From Skeptic to Strategist: Danielle Sheer of Commvault on Trust, AI, and the Future of Legal Leadership

In this episode, Cecilia Ziniti talks with Danielle Sheer, Chief Trust Officer and Chief Legal and Compliance Officer at Commvault, about how legal leadership is evolving inside modern companies. Danielle explains why she adopted the title Chief Trust Officer, how it expands the reach and impact of the legal function, and why trust is often the deciding factor in whether teams succeed during moments of uncertainty.

Cecilia and Danielle discuss how executives can prepare for crises before they arrive, how to communicate difficult news in a way that preserves credibility, and how leaders can build resilience throughout an organization. Danielle also shares her progression from AI skeptic to thoughtful, consistent user, and why she believes AI should free leaders to strengthen relationships, broaden perspective, and improve decision-making rather than replace human judgment.

Throughout the conversation, Danielle offers a clear view into the mindset of the modern in-house leader: choosing to be effective rather than simply correct, developing teams through ownership and initiative, and creating psychological safety by setting expectations with intention and honesty.

If you lead legal, compliance, security, or trust programs, or if you want a grounded and human approach to leadership during rapid technological change, this episode offers practical insight you can act on immediately.

SHOW NOTES

Books, Authors & Thinkers Mentioned:

•Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (leadership, forgiveness, change)

•Naval Ravikant (long-term thinking and playing long-term games)

•Jeff Bezos (high-quality decision-making for senior leaders)

Other References:

•Commvault (enterprise data protection and cyber resilience)

•Manhattan Associates (public supply chain technology company and Danielle’s board role)

•Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (trustee advisory board)

•Cloudflare outage example (resilience and dependency management)

•GC AI and ChatGPT (tools for research, drafting, and strengthening relationships)

•TechGC and L Suite (communities where Cecilia and Danielle first connected)

•“Be effective, not right” (guidance from Danielle’s executive coach)

•Crisis leadership through transparency and communication

•Spare tire analogy for cybersecurity and enterprise risk

•Psychological safety and expectations-setting for teams

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⁠@Cecilia Ziniti⁠ on LinkedIn

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⁠@GC AI⁠ on LinkedIn

⁠gc.ai⁠ website

Transcript

Danielle Sheer: 0:00

Legal advice has been paywalled. You need to know a lawyer, you need to pay a lawyer, you know, to get legal advice. And I think the end of those days are here. Anybody can GC AI a question and get a legal answer. I don't need to wait for my lawyer to call me back. How I apply that to this business and these people will be the secret sauce.

Cecilia Ziniti: 0:27

Welcome back to CZ and Friends, where we talk with legal leaders, technologists, and operators shaping how modern companies work and scale. I'm your host, Cecilia Ziniti. Today I'm joined by Danielle Sheer. She's the Chief Trust Officer and Chief Legal and Compliance Officer at Commvault, a global leader in data protection and cyber resilience. Danielle also serves on the board of Manhattan Associates, a public supply chain technology company, and on the trustee advisory board of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a major teaching hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School. Across these roles, Danielle has become a leading voice on enterprise risk, cybersecurity, leadership, scale, and responsible growth. She's also one of the most relatable AI adoption stories I've heard this year. And Danielle and I go way back, literally Tech GC now L Suite. I think I've known Danielle for about 10 or 15 years, and it's been so much fun for our careers and lives to grow together. I've always admired her, heard her speak on careers at TechG C maybe 12 years ago. Came up to her, and now here we are. We've got a you know a public company board member, and you know, I guess I'm lucky I'm a CEO now. But in any event, it's been really fun to be friends with Danielle, and I'm so delighted to have her on the podcast. Um, she began as a spec skeptic on AI, so we'll dive into that. Now she's a thoughtful and active user of AI. So let's dive in. Danielle, welcome to the show.

Danielle Sheer: 1:44

I'm so excited to be here. That was a great introduction. All right, let's go.

Cecilia Ziniti: 1:48

So your title at Commvault in that intro stands out that it has the word trust in it. I haven't heard that before. Maybe I have, but it's it's certainly not common. How do you think about trust in your role and then at large?

Danielle Sheer: 2:00

First heard that title used by the Adobe General Counsel. And I had read an article probably at this point 12, almost 15 years ago, and I heard that the Adobe Chief Legal Officer had taken on this title of chief trust officer. And what I liked about it was two things. Number one, it enabled the portfolio under a general counsel to grow outside of just legal. And as compliance and security and other areas of the business naturally tap into skills that lawyers develop over time, I thought that was very interesting. And two, it's because when a lawyer enters a room, a lot of people kind of clench up. It adds a layer of stress into the energy of a place. And um, I did try for many years at the beginning of my career to go on a um like a campaign to change how the world felt about lawyers. I lost. I was able to change how the people in my immediate vicinity felt about me. I was able to build trust. But, you know, when somebody brings along their lawyer, it's not something that immediately builds trust with everybody else in the room. And yet you have this position that is an enabler, that is an activator, that is an executor. And I think we could be doing better for our chief legal officers. That's just how I feel.

