Trade Strategies from an Executive: Lila Landis 

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Lila Landis 0:00
So to me, the number one thing is to be proactive. Don’t wait for someone to come and ask you what’s going on and what you’re going to do about it. And this is something you need to understand as soon as possible what the impact is to your organization, and start preparing that communication. Welcome to simply trade. Brought to you by global Training Center. My name is Lalo, and together with my co host, Andy, we have well over 60 years of combined trade logistics and supply chain experience along the way, we have seen and witnessed different challenges in trade compliance. We’ve decided to put the show together and call on our friends and colleagues in the business to hang out with us and share their knowledge in all things trade. Thank you for spending some time with us. Enjoy the show. You

Andy 0:44
all right, LELO, we’re back again for a show. I’m looking forward to this show, because this is one that a lot of folks in the compliance arena can get so down and detailed and wrapped around the axle, as one of my former bosses used to say, and get so caught up in the details of things, and then trying to communicate what’s going on, what? What’s the deal with the usmca or the NAFTA 2.0 what’s the deal with the Russian sanctions and all that? And then they start putting something together to communicate it. And they put these dissertations together and stuff. It’s it’s just so much information that nobody has time to read it. So I’m looking forward Lila to Landis talking with us today, but Lalo, let me tell you this. This is one of those things where, when we’re looking through some of this, and we’ve talked about it from a career perspective, how to get a seat at the table and stay right with the executive levels. Well, this is going to be something that Lila’s background is something I think it’s going to help folks, because she’s actually been at that executive level. She’s been going up through the ranks, so I think this can be something that will help us out. But I’m looking forward to this show. Lalo, yeah, I know it’s,

Lalo 2:02
I mean, like you said, in previous shows, we’ve had other guests talk about, kind of the topic was not that, but it’s kind of like it comes around to that almost in every conversation where, where, how to get compliance done, and, and, and a lot of, for some reason, the conversation almost kind of like gravitates towards that. It goes towards, well, let your executives know. Okay, well, what do we let them know, right? I mean, just don’t, don’t give them too much. Is like drinking out of, out of a fire hose, right? I mean, let’s not, let’s not do that. I mean, we it’s, it’s funny how that happens, and almost all the conversations we’ve had,

Andy 2:40
well, and the thing that I have, I’ve managed quite a few different people in different departments, but it’s in communicating up the chain. It’s always been a case where they need to know, it’s like, and I’ve looked over and I said, this is way too wordy, and they’d come out, but they need to know. What do you mean? They need to know they that’s what you’re there for, for the details. So, you know, in communicating up. So let’s bring Lila on. Lila, welcome to our show. We are, you know, it’s, I think this is going to be a good discussion. I’ve been looking forward to this and with that. So as we’re talking through this, why don’t you tell everybody, kind of, you know, real quick synopsis of your background here, so they can understand the position you’re in in today’s world and what you’ve dealt with, and kind of how you would want some of your frontline staff to communicate to you?

Lila Landis 3:36
Yeah, absolutely. So I’m Lila Landes, I’m currently the Director of Global compliance at Seco logistics for a Global Freight Forwarder, customs broker and logistics provider. But most of my background is all on the importer, exporter side of the house, and I have been at multiple levels in organizations. I’ve been just a Free Trade Agreement analyst, pumping out NAFTA Certificates all day. I’ve done classifications, and, you know, gone through databases of 10,000 HTS codes review in every single one. And I’ve also managed a compliance program for a multi billion dollar company with direct reports across multiple regions, and so been at different levels. I really try to remember what it was like to be that that person just doing classifications or just doing FDA certificates, and remember that that job is hard. But I certainly think that you, you made some good points in the intro. It’s, it’s something where a good trade compliance person is detail oriented by nature, because you have to be to be good at trade compliance. It’s just the nature of the role. But at the same time, when you’re communicating upwards with each successive level, you go up, you have less time to make your point. You have fewer PowerPoint slides that are going to end up in the presentation. And so then brevity is such. A highly valued skill when you’re communicating

Andy 5:02
Lila, that is such a CR that almost that really warrants repeating. That is that I like how you put that, the higher up you go, the less time you have in to be able to sit and talk with somebody, or the less time you’re going to have in communicating with them that is, that’s brilliant, right there, because so folks need to listen to this is that you know, when you’re going up the chain, you don’t, you can’t give a big long deal. It’s got to cut to the chase. What is it? First off, what is it that you want them to decide on? And secondly, what’s the information that they need to know to make that decision without giving them minutia?

