Meet O Shaped Ambassador - Ailsa Longmuir
“Make it real – it has to be something that performance is judged against, both internally and externally".
Ailsa Longmuir, General Counsel (Energy Marketing & Trading and Centrica Business Solutions), Centrica plc
What does O Shaped mean to you?
I am passionate about driving mindset change within the legal profession – to expedite a departure from archaic behaviours on giving advice which simply have no place in today’s world of business. I want and need commercial pragmatic legal advice and we have to be much stricter to those providing this to us that this has to be an equal priority as to the technical quality of the advice itself.
How have you brought O Shaped to life in Centrica?
Centrica focusses on O Shaped in its selection of the firms it uses for professional advice across the Legal, Regulatory Affairs, Ethics & Compliance and Secretariat function. It is also a constant metric on which those within that function are appraised in their everyday roles in Centrica. We focus equally on the “what” and the “how”, and O Shaped lends itself to this approach. Dan has kindly attended internal events to speak on O Shaped, and I have also appeared on an external panel event to demonstrate the importance of the programme in-house. We have undertaken a bespoke engagement on O Shaped with a panel firm to ensure that feedback on how we are putting this into practice on both sides of the relationship is given in real time, to allow for both reflection and action on areas for improvement. In summary, it forms a keystone part of everything we do.
How can readers of this bring O Shaped to life in their own teams or organisations?
Make it real – it has to be something that performance is judged against, both internally and externally. And call out both good and bad examples of where O Shaped has been used effectively or the lack of demonstration of its principles caused issues with business partnering relationships.
To learn more about how you can bring O Shaped to life in your own team, contact us at info@oshaped.com.
