About

As group general counsel, Bernadette Baynie has been pivotal in Batelco’s growth from a small regional player, to a global company operating across 14 companies. She has led legal and regulatory aspects of all strategic transactions over a crucial seven-year period, which included the award-winning Cable and Wireless Islands transaction of 2013. Leading a 16-strong interdisciplinary team, Baynie is praised highly for her success in driving forward a corporate governance mindset across the business. ‘As a member of the Batelco Group executive team, I have been able to positively influence and shape our corporate culture by promoting best industry practice in our undertakings and high integrity in our behaviours’, she says. Baynie introduced Batelco’s first ever compliance function, which was later embedded into an overriding risk-management program. She has taken considerable steps to develop talent in the legal function, spearheading extensive recruitment, training and incentive initiatives. At its core, she explains, has been a strategy of ‘unconditional team support, empowerment and enablement’. Her approach has seen tangible results, both in department performance and employee satisfaction. She has also taken a number of steps to play legal into the decision-making process at an earlier stage, including arrangements for lawyers to join senior leadership teams. ‘By significantly transforming the structure, functionality and performance of my department and its resources across the group, there has been a fundamental shift in how it is perceived and valued by all levels of management and our board’, opines Baynie. ‘This transformation has moved the department from a purely “service support function” to a “valued business enabler” that has become an integral component of decision-making’.