Verisk’s chief legal officer on making a cross-industry move and leading in a hybrid environment

In this podcast, Heidrick & Struggles’ Victoria Reese speaks to Kathy Card Beckles, chief legal officer and corporate secretary at Verisk, an American multinational data analytics and risk assessment company. Beckles discusses the benefits of making a cross-industry move, both in terms of her own development and how it benefits her company. She also shares how her experiences as an engineer and in intellectual property management and litigation helped her progress in her career and how her non-executive director role at NASDAQ has influenced her to be a more forward-thinking chief legal officer and, in return, how being a sitting general counsel and chief legal officer has influenced her perspective as a board member.

Some key questions answered in this podcast include:

• (3:03) A few months ago, Heidrick & Struggles released a survey report on the changing leadership style of today's general counsel. The biggest shift we noted was an increase in the collaborative leadership style, which is defined as being empathetic, team building, talent spotting, and coaching oriented. What's your reaction to this?
• (4:52) This was your first public-company CLO role, and it also involves switching industries. After spending 15 years in financial services, are there any surprises? What are the lessons learned you've experienced moving into a public-company general counsel role?
• (5:43) Do you have any advice you would give leaders who may be considering a cross-industry move?
• (11:43) Regarding your deep experience in intellectual property management and litigation, do you think having that experience has helped you progress in your career? And how so?
• (13:38) You're also a board member of NASDAQ Exchange. How would you say your non-executive director role has influenced you to be a more forward-thinking chief legal officer and, vice versa, how has being a sitting general counsel and chief legal officer influenced your perspective as a board member?

Below is a full transcript of the episode, which has been edited for clarity.

Welcome to the Heidrick & Struggles Leadership Podcast. Heidrick is the premier global provider of senior-level executive search and leadership consulting services. Diversity and inclusion, leading through tumultuous times, and building thriving teams and organizations are among the core issues we talk with leaders about every day, including in our podcasts. Thank you for joining the conversation.

Victoria Reese: Hi. I'm Victoria Reese, partner at Heidrick & Struggles and the global managing partner of the Legal, Risk, Compliance & Government Affairs Practice. In today's podcast, I'm talking to Kathy Card Beckles, chief legal officer and corporate secretary at Verisk, an American multinational data analytics and technology firm serving the global insurance industry.

Prior to Verisk, Kathy served as the general counsel for consumer banking and shared services at JP Morgan Chase. She also led the company's card team and served as chief intellectual property counsel. Kathy, thank you so much for joining us today.

Kathy Card Beckles: You're so welcome. Thank you for inviting me. I really appreciate this.

Victoria Reese: Our pleasure. You stepped into your chief legal officer role at Verisk in April 2021, right in the middle of remote and hybrid work environments. What leadership skills and experiences have you found to be essential or that you have leveraged to navigate this new role and lead your team?

Kathy Card Beckles: Well, it was definitely very interesting, stepping into a new role and having to meet everybody electronically or virtually. Our offices really weren't open yet when I first started, but I quickly realized that understanding my team and giving them a sense of community was key to leading in a then-virtual and now-hybrid environment. One of my tactics—and this might be a little counterintuitive—was having more meetings than we normally would have. They weren't the day-long, everyone sit around and stare at the screen meetings. We had many more short touch bases when we were trying to be intentional about connecting, a lot more free-flowing communication. I think that was one of the tactics that made a huge difference of starting in a remote and a hybrid environment.

There are lots of things you take for granted when you meet in person. So, being intentional about what you're trying to convey and communicate is really important when you’re hybrid. So, if you're going to have that mentoring moment, you have to be intentional about having a mentoring moment. If you're trying to build community, you have to be intentional about putting together programming to actually build community. You can't just rely on running into people in the hallway or in the elevator to do all those things. And, honestly, I think we found that people enjoyed that a lot more, so that was definitely a benefit to having that kind of structure there.

Victoria Reese: A few months ago, we released a survey report on the changing leadership style of today's general counsel. The biggest shift we noted was an increase in the collaborative leadership style, which is defined as being empathetic, team-building, talent-spotting, and coaching oriented. What's your reaction to this?

Kathy Card Beckles: I think it's spot on. It really is. You know, recently my team and I, we had an exercise where we asked each other, what's the best team you've been on? What are the things that really make those teams stand out in your mind? And, for my team, the funny thing was, is the answer came back as places where they were inspired, places where they had an opportunity to work really hard together, and places where they were able to form relationships with people. Now, we have kind of a shorthand for our team: we focus on inspiration, perspiration, and relations in order to move forward. But, if you look at the message GCs have been [receiving] over the past few years, to do more with less, that coupled with a really robust job market and the impacts of the pandemic have had people questioning what their “why?” is to come to work. So, as they're doing that, being that empathetic leader, being the person who is the team builder, becomes critical. In order to get exponential experience and performance from your team members, you’ll find yourself being in a place where you are providing that inspiration, where you are the remover of obstacles in order for your team to get done the tremendous amount of work that they have. And you have to understand the empathy portion; everyone is coming to the table with different reasons and those reasons are changing, everyone's got a different skill set and experience, and we have to look out for different kinds of feedback. Having a strong sense of empathy is what's going to help you be successful in that.

