might be beneficial to you to learn about in future sessions. We've jotted down a few topics or themes that we think might be useful. If none of those necessarily resonate, click 'other' and then pop in the chat what theme or topic you would like to focus on in future sessions. So I know there's a lot of text up on your screen, but some of the themes and topics that we've been looking at and maybe we would want to do for future sessions is around team management, retention in this era of the great transition, in this era of the war for talent. Maybe there's some concerns about retention, managing your team. Similarly, cyber risk, maybe it's this increasing risk of cyber crimes, big data breaches, and the issue around your organization's cyber security policies that you're particularly concerned about. ESG, that seems to be the corporate buzzword these days, maybe that's front of mind for you. Similarly, how you might respond to crises such as those big data breaches or similar things, or indeed pending litigation, as well as this kind of looming recession that we're all facing, and maybe it's really crunching your budget unfortunately. So that's about 90% of you who have responded. Thank you so much. I'll end the poll and just share quickly with you the results. We'll be sure to take note of these, and then in future sessions really try to shape the sessions based on what you have all said today. Thank you all so much. Any final final words, Dara or Kate?

Thanks, Dara. And I don't know, Romana, if you want to pop up that final slide just so our crew here today can see what's upcoming in our Client Experience. Thank you for bearing with us. We try not to be overtime. Occasionally we blow it, we have by a couple of minutes, but the conversation has been so terrific. So thank you for bearing with us. You can find out more information from our website, dentons.com/clientexperience, or you can always email us at [email protected] to find out more. So again, thank you for bearing with us as we ran slightly over. Thank you so much, Dara, for the incredible conversation, and thanks to you, our audience, for engaging with us today. We'll see you all soon. Bye for now.