Leadership Profiles: Marnie Seif

What early career experiences most shaped your leadership philosophy and approach to executive decision making?

Over the course of my legal career, I worked in law firms and in companies ranging from small Series B startups all the way to a Fortune 500 tech company. I got to work with many different management teams and build teams of my own.  A few things that I have found to be true:

Taking a chance on yourself is usually a good move.

I took several risks in my career for the opportunity to advance my career on my own terms. I worked in a variety of startups, some of which didn’t make it, and I learned from every situation, which ensured that I made a more sophisticated decision when going to the next company. Along the way, I learned a lot about business, and I had the good fortune to work for and with a variety of strong leaders, who taught me how to build an effective organization.

The team matters.

This is a key tenet for success. A good leader builds a team comprised of strong players who sometimes know more than the leader does. This means that when building my legal organizations, I wanted folks who were not only subject matter experts but also confident in their own abilities and willing to challenge me if they felt strongly on a topic.

If you’re interested in something, you will work hard to be great at what you do.

If you’re bored, you won’t. Genuine curiosity is a trait that served me well in my career. I always wanted to know the details of the business — everything from technical issues to manufacturing processes to understanding the competition. Because I was interested, I had great conversations with leaders in every area of the business at different levels. They taught me so much, which helped me develop good judgment about acceptable risk in the business, which led to effective legal advice. Having these discussions helped to develop trust between me (and the rest of the legal function) and the other functions. Real candor between colleagues leads to better decision-making.

You held both the Chief Legal Officer and Chief People Officer roles at Analog Devices. How did that combination shape the way that you think about leadership and organizational success?

The staff positions (Finance, Legal, HR) are often viewed as less critical than the operating roles of CEO, Head of Engineering, Sales, etc. at most companies. And to a degree, that isn’t wrong in organizations where the staff functions do mostly transactional work, such as contract drafting, payroll, hiring, and benefits management.

The good news is that legal leaders are uniquely positioned to break out of that pigeonhole. Lawyers are smart and articulate; we can craft an argument, and (hopefully) we have sound judgment. By expanding one’s aperture beyond the legal “dos and don’ts,” a lawyer who is forward-looking can become an important strategic partner to the CEO and the management team. Some things I learned managing two different functions:

Keep the customer at the center of decision-making, and you’ll usually be on the right track.

Most lawyers think of their business counterparts as their customers, and that’s too limited a perspective. Expand the aperture of your thinking and consider the end user of the product or service your company makes. What will make it easier for a customer to buy? When you adopt that approach, you realize that legal complexity is the enemy of business. Sometimes we have to jump through a bunch of legal hoops to bring a product to market, but not always. Simpler and clearer usually wins the day. And in the HR role, I considered every employee my “customer,” which meant that it was my job to promote a culture where people were treated fairly, allowed to do their best work, and compensated as if they were valuable, not fungible.

In-house lawyers and HR staff should strive not to annoy everyone else in the company.

Surprisingly or not, most employees don’t love compliance training or doing other programmatic activities that take away from their core jobs. Good legal leaders always ask, “How does this program benefit the business?” and then design an offering that does that job in a way that employees will not resent. And consider the business calendar when rolling out a required training program — stay away from forcing extraneous work on people close to the end of a quarter or year-end. Give a heads up to management about a program before you introduce it so that they can be prepared when they hear from their own staff about the extra work. People won’t thank you for being un-annoying, but they will call you out for the opposite.

Talent is everything.

That’s the whole rule of leadership. If you foster a trusting and transparent working environment where people are free to engage in a fair-minded exchange of ideas, you will attract the very best talent, and you will get stellar results from your team. Great results come from smart people pulling in the same direction for a common goal. And it’s super fun to work in a place like that.