Episode 12: People and compliance. With Martin Lønstrup, VP and Head of Group Compliance at Sandvik

Inspiring Legal

"Get out there and meet the people", Martin Lønstrup, the VP and Head of Group Compliance at Sandvik, says. In this episode of Inspiring Legal, Stine & Martin discuss the importance of the people that make up the business, its operations, and its level of compliance.

Thank you for listening to Inspiring Legal.

Full episode transcript:

[00:00 - 00:16] Welcome to Inspiring Legal, the podcast for in-house legal. Get insights, learn from peers, life lessons from some of the most influential GCs.
[00:16 - 00:36] If it's related to in-house legal, we cover it. For more inspiration, go to openli.com slash community. Welcome to another Inspiring Legal episode.
[00:36 - 00:54] So my name is Stine. I'm your host. And today I'm joined by Martin. I'll let him introduce himself in a second. But what we're going to be talking today about is something about compliance and not being afraid of failure.
[00:54 - 01:14] Well, how do those two things connect? Well, that is what we'll be talking to Martin about today. Welcome, Martin. Thanks. Thanks for having me, Stine. So Martin, for the listeners out there that don't know you, could you maybe just give them a little flavor as to who you are and your background?
[01:14 - 01:34] Absolutely. I can do that. Well, first and foremost, I'm a father. I have three kids and a wife. And I love to ride on my bikes. So I think that's important for me to start with, because that's probably who I really am.
[01:34 - 01:58] But professionally, of course, I'm today head of compliance for a large global Swedish engineering company called Sandvik. And I have a legal background and have worked now, what, more than 15 years or so in, I guess, mainly large corporates.
[01:58 - 02:15] Before Sandvik, it was Falk. So everyone knows Falk in Denmark, at least. Emergency healthcare company. And before that, around eight years in Maersk, another Danish conglomerate with presence all over the world,
[02:15 - 02:31] the container shipping logistics business there. So, and I've, you know, background-wise, I've gone from working with actually negotiating contracts and being a lawyer and legal work in-house.
[02:31 - 02:50] To slowly transitioning, as many do, into compliance. And working now, I have now worked with compliance for roughly 10 years. So, Morten, I know you from LinkedIn. I've seen a lot of your posts.
[02:50 - 03:09] You're very good at sharing, not only sharing your bike rides, but also sharing wins, struggles, challenges. So in that regard, you've always been very open about giving to others.
[03:09 - 03:33] So when you and I started talking, we started talking about compliance and building out a compliance framework for companies, big companies, for example. And at that point, I remember you saying, well, if you want to build really good compliance programs, you have to be open to failure.
[03:33 - 03:55] And for me, that was, I agree, but failure and compliance and being open to failure are two things that normally don't go hand in hand. So I think the people out there would love to hear some of your stories, some of your learnings.
[03:55 - 04:14] So could you maybe give a little insight into why you believe that failure and compliance is, well, a good thing? Yeah, I can absolutely do that. And it should not sound as if I just go halfway into my things.
[04:14 - 04:41] Of course, with a legal background, we have our methods. So I think everyone who works within this field are definitely capable of doing so. I think for me, the failure part is, it resonates quite clearly to me because I think it's important that you build a comfort in your team and your teams with your employees, with your talents, that you don't have this no failure culture.
[04:41 - 05:11] I think that it can literally lock people down a little bit. And I have actually, if I have to take one example from my very early young days working in Maersk, actually in an area where we were outside of, we were in the legal space, we were not in compliance, but I had to pitch something for the management, a project.
[05:11 - 05:32] I did that, it completely failed. I pitched in the wrong way. I probably used the wrong arguments, even though I felt I was overly prepared. And at that time, it resulted in me actually not being given a chance to then do it again until like a year later.
[05:32 - 06:07] And then it was actually then a success and we could do the project. But that made me kind of feel like, okay, you really don't get a lot of chances at that point in time. And then as I've moved up in my career, I've seen it over and over again that at least sometimes there's this, I guess, general respect or fear that if you don't do it right the first time, then you shouldn't do it.
[06:07 - 06:48] And I think that that's unfortunate because I think that it doesn't really energize anyone or gives any motivation to anyone if you go in and you just get hit for them to come back and sit at your desk and then sit and grumble over like, why did it go wrong? I think that that's quite important to me. And I've seen it also in my later positions. Many of these situations, I have many failures, at least where I go in and maybe I've discussed a project or a pitch with my team, with everyone, and then I go in and then it should have been 40% different.
[06:48 - 07:30] But you learn from that, you become stronger from that. And I think it's important to talk about it. Because if I don't talk about it, and if I don't grab my employees, if they face this type of dilemma in my compliance function today, they're left on their own to deal with that. And I don't think that that's fair. I think that it's also part of my leadership task to try and open this up a little bit and talk about it as something that is okay. And I kind of hate the word failure.
[07:30 - 08:03] I prefer to talk about learnings, because you kind of get something out of it, you learn something, you reflect on it. And then you come out actually stronger in the end. So that's kind of how I try to see it. And I don't know, we've recently done a tech development that I've also told you a little bit about it before, where we did one development, we were very, very positive, we developed it in a system in eight weeks.
[08:03 - 08:42] We did use a technology that was not maybe fully suited for the purpose, but that was for some strategic business reasons. And the day before, we had to scrap it because it could not live up to the data privacy requirements. And data privacy is within my function, so I couldn't really approve it, because then my function would not be following what we are supposed to follow. And immediately after, the first immediate reaction was, because it was taking a chance in the first place, it was like, you have failed.
[08:42 - 09:01] So we have failed in this, you know, and actually, I had to really walk around in all the corridors and talk about, no, no, this is not failure. This is a learning. We have now learned that this tool, or this technology we chose for strategic reasons, were not suited for what we wanted to do.
[09:01 - 09:20] So we have now learned, we should have taken the other technology that we knew of, but we didn't choose that because it may be a tiny bit more expensive for many reasons. We should have taken that one. Now we will take that one and do it over again, and then we'll be successful. It's a learning piece to that.
[09:20 - 09:57] And I think we're all learning, right? Like, that's a part of growing up. It's about developing yourself personally, but also professionally. And what you often remember are the failures you made along the way, where you're definitely remembering, I'm not going to ...