Cecilia Ziniti: 3:23

No, it's fascinating because now on the on the executive side, when I I had a situation with a dispute with a supplier, and I added my lawyer thinking, like, oh hey, you know, plus lawyer, and it immediately went south, like just drop like a rock. And and it wasn't, it was escalated. And I didn't mean it really that way. And it was just a good lesson for me because I think, okay, we're a legal AI company, people are pretty used to lawyers. We have in our brand, I think we do align with folks like you partly because we do see legal as the force multiplier, particularly in house. Like that's something that that we focused a lot on. Okay, so you you go on this campaign and you find, you know, you join, you join meetings as a lawyer, and people are like, or you know, something happens. You're able to be the change you see in the world and you're gonna you're gonna change the brand. What was the thinking and did it work?

Danielle Sheer: 4:13

Well, we have any number of security incidents that we have to deal with through the supply chain, right? When any one of our vendors experiences a security incident, we've got to talk about it, we've got to handle it, we've got to remediate it, and we have to communicate it. If I have to communicate something to you as the CEO of GC AI, would you want to hear from the general counsel or the chief trust officer?

Cecilia Ziniti: 4:38

Good point. Yes. Right? That's right.

Danielle Sheer: 4:41

So I feel like we've been doing our legal teams in-house a disservice by not giving them the right title to open up sort of feelings and emotions in people when they come to the table. An in-house lawyer is not a firm lawyer. An in-house lawyer is not a litigator. An in-house lawyer is not somebody who goes to court. Not all lawyers are created equal, you know, and the roles aren't equal. And so the question is, is does it work? It works brilliantly. I have this portfolio now. Legal expanded to compliance, expanded to cybersecurity, expanded to expand it to business development. And what's interesting is it's changed the way I think as a leader. Instead of leading with the legal analysis, I lead with the business goal. What are we trying to accomplish? Legal becomes an input into that, but there are so many other inputs, and I'm no longer think myopically about the legal input. I think much more about what we're trying to accomplish. And then it's my job to assess risk and regulations and speed to success and how it's gonna be compatible with other teams, how it's gonna be compatible with customers. You know, you think about it all. I I actually think having a chief trust officer on an executive team, and it doesn't always have to come from the chief legal officer's role, although I think we're uniquely situated to kind of take on this role, helps strengthen an executive team. It helps strengthen the motion that all of us go through together and to reach shared goals. How does that show up in a crisis if you've had one?

Cecilia Ziniti: 6:17

And maybe it's been at this company, maybe at others, but like we had a guest, we had Diane Honda of Redis, who I also super admire, and similarly has taken on additional roles from legal. She talked about having literally like a dissenting chair in the room and that helping in a crisis in particular. That was her strategy. So what's yours, or how does this trust concept of like thinking about the wider business? And really, like in your case, your company's selling security services. So trust is is what you're selling, really. So how how does that show up?

Danielle Sheer: 6:50

So let me give a really simple example. Let's say that a key leader in the business resides. And, you know, that can be that can affect a team. And a lot of people are gonna have a lot of feelings about that. And let's say it's a, you know, it can be a key leader in sales and support and marketing, whatever it is. The executive team comes together, we hear the news, and you know, who on the team is thinking about how what do we want to be known for on the other side of this? How do we want to exit this person? What do we want to say to the people who are still here? What do we want that succession plan to look like? How do we want to get to the other side of this? Now, as the head of HR, you're thinking about exiting somebody, you're thinking about a backfill. Legal, you're thinking about were any contracts violated? Are they going to a competitor? You know, the function whose role is leaving is thinking, what am I going to do? Probably the other executives in the room are thinking, thank God it's not me, but you know, now who am I going to rely on? What I find interesting is that instead of showing up with the legal hat to say, let me look at the non-competes and the non-solicits and all that stuff, you've you sort of take a step back and you're like, okay, we should make sure this is just sort of my philosophy, but I add this into the team. Listen, life is a long song. We've had a lot of people leave and come back. We've had to cut people when we haven't necessarily wanted to, or that's been a hard decision to make. Let's make sure that anybody who leaves leaves with our gratitude and our blessing, right? That's number one. Number two, do we have an internal candidate? Sure. Yes, we do. Should we go outside? Is there some is there another skill that we want here? And like, whose role is it to put all of those pieces together and to be thinking at all times, how do I make this team come on the other side of this stronger? Because everybody has a my part works in this example. But who's thinking about who are we going to be on the other side of this? So almost every um crisis or goal that we want to achieve, because it it works just as well for goals, I'm thinking, who do we want to be on the other side of this? And how do we get there? How do we get there together? How do we get there by strengthening trust and not by breaking breaking trust with each other, with our employees, with our customers, with our board, you know?