Lila Landis 5:47
Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of logistics and compliance professionals got called to the carpet when the section 301, tariffs went into effect, because that was all over the news. It was, you know, huge deal everybody’s talking about, oh my gosh, this is going to be 1000s and hundreds of 1000s or millions of dollars for organization that we suddenly have to pay. And the the best outcomes that happened for logistics and trade compliance in those scenarios are when the trade compliance or logistics leader already had a relationship with the executives that they needed to talk to, and they were prepared to give a brief synopsis that was about, how is this going to impact us and our organization? Not a dissertation, like you said, not a history of US, China relations. Nobody cares like we care as trade compliance professionals, executives don’t care. That’s not what they want to hear. They want to hear what is the impact to us, to our organization, and so then that’s the type of situation where you need to have day data available as a trade compliance person. You better have your ACE data right to be able to say, this is the value of the imports we’ve been doing from China. This is what’s going to be subject to. Section 301, here’s the additional cost impact that we need to expect. Here are the possible remediations or mitigations that we could put in place. That wants to hear,

Andy 7:08
what, what a great synopsis. Again, you went right down the line, you know, here’s what’s gonna bottom line, here’s what’s gonna happen, here’s what’s gonna hit, you know, cost wise, or what the impact is. But as you went through that, then you added that, here are the remediations. This is your alternatives. Here’s what we possibly could do here. You know, we can fight this this way, or we can change sources. You’re coming back with possible solutions or options for somebody to look at. That is a very important point that a lot of people forget to think about. I

Lila Landis 7:40
think it’s really important, when you’re communicating upwards, to try to anticipate what kind of questions you’re going to get asked. So you you really want to think about, you know, if I, if I tell them, hey, here’s this extra cost we have to incur. Well, they’re likely going to ask. Are you sure we really have to right? Is there a way to lessen it? Is there a way around it? Is there some other option that we could pursue? That’s a natural question for an executive follow up with. If you’re not already prepared to answer that, then you’re not going to have as good of an interaction. You’re going to send back, be sent back to go do your research and come back again, right? And you a lot of times, if this is your first time having that face time with these executives, that first impression is really, really important from a career standpoint, and from the kind of impression you leave with them with for your function overall. Because if they’re not already involved in logistics and trade compliance, if they don’t already get any kind of regular updates from you, and you’re just coming to them when there’s some type of crisis or brand new issue that you need to involve them in. One of the key things you should be thinking about is the impression you want to leave them with of how your function operates and and what you do to add value to the company.

Andy 8:53
You hit on something else, though, that is a key element is if you’ve not been providing regular updates, then this is going to be your first rodeo with them and whatnot to talk with them. Well, let’s back up. What about regular updates? So let’s talk about that just for a second. So at the upper echelon, what are those types of updates that you said you would recommend that people put together and in you know, what are they going to talk about and how, how long or how much information should they put in to absolutely

Lila Landis 9:31
Well, I think it starts with understanding what is your executive structure even look like, right? So for you as the trade compliance professional, how do you report up through the organization? How many levels are there between you and the CEO, and how does information get communicated upwards? And so this is, this is one of those questions where you should be talking with your direct leader about this, whatever their title is. This is a question that you should be asking them of well, what does your leader ask of you? What kind of updates do you give them, you know? What kind of you know information do you get asked about? What questions do they ask and what, ultimately, how much information that we share gets flowed up to that executive level. What kind of executive meetings are there? What’s the cadence for that? What’s the business rhythm for those executive meetings and whatever function trade compliance ultimately reports up to, are they at those meetings, and do they ever talk about any trade compliance or logistics issues in those executive meetings? The answer is no, then that’s something that you you want to work on. But I think it’s, it’s the responsibility isn’t all on the trade compliance function. It needs to be on executives as well. The executive team should want to know about what’s going on with logistics and trade compliance, particularly depending on what the organization does, what kind of industry they’re in, and so then, if they have no idea who their their trade compliance and logistics function heads are then, to me, that’s, that’s the fault on the executive team. What are you guys doing to stay aware of what your logistics and trade compliance functions are doing? We’re in a trade environment now where you can’t simply write that off and go, Well, someone else is handling that, and I don’t need to know anything about

