Building (air) bridges between countries and continents - Part 2

Emotional intelligence, diplomacy, and interpersonal skills were among the vital ‘soft skills’ that really came to the fore during the massive project for Uganda Airlines to launch a new international air route in May between Uganda and London, says Susan Batuuka Kaggwa, Company Secretary/Head of Legal for Uganda Airlines.

“You’re crossing so many cultures and so many issues that we’re not ordinarily exposed to, so you have to have a crash course on how you engage in these meetings with Europeans, how you address certain things, what to escalate to Ministers or the President, because otherwise it might bog down the business,” says Susan, who led a project involving more than sixty aviation experts, legal and commercial professionals, including various Ugandan and UK government agencies.

As Susan discussed in our earlier article, an enormous amount of legal work and relationship building went into successfully launching the London route; five years of preparation and months of 20-hour workdays for the team to realise a thirty-year dream. It was a legally complex venture requiring meticulous regulatory planning, compliance with multiple legal regimes, and sound bilateral cooperation. 

High-level law, and much more.

“As a lawyer we couldn’t just sit and say ‘oh I’ll advise on the legal provisions’,” says Susan. “It took us understanding what engineering does, spare parts, why the crew has to layover for so many hours. You have to understand the whole thing, the entire aviation industry to be able to contribute to the bigger pie. We worked long hours, so soft skills, leadership, and influence was very important. Because you’re pulling senior managers from other departments who feel they have their own right way to do things, and you need to influence so everyone is pulling in the same direction.”

Project management and prioritisation are also key skills that Susan says she has learned over the course of practicing law for nearly 25 years, and were hugely valuable on Uganda Airlines' journey to successfully launching the London route. 

Susan will be sharing more of her expertise and learnings as a panelist at the upcoming GC Forum | Governance, Risk & Compliance in Johannesburg on 17 September where she will be part of an elite panel of senior in-house lawyers discussing “Law Across Borders: Building a Legal Function That Works Across Africa”. 

“One of my key learnings from this project was stakeholder management and cross-border relationship building,” says Susan. “We strongly had to rely on relationships, including outside aviation, speaking to foreign affairs, civil aviation, immigration, we needed to call in ambassadors, neighbours. Cross-border relationship building was key, and you also needed to adapt and think quickly, because aviation law keeps changing every other day.” 

Lawyers working in a complex legal and regulatory environment like the aviation industry need to be adaptable and quick-thinking and have a commercial mindset, says Susan, because they need to solve problems very quickly without breaching the laws, while at the same time dealing with stringent procurement regulations considering that Uganda Airlines is a government owned entity.

“We had to ask for dispensation for some things, because if I need a decision today I can’t wait for the whole procurement process with a contracts committee, an evaluation committee to take it to the Attorney-General to review, because by the time it returns the product I need will be gone,” says Susan. 

“There’s no way we’re going to pull off this new London route without alignment within various institutes. You need to lobby constantly to be aligned before you submit something, otherwise it would be rejected, which sets you back many weeks. So there were a lot of learnings with our London route, which we can take into new launches we intend to do in future into Asia and the wider European space.” 

This is part two of a two-part series. In the first piece, which you can read here, Susan discussed the legal and political complexities of launching a groundbreaking new international air route. 

Susan will also be speaking the GC Forum | Governance, Risk & Compliance in Johannesburg on 17 September. You can register to attend here.