Cecilia Ziniti: 9:02

That example gave me the chills. So, like, life is a long song. I think, you know, there's variants I've heard across this. You know, Naval, I read a lot of this kind of uh Twitter sort of inspo stuff. He talks about play long-term games. Like that's just literally the name, and that it will pay off in business in a in a tremendous way. And that's a great example because I I've been the HR side, I've been the legal side, now the CEO of that exact scenario. And of course it happens at every company. That's life. And and thinking about like there's stress in the moment, right? It's like, oh, the stock options and the exercise window, and then this and the that. And it's very easy to not see that big picture. Wow, that I did not expect that that truth bond this morning, Danielle. Amazing. I love it. All right, so how does that translate to the board level? So you're on the board of a of a major nonprofit and of an of a public company. How does have these board roles affected your your view of this?

Danielle Sheer: 9:56

It has, you know, um sitting on boards and the latest one, Manhattan Associates, has has transcended me as a leader. I, you know, it's very difficult to ask somebody to do two things at the same time. Number one, tell me how you do your job successfully. And number two, tell it to me in a way that I should care about. Those are two very difficult things to do at the same time. When I show up as the chief trust officer and report out on my function, I I'm trying to try very hard not to like justify your existence presentations. I absolutely hate them, right? Nobody needs a book report on everything that I've done in the last quarter. But it's hard. It's hard to get yourself out of that mindset because there's so much information you want to get across to a board that you only get to see four or five times a year. Sitting on a board and, you know, a public company board and one in the supply chain, I have a better appreciation for, you know, first of all, tell me the end of the story first. And two, tell me what matters. So let's take cybersecurity, for example. It's a big topic for a supply chain company. Um, you know, we have conversations about enterprise risk. We have conversations about, you know, how can we help the board members understand what the enterprise risk management program is and how that feats into the cybersecurity program? And there, you can imagine, because I know you have, sat in conversations where you're talking about how somebody creates their enterprise risk management program, runs it, explains it, communicates it. You know what actually matters to board members? What are the three to five systems that if they go down, we're not in business? What are they in your entire company? Can you survive without Outlook? Probably. Right? You could probably survive. It's not easy, but you could probably. So I remember being at Carbonite and the internet went out. I don't know. I think there was like a at like at the company, and we all moved to the Marriott next door and popped open our laptops and got on the free Wi-Fi at the prudential. Like, what has to be totally down for you to be out of business? Tell me the three, four, or five things. It's a really hard question to ask. At GC, what has to go down for you to be out of business? What are those things? And now tell me, what's your backup plan? What's your spare tire? How do you spin those things up while you're handling the remediation of like what happened? That's what boards want to know. So think about a supply chain company like Manhattan Associates. They make sure, I mean, we're headed into Christmas season, right? Holiday season. They have vendors all over the world shipping gifts and clothes and electronics, and they have, you know, a warehouse management system. If something goes down and those gifts don't arrive on time, what are those things? And how do you have a spare tire to keep things up and running while you're figuring out what went wrong and you're remediating it? That's what boards want to know. They don't want to understand what your checklist is. They're not interested in like the big loaded words that make it sound as if you know what you're talking about when it comes to enterprise risk management. If you sit on the board of a, of a, of a, of a travel company or let's say like an airline, what keeps our planes grounded? What are the things that would keep our planes grounded? And what is our backstop if that happens? And I just think about it like running my house. I live in Massachusetts. We get storms. I hear this winter's gonna be bad. What happens if I'm the electric goes out? What do I do? Where am I gonna go? What's my what's my fail-safe? You know, it's interesting that companies nobody wants to think about that. That's hard, right? Because then you have to spend a little bit of money for, you know, to address a headache that hasn't become a reality yet. But that's sort of why you have a chief trust officer. Now, I am not planning what the backstops are for each tool in each system because that has to live in support. It has to live in finance, it has to live in cybersecurity. But I'm asking the question, I'm c I'm connecting it all, creating a comprehensive narrative that then I can go to a board of directors and say, here's where things get really spicy, and here's our plan for what we're gonna do about it. And so as I sit on, I have come to this realization as a board member more than I have as a sitting executive. And so I now as a board member, it's very easy to cut through all that noise and ask a Sesame Street simple question. The answer, incredibly difficult. But tell it to me like I'm five, right? What systems have to go down where we are in a bad situation? And what's your plan to do something about it? Because you shouldn't be figuring out the plan at a moment of crisis.

