By Blandine CORDIER-PALASSE, MEDEF Review
As a consultant in human and organisational strategy, BCP Executive Search favours a made-to-measure approach in which it understands the environment, organisation and challenges of a position in order to propose the most suitable candidates to its clients.
Interview with Blandine Cordier-Palasse, Managing Partner.
What are the ambitions behind the creation of the firm?
It was when I was offered a job that didn't match what the headhunter had described to me that I realised how much of a difference it made to have operational experience. When I moved into recruitment, and to avoid a repeat of what had happened to me, I adopted an approach that combined expert advice on the job beforehand with the drafting of particularly precise job descriptions. These descriptions are completed and validated by the client. They give candidates a clear understanding of the professional environment, the Group's organisation and the qualities and aptitudes required.
What is your current methodology?
We believe that a good candidate, if he or she is to fit in well with a new company, needs to have specialised skills. To these must be added human qualities and, above all, the potential to develop. With this in mind, we subject the various candidates to a questionnaire. This one probes the way they handle complex situations, relations with their contacts, management, conflicts, etc. These are all things that enable them to project themselves into the job. On the other hand, it gives us a basis on which to judge their 'fit' with the demands of the future environment. We supplement this with personality tests.
We then send our clients a precise benchmark of candidates, from which I like to include an outsider. This outsider can sometimes be chosen because a job is always what you make of it. So, if the job is defined as 80 %, the remaining 20 % also depend on the candidate, their interpersonal skills, the way they capitalise on their experience, their potential and what they can bring to the table. What's more, the fact that we know our market and our candidates well means that we can tell the customer what each individual can bring to the table. In particular, this support enriches their thinking.
We generally present 5 to 6 candidates. Our clients see 3 to 4, select 2 and take 1 (or sometimes 2).
We're also recruiting teams. This is a challenge that I particularly enjoy. It requires us to put together harmonious pairings that match and complement each other. The search for and creation of these alchemies pushes us to think outside the box. It's a dynamic that echoes our motto "Thinking out of the box".
In your view, the ideal profile of a legal director today should certainly retain its legal dimension. But it should also have a strong business dimension.
Absolutely. These profiles are changing rapidly, both in law firms and in companies. Today's legal directors need to have both a very good legal background, which helps them to develop their reasoning and analyse situations accurately, and an appetite for business, ideally backed up by training at a business school. This enables them to speak the same language as managing directors, financiers and operational staff. And, above all, to be able to deal with the complexity of setting up operations and legal and financial engineering, to reason constructively and analyse situations, risks and opportunities. In this way, the legal director can support the business with legal expertise. This will make him or her a truly proactive player in strategic thinking and decision-making.
Being in direct contact with reality and leadership is an exciting way to practise law. It's also a way of defending positions in the service of a strategic vision.
Today, it is vital to change our perspective. We must no longer focus solely on constraints. We need to provide business solutions that take account of legal and extra-legal risks. The law has clearly become an economic weapon, and therefore a major competitive factor. It is the way in which we negotiate an acquisition, a JV, a transfer, a contract, a commitment, a guarantee, a deadline, a liability, a risk... that makes all the difference. You don't have to wait until there's a legal dispute before wielding your powerful legal weapon. That's when it's too late. Instead, use it upstream, in the service of your business. This is a fundamental message that the MEDEF must take on board. I'm working hard to get it across to both candidates and my clients.
Do you think that this development is the only one to have an impact on the way in which legal issues are integrated into the company?
No, other changes are underway. For example, with companies now operating on a less hierarchical basis - because young, highly proactive employees prefer to deploy their entrepreneurial potential and energies within more horizontal organisations and no longer expect validation from their managers - it is essential to have good legal reflexes to be able to be your own censor.
Finally, we need to be able to ensure that a legal director continues to provide the company with real added value, in line with its strategy and business opportunities. Lawyers who have been in post for 10 years are no longer necessarily the ones likely to support a group as it evolves. So, in the same way that a company's finance director is reviewed every 5 years or so, a company director must be able to question the ability of his or her legal director to support and secure the group's strategy at each stage of its development.
What place do you think this 2.0 legal director should have within the company?
It seems to me that, following the example of Anglo-Saxon companies where the General Counsel is the Chairman's right-hand man, our Legal Directors should sit on the Executive Committee. Just as the CFO assists the CEO in implementing the company's global strategy, the General Counsel should be able to participate in defining and implementing it with the members of Comex. This will make it possible to integrate legal thinking and engineering into projects at a very early stage, to involve the legal dimension in the business and to instil legal reflexes in the members of Comex. It's worth noting that the legal team's roadmap is becoming cross-functional, and that it now includes compliance issues, which are becoming increasingly important.
You are particularly committed to this issue, as you are vice-president of the Cercle de la Compliance. What are the issues raised by compliance?
Driven by civil society and regulators, companies are becoming more aware of the issues involved (combating financial crime and terrorism, anti-corruption, fraud, business ethics, data protection, regulatory and professional standards, etc.) and are implementing preventive and vigilance measures to protect their tangible and intangible assets.
These are major challenges in the age of the digital revolution and big data, which means that companies and individuals are having to take a serious look at how they secure their data, and which gives compliance functions an unprecedented role, supported by changes in institutional regulations, such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which aims to improve transparency and will come into force in May 2018. Fundamentally associated with the contemporary challenges of cybersecurity and, more generally, with business ethics, compliance functions are now often attached to top management in international groups, because senior managers have understood that they are essential to protecting their company and helping to change the group's culture with regard to new ways of doing business.
I have been a co-founder and contributor to the Cercle de la Compliance for 6 years. What's more, I understand both the challenges and the needs that compliance entails. I know how best to support my clients in these highly specialised areas of expertise, which are very new to them. Like the legal profession, compliance is not there to prevent people from doing things. On the contrary, it is there to secure the way things are done. It enables us to analyse, assess and pre-empt risks in a world where the rules are changing. It's a world where what was permitted or tolerated 10 years ago is no longer the case today.
This is evidenced by the increase in the number of executives dismissed for ethical misconduct, as revealed by the "CEO Success" study published by PwC in May 2017. Of the world's 2,500 largest listed companies, the number of departures due to ethical misconduct increased by 36 % between the periods 2007-2011 and 2012-2016.
Do you think the streamlining of the hierarchical structure you mentioned is a good thing?
Above all, it seems to me that this is an inevitable development - with positive aspects. It is a force that can unleash energies and initiatives. But above all it needs support. In the United States, for example, managers - who know that everything is a contract - do nothing without their legal director. It is crucial that we succeed in developing this same legal awareness in France. It is also essential to integrate it with ethics, which, far from being detrimental to performance, actually enhances it. This is what I work on with my customers, firstly through my consultancy work. Then my role is to find them the personalities capable of taking on these challenges within the company.