Victoria Reese: Kathy, Verisk was not just a new organization for you. This was your first public-company CLO role, and it also involves switching industries. After spending 15 years in financial services, are there any surprises? What are the lessons learned you've experienced moving into a public-company general counsel role?

Kathy Card Beckles: Well, I have to say one of the happy surprises was how much people reached out to help me. Whether that was another general counsel, whether that was people at my new job, whether it was outside counsel, everyone did reach out to help to make sure that I was prepared and ready for the challenges of the new role. So, that network, which gets stronger every day, really did come as a critical part to my transition. And I'm forever grateful for the people who reached out and provided some help to me.

Victoria Reese: On that same theme, do you have any advice you would give leaders who may be considering a cross-industry move?

Kathy Card Beckles: I might be slightly biased, but I would tell your clients that they should really consider a pretty wide range of folks if they're looking for a public-company role. Look, the public-company aspect of a company is an incredible responsibility. But you can break it into a couple of pieces. The key technical bits you can definitely learn whether it's by using outside counsel or being trained or having good support teams. It's a set of rules that are learnable. And lawyers, as a general rule, are really good at learning rules. So, all of those things are definitely learnable. The bigger piece, in my mind, is that the real impact of what you do day-to-day has to do everything with the decisions that you make, with the strategy you help to set, with the way you work with the senior team, the way that you execute. Those are the key things that are going to impact being a CLO. And, honestly, those things are the very types of things you learn when you're a divisional GC or a division head or something that maybe not be a public-company CLO.

So, from my perspective, I think companies should have a very wide set of people they go after rather than just staying with public-company GCs, because there's so much you can learn. There are so many people that can bring a wealth of experiences to your office. The other thing I will say is, when you're looking to either go across industry or go from maybe private to public or division to public, from an internal perspective, you’ve got to be willing to read and learn. If you think your learning days are behind you, doing a big jump is probably not the thing that you’ll want to do. But honestly, reading and learning is a huge competency of being a good CLO. So the people who are looking to do this are likely strong in this anyway, and it may seem like the learning might be exhausting or tiring, but it actually gives you energy because it allows you to connect dots in ways that you may not have been able to connect them before.

Switching industries, switching companies, can be a humbling experience, especially when you're used to relying on a long-tenured subject matter or institutional experience. But it actually is good because it requires you to ask really good questions, and that's a good skill to tap into. It forces you to slow down and really take time to truly understand what the issues are. And those are all, again, core competencies of being a good CLO. You have to get to know people. You can't rely on your network. I couldn't just say, “Oh, I know everybody in this space.” It really does put some energy and initiative on you to get to know people and to get to know different organizations and different ways of working. And honestly, that can be a huge benefit to the company that you're working for, because you're able to bring perspectives and mindsets and ways of working from other industries into yours. And some of that stuff, you know, you'll find other industries are trying to solve the same problems. You might be able to bring something to bear that no one else has because you're thinking about it from a different industry perspective.

And then lastly, I think one of the biggest benefits to transferring over is you learn a lot by analogy. You'll say, “Well, I know this process and this new process is a lot like this process, with these different exceptions.” And while you're in the process and the exercise of doing those analogies, you can find that you might be able to connect dots that others haven't been able to connect this readily. So overall, while there's a lot of reading—which is actually a good thing—there’s a lot of learning, which is even better. I think the experience of going cross-industry and between different companies has been tremendous and has made me a better CLO.

Regarding the courage to make the move, can I tell you a story? Some of the best career advice I ever got was from my then-nine-year-old daughter. In their school, they have this jungle gym in their playground. And when you get to be about eight or nine years old, you get brave enough to climb on top of the jungle gym and jump off from the top rung all the way down to the ground. It's a rite of passage for every third or fourth grader. And the day that it was my daughter's turn to go ahead and do this, she gets up to the top and she's telling me what's happening. She's like, “Oh, mom, I jumped off the space ball!” That's what they called it. “I jumped off the space ball today.” So I'm like, “Oh, were you excited?” And she says, “Yeah, I got to the top, and even though I had watched other people do it, I was really kind of scared and nervous.” I'm like, “So what did you do?” She's like, “Well, I know I've jumped off of different things before and I landed OK. So, I figured this was just something similar to that. So I jumped off and I hit the ground and I fell a little bit. But other than that, I was okay.” I said, “Oh wow, what did you do next?” And she says, “Well Mom, I just climbed back up and I did it again. Because once you jump off the top of the space ball once, it's a lot less scary every time you do it after that.”

What I learned from that was once you get in the habit of learning how to take a risk and you build off the fact that you probably can identify other times when you've taken risks in similar situations, jumping off the space ball gets a little easier every time you do it. So there’s that, and I will also give a little bit of attribution to my engineering training. Probably one of the first or second classes that you have as a true engineer is learning how to draw a system. And you realize that a system is all about where you draw the box. It can be as small as an intermolecular interaction or it can be as big as the world. And you can describe everything in life by: “Something goes into a box, something happens inside the box, and then something comes outside the box.” That is literally how all engineers look at the world. So, once you have that, it's just about asking myself, where am I drawing the box? I don't really care what's inside the box right now. What's inside the box is important, but the skills and analytical tools you bring to it are the same.