Andy 11:18
it. Well, taking the time to, again, anticipate what upper management may need to ask when you’re we’re preparing something on an ad hoc basis, is one thing, but the regular updates, as we were just talking about, is something that, again, talking to your director, you know, manager, supervisor, whoever you report to, and going through that, one of the things that I had done is we put together a report. It was a weekly report, and it had a lot of statistical data and whatnot, but I put a summary memo on top of it, and then I sent that on to my boss, but then I drafted a paragraph that my boss, as a suggestion to him, drafted a paragraph that they could write, or plagiarize, if you will, whatever you want to call it and say, you know, here’s some, here’s the summary of it, or whatever. So that way my report was done in such a manner, it could be forwarded on. My boss puts something on top of it and goes on and it works out, you know, and sits better. Everybody wins out of that scenario there.

Lila Landis 12:31
I think it’s good to look at what do other support functions do in terms of their reporting? Is there a style that your executives seem to prefer? So for example, at Seco, usually when I’m doing an executive update, you know, I have maybe 15 to 30 minutes as part of an executive meeting to give an update on on compliance, and so then I’m using maybe three to five slides. I’m focusing on, what are the major initiatives we’ve been working on this year, and where those are at, what are major risks that I want the executive team to be aware of, and where am I asking for support from the executive team? And so then, to keep it concise, it’s really about just high level what I want them to know. And bringing it back to this is how compliance is adding value to the organization. So one of the slides that I like to share a lot is I have a a vision for compliance for the organization, and so I talk about how our major initiatives that we’re working on are leading us towards accomplishing that vision.

Andy 13:34
Excellent, excellent. So, and hopefully, when you’ve created that vision, it’s in alignment with the company’s vision. So they, if there’s synergy there, you’re in good shape. If you’re, if there’s not, you’re going to be a rogue organization. And they’ll have a discussion with you after the fact, I would imagine. Okay, great. So let’s say that something comes up, and let’s take the Russia situation. Obviously, Russia invaded the Ukraine, and in all the scenarios there that you know, there’s challenges in doing business now with both those countries, if any companies in those countries, and it there’s a major disruption in supply chain, as well as in business transaction. The banking and financial institutions now are in disarray and with the different sanctions and all that. So what do you do? What do you go to if you’ve got a global operation, or you have subsidiaries or whatever, and you’re trying to reach out to these, what are you going to do in preparing an update to the upper management regarding that situation there?

Lila Landis 14:51
So to me, the number one thing is to be proactive. Don’t wait for someone to come and ask you what’s going on and what you’re going to do about it. This is something where you. Need to understand as soon as possible what the impact is to your organization and start preparing that communication. So depending on what level you are at in your organization and how much contact you normally have with operations or with other functions or with, you know, executive leadership, then this may be something where you first want to start preparing that executive summary, and then go to your leader with that and talk about the communication plan for how you want to get that out there. If you are the head of compliance for for your organization, then this is something where you want to think about, what are the relevant parties within your org that you feel need to have this information. And this is a situation where you want to over communicate, if you are you know, second guessing yourself about whether someone else needs to be included on the communication or not just Adam. If they don’t think it’s relevant, let them, let them delete it or move it into a folder in their inbox or something like that. But over communication in whenever there’s a crisis or a major event like this is is much better than leaving people off and then coming to you afterwards and going, Why didn’t you tell me about this? Right? So having that executive summary really hitting on those key points of what has happened. How does this affect the organization? What are we doing to mitigate the risk or minimize the impact to the organization as much as possible, and you focus on those three things.

