Matthew Newman is the General Counsel for Royal Mail and was also interim Chief Human Resources Officer for 8 months in 2021. Matt has an employment law background and has been at Royal Mail for 6 years in a range of legal roles. Before that he spent 5 years in Financial Services at Royal Bank of Scotland after having trained and spent 6 years at Linklaters.

Below Matt discusses with Corporate Counsel Advance the skills need to perform various leadership roles and outlines the biggest challenges of taking over a different function within an organization. He also outlines the cultural transformation that the Royal Mail has recently been through and highlights that the secret to success is developing an organization’s North Star.