Cecilia Ziniti: 14:21

Yes, that is a resounding theme. So love how you put that. The spare tire example is a really good one because I do think there is an excessive energy in writing and kind of like almost like I felt this way in a little bit with GDPR, where it was like you have the manifest and the kind of like, you know, it has been called a compliance theater. But this question of like, do you have a spare tire in your actual trunk? Like that is very tangible and very clear. So, like this morning, literally the cloud flyer outage is happening as we speak, and it's like, you know, half the internet is down. Obviously, open AI goes down in our case. We've got fail-safes, we're able to hot swap models, we're able to hot swap other things. And, you know, just really thinking like it's almost it's funny because I've I've had this realization recently of like that you mentioned the household example that running a company is it's the complexity of a household, right? Of like, oh, did you rubber the passports? Oh, did you do this? Did you like, you know, like when when the kid, you know, the babies are little and you've got your your diaper bag. This is like every possible eventuality is like taken care of. But thinking of like taking care of it where to where it's actually um, I think this is something that a number of guests on the show talked about is like this idea that when legal and trust are running well, it's not crisis latent. It's not you're coming in and saving the day, it's that you've been doing it the whole time, asking the questions and so on, so that when you need the spare tire, it's like, all right, call triple A, or you just do it yourself. And it's like you you experience, maybe you experience a disruption, but far less than you otherwise would have. So, yeah, that's great.

Danielle Sheer: 15:53

The organization, you build resilience in the organization, you build resilience in the team, you build resilience in people.

Cecilia Ziniti: 15:58

Love that. Such a good story, too. This I'm having so much fun. All right, turning point. Let's go to my next favorite topic, which is AI. So I'm gonna say your AI story is is refreshing and and obviously different point of view than me, and that's great. That's why why I have you on the pod. So a year and a half ago, uh, we looked this up, we did the the research notes. Uh you're at an L-suite event, and you literally said, um, AI is not a faith. You said, not a faith. So this is what is this? It's it's now it's 25. So this must have been, I guess, 23 um or early 2024. So you weren't interested. What what led you to that conclusion then and what has changed?

Danielle Sheer: 16:35

Yeah. So um I really, my personality does not get on hype cycle bandwagons. And I am immediately suspicious of it. And um I needed to work out why I was suspicious of it. Uh, AI is a tool. It's a tool. When companies started saying, How are we going to get use more AI? How are we going to sell AI? How are we going to make money with AI? We're going to be left behind if we don't, you know, use AI. It was like nails on a chalkboard to me because that is the wrong question to be asking. I needed to sit with people I trusted and hear repetitively, repeatedly, what problem are we solving? And is AI a new tool that can help us solve it? And you and I spent a lot of time talking about this and it helped me work things out in my mind. It's not that I don't think AI is a thing. It's like that would be like saying electricity isn't a thing and I only use candles, right? Obviously, like AI is a really awesome technology. But you know what I don't want to do? I don't want to talk about how AI is going to replace humans, how AI is going to take people's jobs. Like we're firing hundreds of thousands of people all over the world because now we're introducing it with a bot. Like that, that to me, I'm like, I'm very opposed to. I don't think that's helpful. I certainly don't think it's helpful as we usher in a completely new technological innovation in our lives. I think AI is very powerful. And I still think it has a long way to go to build in safeguards so that we get the best use out of it without it causing harm. And I worry mostly that companies are rushing to develop, use whatever AI because they see it as a moment of like a gold rush moment. And, you know, we had a little bit of that problem when electricity was invented. You know, every home in the US was wired, you know, uh for electricity. You know what happened? A bunch of homes went up in flames because we didn't have a code that, you know, people who understood how to wire buildings could could live by. That code was ultimately created. We have this problem in technology where we're so fast to develop it and everybody is so fast to get rich as a result that we don't think about the safeguards we need to build into it. And so that's sort of my hesitation when it comes to AI, which is let's just let's let's let's tread carefully. Let's go slow to go fast. So I know you. I have long been a fan of who you are as a leader and as a thinker. And so I said, let's let's check out this GC AI tool that is being built. And I find it fascinating. I you know what I love about it is that it helps me overcome a blank page. And it you know, gives me sort of a heads up on what the customer perspective could be when I am so rooted in my own way of thinking. So I actually before I moved over into GC AI, I s I used ChatGPT. I really forced myself to use chat GPC, ChatGPT. And I like it. I actually use Chat GPT like every day now. I am careful. I make sure that I turn off the prompt that talks to me like a human. I'm not interested in having my emotions toyed with, right? I'm careful, but um, but I like it. And then I was like, you know what would be really helpful is if there was an entire universe that was like ChatGPT, but built for and made for legal world and the compliance world, GC AI. And it's great because it gives me the tone, the tenor, the reliability, the credibility of, you know, an LLM that was created by and for lawyers. So would you say you're an optimist now on AI? Cautious. I'm a cautious optimist. Um I read these articles about how like, I don't know if they're true, by the way, because that's interesting, but like how robots are gonna start cleaning houses and cooking and like driving kids and whatnot. And this is just a philosophical point of view. I like to take care of my family. Like, I like to cook dinner. I like to drive my kids to school because that's when they talk to me. If AI is gonna replace all the mundane things that I do in my life to raise a family, what is the point of living? I don't want that. Now, do I do I want to have 10,000 candles in my house because I don't have electricity? No. So, like, I think there's a point that AI can help all of us up level. One of the things I like to say to my team as I'm growing them, and it was said to me as people were growing me, is write down everything you do in a week, like stream of consciousness. Find a way to give 80% of it away. That's how you teach the next generation. Okay, well, Danielle, what am I supposed to do with everything I just gave away? You know what you're supposed to do, you're supposed to figure it out. Because that's what growth is. Figure out a way to add value to the company, to the team, to your life. But you have to create the space to figure that out. And what I think AI does is it creates space. It creates space for me to myself the really hard questions, like, what value am I going to bring with this free time that I don't now need to spend 12 hours researching a subject? And you know what it does? You know what time it helps me develop? This is really crazy. Building relationships. I have more time to build relationships because now I have the answer quicker. I've looked at it from like a 360-degree perspective. I really love to ask questions like somebody who doesn't agree with this, what would their arguments be? I mean, like, how great is that? And then you read it, you digest it, you give yourself a moment, you turn back to it, and you're like, all right, now I'm gonna make a plan. I want to influence these three leaders. And that doesn't take showing up with like an amazing argument. It shows it takes having a relationship with those people where they trust you. They trust you enough to say, I don't agree, let's talk about it, or okay, let's give it a shot. But AI can't solve that.