Andy 16:25
Okay? And so with somebody that’s coming through the ranks as their preferred, let’s just say it’s one of your compliance manager, it’s they’re new to the role, but now, as they start going through is there a difference of establishing, let’s say a weekly email, or a bi weekly email of updates. Here’s what’s going on here, the current issues and all that, versus amount now going to have a, you know, let’s say a virtual call or a video conference, or a face to face meeting, where I come in ever so often, and again I’m going to present to the leadership team.

Lila Landis 17:08
I think it really depends on how does your organization communicate? How do people like to be communicated with your organization? Because culturally different organizations have very different styles, and so then you might be an organization where people are really not that good at staying on top of emails. You can send an email, and if it looks like a form email to them, it’s something that they might read when they get a chance in three or four weeks, right? You might be an organization where it’s all about the in person, and so if you’re at the corporate office, what you need to do is call an in person meeting with the heads of different functions and give them an update. Maybe you’re a really PowerPoint heavy organization. I’ve been in organizations like that where they don’t want just an email, they want a slide deck that goes through you know, here are the here are the key points. And so you need to think about what’s the communication style for your organization, what is effective in other situations, and then utilize that, especially when you’re talking to the executive team, you got to know, do they like an email? Do they like a phone call? You know? Do they want you to just send the pertinent notes to their executive admin, you know? So that understanding how to communicate is important. Don’t just go with whatever your default is. Go with what works for the org? Well,

Andy 18:22
one of the things too is you’re looking at that, I will say this, especially if many organizations are PowerPoint hungry, and there are people that will start generating slides like crazy. One of the things that I think is paramount is that you have as few as slides as you can get away with. And have that if there’s more detail in the slide deck, you could put that in the addendum. You’re not, you’re not going to cover everything, and you shouldn’t. You should cover just the key points. And if there’s you know, more information for the addendum with all the other detailed, more detailed charts, or more detailed bullet points, and is in there for them to look at later, after the fact. But at least you can get through your presentation, get to the main point, and go from there. The only other thing that I was saying looking at it is, you know, if you schedule a meeting, one of the best things you can do, let’s say you schedule a 30 minute meeting. If you can get in and out of there in 15 minutes, you’re in good shape. But if you go in there for a 30 minute meeting, and at 45 minutes, you’re still there, that’s not going to be good.

Lila Landis 19:38
So it’s a it’s a joke that I like to tell other people is that, you know, so I am, I tend to be well known for running very efficient meetings. When people say, oh, you know, Lila is so good at running a meeting. And there’s nothing special about the way that I run meetings. It’s but I have an agenda in the meeting invite. So you already know what we’re going to be talking about. So we run through the agenda at the very beginning of the meeting. So I tell you what I’m going to tell you, tell them, and then I sum up, what do we talk about? What are the action items? And then there’s an email follow up to say, here’s what we talked about in the meeting, and here’s who has the action items from the meeting. That’s not complicated, but most people don’t do that, and so it’s a great way for you to look good to other functions and to your executive team. It’s just to be really well organized with your meeting

Andy 20:30
outstanding. I mean, I just that’s excellent information there. As far as in learning to communicate with the upper management. One of the things that I have also suggested, so I want to hear what you think about it, is, I usually suggest to people to go through the disc program. So personality assessment, I personally have used disc that’s D, I S, C, there’s a compliment to that. It’s they’re unrelated programs, but there’s another there’s a book called The two sides of love that was written by John Trent and Gary Smalley. Those two programs are outstanding, but here’s the point. It shows you how you process information and how you communicate, which is really important so you know how to deal with things, but then you learn the other personality traits, and then you have to make an assessment of your upper management. Are they detailed? Are they high level visionaries? Or what if you go in and try and hit somebody with a lot of detail, and they’re more of a visionary, it’s going to cause a problem, because they’re going to like, look, You’re boring me with the details, you know, cut to the chase. What do you think about that? As far as preparing yourself, trying to develop those communication skills and assessing personalities and things of that nature to improve your own communication. I