Victoria Reese: Kathy, I wish I had more stories like yours. I want to touch on your deep experience in intellectual property management and litigation. The shift from hard assets to knowledge assets, in many industries, I would imagine, is making IP expertise very important as IP becomes a larger asset for companies. Do you think having that experience has helped you progress in your career? And how so?

Kathy Card Beckles: Absolutely. Being an IP attorney, starting off my legal career as an IP attorney, definitely helped. I still view myself as an engineer. I have a background in chemical engineering. Shout out to any Blue Hen engineers out there from the University of Delaware! One of the things we learned there was the focus was on solving a problem. In my engineering training, I learned how to solve problems using chemicals and statistical software, and a lot of what I do now is solving problems with words and systems, so the impetus to solve problems is still there. As a patent attorney, one of the things you have to learn to be very good at is jumping into a situation at a particularly sensitive time. You may not know a whole lot about the background of something. You have to get up to speed very, very quickly with people who have been deeply involved for a really long time with that particular project. And you have to do that in such a way that not only can you understand it the project and understand their viewpoint, but you have to be able to articulate it enough to convince someone else—in this instance, the patent office or a judge—to see your point of view, and do that pretty quickly. That skill, that critical ability to jump in, understand what's happening, and being able to translate that for others who may not be as steeped in the project substantively is incredibly helpful. It’s important as a CLO, but also as we look at the heavy technology focus that most of our assets have taken. So yes, being an IP attorney was really helpful.

Victoria Reese: Kathy, you're also a board member of NASDAQ Exchange. How would you say your non-executive director role has influenced you to be a more forward-thinking chief legal officer and, vice versa, how has being a sitting general counsel and chief legal officer influenced your perspective as a board member?

Kathy Card Beckles: I think the benefits definitely go both ways. I also look after the corporate secretarial role here at Verisk, and it's really great to be able to see other examples of how people discharge that role. So, right away you're just getting into the day-to-day blocking and tackling of that role. You're getting to see, “Oh, here's how this person does it. Here's what they do, here's how they get information out.” So that's always a benefit to see, on both sides. And, from a CLO perspective, it provides a really good check. You say, “Well, am I getting all the risk issues? I know we were talking about these particular risks that are coming up on the NASDAQ board. Am I addressing these? How seriously are other people taking them?” I think it really does do a lot from a CLO perspective to broaden your perspective and your horizon with regard to not just legal risks, but all risk.

In terms of how it makes me a more effective board member? I think, you know, having been in those situations before, you know how to ask the right question. I think, in some instances, my questions can be a little bit more finely crafted. I can ask different things that maybe someone else wouldn't think to ask around, maybe staffing or push a legal point. And you do it out loud so the rest of the board can hear you and maybe even prompt them to ask additional questions. So overall, I think it's been a great benefit to both my role as CLO and corporate secretary and hopefully that experience that I have and bring to the board has been additionally helpful to them as well.

Victoria Reese: Kathy, looking ahead, which specific leadership skill sets and capabilities will be most important for your company to meet its strategic goals?

Kathy Card Beckles: I think three. If I had to pick a few key leadership skill sets, one is caring. You know, we talked a little bit before about the changing ways of leaders and the empathy that you need and the team-building aspect. I think people need to feel like you care, particularly in a post-pandemic (or at least a currently endemic) world. The other skill set I think you need is innovation, and this is not just innovation from products and services perspective but innovation in terms of your leadership. Everyone should be constantly learning and looking forward. We want to be able to look forward and learn from what we have done and not just remember, “Oh, here's what we did.” It's much more about applying what we've done so far. So, we want to be a learning organization and not so much a remembering organization. And under no circumstance do we want to be a forgetting organization. And, lastly, you can care all you want, you can be as innovative as you want, but if there's not a high capability to execute, it puts everything else in jeopardy. It puts everything else at risk. So, at the end of the day, you must still be able to execute and get things done in a timely manner and have the critical things and the critical skills you need to move forward and to meet your strategic goals.

Victoria Reese: Well, Kathy, I certainly learned a lot from you today, as I always do, and obviously I love your story. Thank you for telling it to us today, and most importantly, thank you for taking the time to speak with us.

Kathy Card Beckles: Oh, absolutely. Anytime, Victoria. And I want to thank you for all the help you've provided. You are one of those people who jumped up and helped me as I transitioned. That was a happy surprise. Hopefully, you felt the love there too.

Victoria Reese: Kathy, thank you again. It was my pleasure to help you. And I know you had many people who were very, very happy to step forward to help you as well.

Thanks for listening to the Heidrick & Struggles Leadership Podcast. To make sure you don’t miss more future-shaping ideas and conversations, please subscribe to our channel on the podcast app. And if you’re listening via LinkedIn, Twitter, or YouTube, why not share this with your connections? Until next time.

About the interviewer

Victoria Reese (vreese@heidrick.com) is the global managing partner of the Legal, Risk, Compliance & Government Affairs Practice; she is based in the New York office.