Cecilia Ziniti: 22:35

No, I love that. And that's exactly like, I mean, you just this is like the third time this episode that you've given me the chills. But in any event, that uh story of using AI, like in an AI world, the relationships part matters more. But interestingly, you can use the AI to make the relationships part better. So, perfect example. I was on a panel last week at the GCC East Conference, and um a leader from uh a company called Acorns talked about how she was basically able to, there was a product counseling issue where a BD person at the company wanted to do a kind of unusual deal with a regulated industry. And GC hears about it the night before, or the product council hears about it the night before. And they're able to use AI to do exactly what you described, which is like, okay, here's the considerations, here's the regulation that's probably gonna come up. And by the way, here's four alternative deal structures that could actually achieve what you're trying to achieve. And so this BD person who had said, Oh, hey, I looked on ChatGPT myself, Legal was able to actually say, like, okay, actually, let's widen the aperture here a little bit. Let's think about how to get this deal done, did that. And it was literally like this BD person was like, How did you do that? Legal, this is incredible. And the deal is gonna get done. And it and it was like this beautiful story of literally exactly what you said, where it's like, okay, you've got the headspace now to go a click deeper, to be more effective, to think about the dynamics that are be kind of how we kicked off the show, right? Of like, okay, the regulation, let's assume now that with AI anybody can look at the regulation. Okay, so like, what is that next thing that you're gonna do? Exactly.

Danielle Sheer: 24:09

Yeah. I had this executive coach years ago, and when she said this to me, I I really resented it. Uh, and you've probably heard me speak about this. She would say, Danielle, you are gonna have to figure out whether you want to be right or you wanna be effective. And when she said that to me, I was really irritated and I was like, I want to be both. And she's like, Great, but there will be times you have to choose. And this, I think, is the point of AI. AI, for the most part, let's just assume that it can be right. What it can't be is effective. So it frees up time for humans to figure out how to be effective. It gets you to water, right? But it can't force you to drink. Yeah, that's right.

Cecilia Ziniti: 24:49

Yeah. Well, and it's literally to the point where, you know, even something super unrelated, very early in the company, I did a panel with the American Association of Marriage Lawyers. Okay, so I know very little about marriage law or divorce law. I don't think I could know less effectively. Like I know California's community property, but that is like the end of my marriage law knowledge, all right. And I'm we're prepping for this panel on AI. And I talked with the practitioners there, and basically they explained to me that in Southern California and Northern California, divorce practices and the amount that people go to court versus settle or do mediation is very different. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. Why is that? It's the same state law. There should be no reason for that. And it turned out the answer was that uh in Southern California, because of Hollywood, high-stakes divorces, it's all about the image and who goes to court first and kind of this like controlling. Right? Exactly. Versus in Silicon Valley, it's the stock options. It's confusing math. It's like this whole thing where it's like we need a mediator to like look at cap tables and look at, you know, the philomorphic value and this whole thing. And that is something that maybe AI could figure that out, but on the on the rightness of like what is the right thing to do here? Is it to settle? Is it to go with a mediator? Is it to whatever? Like that experience and that humanity, and literally one of the most human things you can do, like people's marriage, was like, okay, these guys' jobs are are pretty much safe.

