General Legal Counsel in Barclays Asia Pacific

Rachel has been with Barclays for sixteen years. She joined us because she saw that our growth plans in Asia Pacific could give her the career variety and leadership experience she was looking for.

In her time here she has enjoyed a range of roles across Legal and believes Barclays has helped her develop into a multifaceted leader and lawyer. She’s a champion of diversity and inclusion in the workplace, and passionate about promoting the new, more effective ways of working that are helping us build the legal function of the future.

Growing together

I’ve had many opportunities to grow as a manager and as a leader. I started with line manager responsibility for just one person, going on to lead the Hong Kong legal team, the North Asia Legal team, then Asia Pacific Markets Legal and now, as General Counsel, I am leading the whole Asia Pacific Legal team. In my time I’ve seen us grow strongly in Asia, expanding our product range and the jurisdictions we operate in, and it has been incredibly interesting. I’ve played an important part in helping our business to grow, and I’ve developed as a leader as Barclays has grown.

Global reach

Being so closely involved in the growth of our business has exposed me to a huge range of different types of work in my time here. I feel very connected to the global organisation here in Asia Pacific, and privileged to be able to work closely with colleagues in New York and London. In Asia I lead a dispersed team of professionals located in India, Singapore, Tokyo and Hong Kong and thoroughly enjoy the challenge of managing a diverse team from different cultures in a global firm. Here in Asia Pacific we’ve always built relationships with our global colleagues and as we move as a function towards less location-specific working, our cross border approach is becoming the new norm across the business.

Career moves

I believe that professional mobility leads to better career development and encourage people to broaden their experience and acquire new skills by taking on new roles. We have just launched a platform, the Legal Professional Mobility Hub, that will help people in building more varied career paths. For example, we have a secondment programme that encourages colleagues to try something new, while supporting our managers to fill the resulting gap in their team. We want to give people opportunities to experiment with their careers and acquire new skills, knowing that they can come back to their old roles. The experience and skills gained through professional mobility creates versatile lawyers and builds and strengthens connections across the bank.

A better place

We talk a lot about creating a more contemporary, supportive and inclusive place to work and I’ve been very much involved in making sure this happens: I helped to found the Women’s Initiative Network in Asia Pacific in 2006 and it now has approximately 2000 members with around 40% male membership. One of our great early successes was increasing maternity leave across Asia Pacific to 22 weeks paid leave, a huge increase from the statutory minimum periods that Barclays had followed until that point. When this was announced, I was pregnant and make a point of taking the full leave and encouraged others to do the same. Policies are meaningless unless people feel that the firm supports them in practice and I’m proud to say that Barclays fully supports them. Since then the Employee Network Groups have made great strides working together to increase non-primary caregiver leave. Policies like these coupled with a culture where people know the firm supports them increase colleague retention and improve their well being. Here in Legal we are trying to make Barclays a better place for everyone