Lila Landis 22:05
think this is something where you should really lean on your leader to help you get to know your executive team better in terms of the way that they communicate and how they like to be communicated with. So, you know, I’ll give an example. In a previous organization I was at, we had a new VP of supply chain come in, and he had come from a finance function. And so then to me, I made an assumption. Said, Oh, well, he’s coming from a finance function. He’s going to be a numbers guy, right? He’s going to want me to have numbers, to have data, and to explain, you know, where the data comes from, and, and, and really focus on it from more of that analytical perspective, he was not this was something where he never really paid attention to the numbers. That’s just not the way that he operated. Not to say that, I’m sure he wasn’t good at finance or anything like that, but just it wasn’t what I assumed, right? So I, you know, I’d made a mistake in assuming that he was, he was going to be this numbers guy. And so then I had to really get more feedback from from my leader, who reported directly to him about how they were interacting and what was working well for him in terms of learning how to adjust my communication style to better fit for him. Yeah, it turned out that he was, he was just much more visual than what I expected and less analytical. So it’s, it’s good to check your own assumptions about, you know, thinking about, well, just because someone comes from this function or that, that they’re going to want to be communicated with a certain way, and try to ask for guidance ahead of time from your leader or other people who’ve worked with them, or your peers, about what is working well for communicating with with that person or with a particular team. And use that

Andy 23:53
Well, I will say you are hitting on some really good stuff here. So so far, we’ve talked about, you know, being prepared ahead of time before you go into, you know, face to face meetings. Don’t, don’t go in with a whole, you know, a huge slide deck. Go in with just a few slides, and you can always supply more information after the fact, if, if they’re requiring it. And if you know having you’ve emphasized this a lot, which I tend to agree with, is your immediate boss or your leader, that you need to talk with them. You need to obviously communicate with them, but in preparation for meeting with the other his counterparts, or his or her counterparts, or upper echelon, is take your, your you know, some guidance from them, and then you know, basically, you know, cut into the chase. But I will say this, if you’re doing a regular update, you. Yeah, you could also keep it, you know, short and sweet. So it’s like, people are going to be interested in looking at it. How many times have we all opened up an email and you see it so long and you’re like, Man, I don’t have time for that. It’s like, very short and sweet, and you can only send multiple updates if you need it. But it’s to the point short, concise, and

Lila Landis 25:21
sometimes you might need to send a long email, like there are situations where that that happens, but then you can structure your email in a way where, you know, maybe they don’t read every single detail, but they still have that documentation. So if you really need to do a long email, because that’s the way your organization communicates, but it’s going to be long. Have a little Executive Summary right at the top of the email with one two sentences. Here’s the key takeaway, right? And then you can go into your detail of, here’s a description of the risks. Here’s a, you know, a list of the options that we’re we’re reviewing, right? And here’s, you know, the next steps that we’re going to take,

Andy 26:00
yeah? Yeah. But something like what you’re just talking there is when you’re given an update on really a specific topic, probably more than a general update on here’s what’s going on, here’s our topic, but it’s like a specific topic that’s a little different. And I like that, because you’re right. Here’s the executive summary. And if there is a decision to be made by whoever’s the whoever the audience is. Put that at the top, we’re going to look at it. You need to decide, do we want to spend this x dollar amount or execute this contract, or do we want to pull out of operations whatever you want? That’s the thing. And it’s like, here’s the background. Go from there. All right, Lila, what else is there anything else that you we’re gonna we’re kind of, I could talk to you all day on this. I love this stuff. Is there anything else that you’d like to try and as we start to wrap up here,