Danielle Sheer: 26:20

And so, yeah, just just reminded me of like, you remember when we were baby lawyers and even like baby in-house lawyers, and like the reason why we gave the advice we did is it's because like it's the law. Like, I would be like, That was the law. That that is the law. This is what I want to do. And so it's like it can help you get to the answer really, really fast, but it cannot help you be influential. I mean it's like you it can help like to, but like you still gotta show up.

Cecilia Ziniti: 26:49

You gotta say, right. And I I think I I love to, I'm part of me. I'm like, I want to ask your exec coach to put it in the show notes, but I'm like, this person can delug because that is like absolutely outstanding advice. But I can I can literally I can feel like I have this empathy of like sitting there and having somebody tell you this, and you're like, you know, like I feel it. All right, so leading through change. So you've done acquisitions, you've had cybersecurity events, you've been part of a public company, lots of change. That's obviously constant. Where do you anchor in times of change?

Danielle Sheer: 27:18

This is my favorite question, and I do not get it often enough. Communication and transparency. You know what shocks me? When something is happening and it's significant enough that it's gonna affect people's lives, and we decide we're gonna keep the information close to the best. We're gonna only let a few people know. And then like a few people let a few people know, and a few people let a few people know. You know what? By the time three people know, it's not a secret anymore. Now you just have a bunch of people who feel they weren't important enough to know the news. They didn't perhaps hear it the way that you wanted to say it. They feel out of the loop. They don't feel on the inside, they feel on the outside. All of like the best thing you can do in a moment of change is to be honest and quickly. Like get in front of people quickly. This is what's happening, here's why it's happening. I'm very excited about it. I don't know a bunch of things, but here are the people I've tapped to help us figure it out. And by the way, if any of you are interested, reach out to X, Y, and Z. If any of you are interested to learn more, to help out, but I think this is a good thing, and when I have more information, I'll share it. Like, as opposed to let's wait until a communication plan is perfect, you break trust that way. As soon as somebody finds out something and you didn't have the chance to say it directly, you know what I mean? It's okay to say, I don't have all the answers, but let me tell you what's going on because you guys matter and your opinions matter, you know? I've always had good success with being transparent and candid.

Cecilia Ziniti: 28:46

Okay, so I hear you and I want to agree with you, but sometimes I guess I I've always been very transparent. I'm an open book, you know, not particularly good poker player. But I guess flip side of that, there's advice from like Ben Horowitz of like, okay, he did his book, Hard Thing About Hard Things, it's it's excellent. But he does talk about essentially that there's things that you and not necessarily don't want to tell the team, but you need to kind of like it sort of control the narrative. But also like for me, so let's let's let's pick a tactical example again. So let's say you're working on an MC and it falls through for whatever reason. Walk me through how in your in your strategy or in your comms suggestion you you would go to that. I mean, you can go to, well, you know, they wouldn't have been a good target anyway. You know, like so what do you what do you do? I'm I'm the GC or I'm the someone in the working with the project team in that in that scenario, or or big case settles, or or or or big case comes in, or something that's like, let's say, not good news. What do you do?

Danielle Sheer: 29:43

Um, so first of all, not everybody needs to know everything. So you have to figure out who the right audience is. And you do have to figure out what the right time is. My perspective is that most people miss that mark by days and days. Um, that's okay, so that's two. I would, I, I'd be faster to that than I would be longer. The third is you have to know who you are. Like I'm pretty synergistic and I like to talk things out loud, but I have a couple of deputies that I do that with and they don't action what I'm saying. They understand that I'm trying to work things out. So I think it's important to surround yourself with people that you can talk to. And they're not just people who work for me, that some of them are other GCs, right? And say, this is what's going on in my mind. This is what I'm trying to work out. You know, what do you think? And like, like, like more than half of the time, I sort of abandon that thought. I just needed to get it out. I needed to work it out. And I needed it to be caught by somebody. I needed it to be received. But I am mindful, and I do agree with Ben Horwitz, I am mindful that like just because you have a message doesn't mean it's intended to be received by everybody. So you have to figure out what the right audience is. To your specific point, like, how do you deliver bad news? I mean, the the greatest example and the most relevant one is when a company needs to do layoffs. It's a hard question. I think the best you can do is be as human about it as possible. And when companies try to segment who they're giving that news to and think, you know, the rest of the company won't find out or I don't care if they find out in this way, I think that's wrong. I think when you get that message by text, I think that's wrong. You know, I think it's unusual for somebody to go through life and never experience a layoff or a termination. And so we should all have the experience to show up and be human in that moment when we have to be on the other side of it. I think you deliver good news. I'm sorry, I think you deliver bad news fast. You don't sugarcoat it, and you build trust by being transparent in that moment. Okay.

