Marvin Levine is the chief legal officer and executive vice president for real estate investment company General Growth Properties Inc., which owns and operates shopping malls across the country.

In his six years with Chicago-based GGP, Levine has seen the company re-emerge from surviving bankruptcy to ranking on the S&P 500. But it took some work to get there between restructuring the legal department and carving out meetings just to get to know his employees as people and not attorneys.