Agnieszka Dzięgielewska-Jończyk – GC Powerlist
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Central and Eastern Europe 2019

Industrials and real estate

Agnieszka Dzięgielewska-Jończyk

General counsel | Skanska Central Europe

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Central and Eastern Europe 2019

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Agnieszka Dzięgielewska-Jończyk

General counsel | Skanska Central Europe

About

What are the most important transactions and litigations that you have been involved in during the last two years?

This year the Skanska Company is implementing a new corporate governance framework on a worldwide basis, and I am leading this project within Skanska Poland. The project’s aim is to implement a comprehensive compliance system consisting of several dozen internal regulations from all areas of the company’s operations – involving legal, finance, IT, sustainability and more. The implementation of the new corporate governance framework involves not only the formal adoption of regulations at the company, but also their full implementation and deployment through trainings, information campaigns for employees, as well as ensuring compliance with them.

I am also working on the enterprise risk management project aimed at creating an integrated risk register for the company. This project consists in developing a comprehensive enterprise risk register involving all areas of the company’s operations. I am supervising the register development project, working with the risk team that ultimately is to become the owner
of that register.

How important are “soft skills” or personal attributes outside of technical legal skill, and which “soft skills” do you feel are most important for an in-house lawyer to possess?

Communication skills, leadership, project management, openness to new technologies, building relationships and networks.

What are the main qualities you look for in a potential new hire?

Integrity, legal expertise, openness and communication skills.

 

What advice would you give to any peers or colleagues working in the Polish market for the first time?

 

It is essential to look at a project from different perspectives, taking into account not only legal regulations, but also market practice.

What can law firms in Poland, and the wider CEE region, do to win more business from you?

Understanding the business is as much important as compliance and values.


IN THE WORDS OF A NOMINATOR:

Agnieszka Dzięgielewska-Jończyk has been a legal and compliance director for Skanska since December 2018. She was previously engaged with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, where she was the head of legal and regional counsel for Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Dzięgielewska-Jończyk is well-oriented on the legal and regulatory framework in Poland, ensuring the organisations she has been leading are compliant with recent key regulations. As proof, before leaving her previous position with HPE, she engaged our practice in a complex legal compliance project related to obligations of entities in field of anti-money laundering and financial terrorism. She has been also an active participant of many ventures and events taking place in the Polish legal and business market – both as a speaker and a participant.

She has an excellent business acumen and is a true example of leadership skills in managing legal matters of the organisations she has been a head of, on her LinkedIn profile we may read that her superiors are ‘impressed by her sound legal judgment, her reliability, her expertise and her engagement for the company’. In addition, she has been an excellent business partner in day-to-day contacts with our law firm when outsourcing legal tasks and processes. Due to experience gained in one of the top law firms in Poland, she delegates the tasks and supervises the outsourced works in a manner allowing for an excellent synergy between business and external advisors. Beside a solid legal background, excellent soft skills, she is also focused on innovative approach to legal services, in particular with use of new technologies.

This year the Skanska Company is implementing a new corporate governance framework, which Dzięgielewska-Jończyk is leading, being responsible for all legal aspects related to this comprehensive assignment. The project consists of more than 50 global and local policies to be implemented in the organisation. From a global point of view (the point of view of the Skanska headquarters in Sweden), the main objective of the project is to implement the Corporate Governance Framework in all Skanska’s business units in all countries in which it has a presence, by the end of 2019. Dzięgielewska-Jończyk’s task as the project leader is to localise global documents and to transpose them into the Polish system directly or in any other way that corresponds to their business reality. This means the existing internal regulations must be reviewed/modified and new ones adopted. Thus, she coordinates the activities of a number of functions and units within the organisation to ensure that substantive policy owners, acting in a coordinated manner, can implement relevant regulations in their areas. Hence, the implementation of the new corporate governance framework involves not only the formal adoption of regulations at the company, but also their implementation and deployment (through training, information campaign for employees etc.), as well as the ensuring of compliance with it. In addition, her job is to adapt the new corporate governance framework to the changing laws and regulations in Poland. This is definitely a very comprehensive project which requires lots of time and efforts. In addition, she is working on a global enterprise risk management project to create an integrated risk register for the company.

It is a project that consists in developing a comprehensive register of corporate risks involving all areas. Again – it involves a number of coordination activities to include identifying risks in all areas of the company’s operations, assessing them, assigning owners to them, and then working with risks – describing and implementing methods to mitigate and monitor them.

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