Cecilia Ziniti: 31:43

Um, so I would categorize you as a modern general counsel or a modern trust officer. Clearly, like you've made strides, you've evolved the whole kind of profession, which is like I just this is the uh first on this episode and among people I've encountered. So, what's different about the modern GC? So you talked about trust, obviously. Other other other things in like, so you said effective and not right. That's a that's just like an incredible North Star. I read a post yesterday that was saying a CEO was able to change legal when he literally said to the company or said to legal, like, hey, you're not your job is not legal, your job is to accelerate revenue safely. And and that that like three-liner or whatever, or three-word one-liner was it was enough to make the change. Now that's obviously dramatic, but like what's the um what are the hallmarks that you want to see in in the legal department of today?

Danielle Sheer: 32:36

Yeah, another really great question. Forever, I think the legal, I think legal advice has been paywalled. You need to know a lawyer, you need to pay a lawyer, you know, to get legal advice. And I think the end of those days are here. So if you don't need to pay to understand what the law is, which by the way, I never actually thought you should have to do that, but I do think our profession was paywalled. What kinds of legal leader will be successful going forward? I think the kinds of legal leader that will be successful are the ones that are translators. Nobody can read these regulations, not even the people who write them. So you have to understand them and then translate it into what's the point? And what's the point will be different for who you're talking to. What's the point to you as a CEO? What is the point to the head of engineering? They they will mean different things. I think it modernizes the legal profession in a way where we have been hesitant to let that happen, where other positions have had to modernize. Every executive role comes with their bag of tricks. You know, the chief revenue officer generally has come with years of experience on compensation and commission planning and on customer relationship development. Those are some of the tools that they have to play with to be successful. Marketing has their tools, right? Finance has their tools. Legal needs to sharpen their tools now because anybody can GC AI a question and get a legal answer. I don't need to wait for my lawyer to call me back. How I apply that to this business and these people will be the secret sauce. Wow.

Cecilia Ziniti: 34:18

You've led governance, legal strategy, IPO readiness. Like you name the trick, you name the the legal thing. Danielle has done it, and and just like her wisdom is just like see see seeping off the page here. Um, so what are the skills like? So when you talk about the bag of trips, we've got to sharpen our sharpen our skills. Let's say junior lawyer on your team, you're growing them. We've got our 80% advice. I love that. Is there any particular like skill that that you think is like like that people should be really deliberate about developing in legal?

Danielle Sheer: 34:50

Anyway, I think uh Mark Twain said wisdom is just um a heck of a lot of experience in making mistakes. So appreciate it. I'll have a mountain of mistakes behind me. I've just been I've been fortunate that people have allowed me to make those mistakes and and bounce back. So I do have a young lawyer on my team. I um rescued her from a big law firm and she came with some really great skills. She saw me on a panel six years ago while she was in law school.

Cecilia Ziniti: 35:17

Wow.