Lila Landis 26:57
you know, I’m a trade nerd, so I could talk to about this all day. So I would say just, you know, as far as key takeaways that I would want people to have is that really the communication goes both ways. So it should be it’s partly on the logistics and trade compliance departments to make sure that they’re communicating upwards. And when you do that, you really want to focus on brevity, being brief, understanding that you have very little time to make your point, because you’re talking to people who are being pulled in 20 different directions every day. Not that you’re not as the compliance person, right? But you know they are going to have a limited amount of time and brain space to give you, and so you need to focus on what’s just really, really important, and what are you asking of them? You know, focus on ask. But I also want to emphasize that the executive team has a responsibility here too, to make sure that they understand what is your logistics department do, what does your compliance department do, and what are the major issues for the organization? And so I would really encourage executives to understand what are the major policy statements you have. Is your name on this? Is your name on the compliance manual, or on your code of conduct or on your FCPA policy? Do you even know what’s in those policies? Because sometimes it’s just been applied because you’re the CEO or the CCO, right? And that’s that’s what it is. But you know you should understand what those major policies are for your organization. Your organization, who’s responsible for maintaining compliance with those and are they truly reflective of what your organization does? I would also think about, you know, what do your customers ask you about your logistics, supply chain and compliance, and you know, make sure that you know who’s in charge of that in your organization, and that you’re getting some kind of updates on that on a regular basis, because it is a major piece to how your organization operates, and there are major risk areas there, you want to make sure that that’s something that you’re aware of

Andy 28:53
outstanding. All right, here’s a question that we ask a lot of our guests, if you could go back in time and talk to your 21 year old self, what would be one of the most important things you could say or tell yourself?

Lila Landis 29:11
I would tell her that it’s all going to work out much better than she thinks that this whole idea of majoring in International Business is actually a really good idea, and it’s not going to end up in the career that that she thought that it would, but that it’s going to be a really fun ride. You

Andy 29:30
know what I it that’s one of the things that I think somebody asked the question, how many of us in this big room? How many of us are in the job that we envisioned when we were younger. It’s like, I don’t think there’s one hand that went up.

Lila Landis 29:47
Everybody has a great story about how they fell into trade compliance. I mean, I if I’ve rarely met someone who’s like, oh yeah, I knew what trade compliance was when I started college, and I specifically went for that as a career. Or everybody else is like, no, I’d never heard of trade compliance before. I didn’t know anything about import, export. It’s just something that got dropped in my lap when I was doing some other job, right? And isn’t it

Andy 30:12
great to be able to go to a conference with other fellow trade nerds that are you know, when you start talking about issues that they don’t lose you and walk off or whatever it’s like, I can understand

Lila Landis 30:28
the conversation. Yeah, I have certain trade compliance issues that I’ll really geek out over, and I can get into really spirited discussions on. And so it’s so much fun to be around other other trade parents and get into the nitty gritty details of why I hate routed export transactions.

Andy 30:43
Oh my gosh, yes. Like, I don’t like touching their sleeves from there or something, like they jump right in there or whatever. And I always love the thing of the 301, tariffs here, and more specifically, the the China tariffs. And there’s the debate with how we need to get rid of them. Well, was, you know, what about fair trade and going back and forth and all this other stuff, and it

Lila Landis 31:08
gets beneficial ownership, and the 50% rule is another

Andy 31:15
one. There’s like, break it on. There you go. I love it. Well, Lalo, do you have anything before we close out?

Lalo 31:26
No, no. I mean, this was sorry. I didn’t have much to say. I was just taking it all in, to be honest with you. I mean, it was a, it was a, it was a good conversation. And, and, I mean, I, I’ve been in every scenario like, like Lila said, you know, either, either the person reporting to management or somebody reporting to me, and, and I totally get it, you know, that those, those were all on point, you know. And like all of us, have been, you know, even Layla, you said yourself, you’ve been, you know, cranking out certificates and then all the way up to management. So, yeah, we’ve all from the color of my hair, and and Andy too, you know, we know we’ve been around for a while. So, so, so, yeah, I totally get it. And, and it’s great. So, well, thank you, Lila. I mean, I really don’t have anything else to you, Andy, I mean, and

Andy 32:14
I’ll just say, Lila, yes, like you are, it’s such a wealth of information. You’re well respected in the industry, and Seiko Logistics is great to have you. I know they’re really fortunate in having somebody caliber and really appreciate you joining us for our show.

Lila Landis 32:34
Thank you Andy and Paula, so much for having me on. It’s been my pleasure.