Danielle Sheer: 35:17

And she followed up on LinkedIn and she's like, I thought you were great. I liked this part specifically. I'm in law school. I'd love to stay in touch. And you know, some people will ignore that. I don't. I know you don't. We're big believers in mentoring the next generation. And so I wrote back and, you know, I I didn't really think about it after that. But every year, she either found a way to show up to a panel I was on, she found a way to comment on something she had seen me speak at, or she just wanted to say, hey, you know. And six years later, I was looking to start bringing on uh junior counsel, in-house counsel, who could manage SEC work and who can manage governance and who could help me be the connective tissue on the corporate sort of side of the house. And just luck and fate, she had happened to send me a note a couple weeks earlier and I hadn't responded to it, but it was in my mind because it's kind of remarkable when somebody stays in touch but doesn't ask for anything. And so I asked for her number on LinkedIn. I called her and I said, What are you doing these days? And she's like, I'm at so-and-so firm in New York City. And I was like, Are you ready to get out of there? And she's just like, Maybe. What did you have in mind? And so I said, Well, you have to take a massive pay cut, but you'll get equity, and I will um I'll teach you the ropes. You know, this this team would teach you the ropes. So she's like, Okay, I'm interested in learning more. And we had her interviewed by six, seven people on the team, and three months later she was on board. So I haven't answered your question yet, but what she had was initiative. What she had was patience, and she had a grace about her. I remember when we were much younger, and people like to talk about how to find a mentor. You know, you can't deliver your problems to somebody's doorstep. You have to make it worth their while. And I always thought it was lovely to hear from this woman. Her name is Gianna. I always thought it was lovely to hear from Gianna. And she didn't take up too much of my time. She didn't ask too much, but she made sure that she stayed appropriately present and she let me follow her career. As now a full member of the team, she looks for ways to do that in the company. Who she is is who she is. So she will reach out to people and she say, I'd love to understand what you do here. And she's probably met a hundred people in the company. And she's like, you know, it's really interesting because Joe over here does this. And in finance, we've got, you know, Maggie who does this. And uh I feel like we've got, you know, a procurement person who's always in the middle fighting me. Well, what do you think if I sort of put these people together? And I was like, Jana, that's brilliant. But she's got the personality to want to solve problems, to want to remove obstacles, to want to be an enabler. And so I look for that. I happen to just don't, I just don't ask the question as if it's something on a resume. I look for it in a person's personality and how they've shown up over years. I have a team that I travel with uh for the most part. Many people have been with me. This is our third company, and we love to grow young talent. We love it. It's not always easy, right? Because it takes a while. We love to grow young talent. Probably the hardest thing for me to do was to hire people who were much more senior. And I I learned how to do that in the last couple of years, and then to make this whole team work together as an ecosystem that can survive you. Like that's the goal.

Cecilia Ziniti: 38:33

It's incredible. Let's see. You've talked about psychological safety in the past. But this, like, I mean, hearing that, I'm like, you're gonna get a flood of applications to work for you, Danielle, because that's like literally, I think what people are looking for as well. And then in this, like, you know, patience, initiative, grace, putting people together, because that gets back to the AI point, actually, of like AI wouldn't ask what Joe and Maggie are doing. It's just not a thing. And so thinking about the business value that creates, I'm assuming that you know, procurement improved X amount after that. And it's very difficult, I think, even quantify your resume. But that is, like you said, like a trait of like something that you've developed that if if you put in your annual review, it's annual review season. Okay, I want to develop more initiative. It's like, okay, I'm gonna have XYZ lunches. I used to tell my team, plan on an external lunch once a week at the end of the year, you're gonna have 50 people and you're gonna cancel it, let's say holidays, whatever, but that's 25 connections, 10-year career, that's 250 people that care about you and what you're doing. And and and that is inclusive inside the company and out. And so, like now in the venture ecosystem as an example, like all the venture back GCs, we're all sort of friends. We all kind of like can, and when things come up, we can talk. I just, yeah, sorry, I'm rambling, but like this, this is this is such such gold. Anyone that's listening to this and wants to expand their career, do that. All right. So, next thing, let's talk about psychological safety and like how do people in that moment when you're implementing your coach's advice of like I want to be effective, I don't need to be right. And how do you do this? Because there is a um, I think it is part of the lawyer personality that, you know, so like typos, right? Like I literally like finds I can't I can't stand them. I find them, and it's and it's it's what I'm saying. And it just is like, but it does, there is this like broken window syndrome. They're like, all right, we sent out something with typos. We had at one of my companies, the CEO's name was not a standard spelling um of that name. The uh the the one of the leaders of the company said the next document that comes to this person with the name misspelled is fired. And that did not go well, uh, but it also is like it was pretty serious. So, like what what could what could the GC have done in that scenario?

Danielle Sheer: 40:49

Okay, psychological safety. Uh to me, there's two ways to answer this question. The first is um you have to tell people what it takes to feel safe with you. You know, Cecilia, if I worked for you, I would hope that you would either ask, you would either tell me or I would ask you, how do I feel safe with you, Cecilia, on your team? What is it that you need, right? So I've got a team of leaders and sometimes they flail. Sometimes I flail, right? And when I am irritated or annoyed, um I have to really think about why. And I try very hard to be like, what is bothering me? Because people are not all good or all bad. They're not all smart or all stupid, right? So it is really bothering me and why why don't these people feel safe with me, right? I just had a team meeting today and I said, there's some new folks on the team, some people who've worked for the company for over 15 years who have moved into leadership roles on the trust team, business development and stuff like that and security. And I said, let me tell you how you're successful with me. I am not going to tell you what your role is. You decide how you want to add value to the company. I will help you refine it, I will amplify it, I will help you resource it, I will help brand it. But if you're failing because you don't know what the point of your life is, I am not your answer. You are leaders. You need to figure that out. I have to figure that out and tell the CEO what my role is, right? How am I going to add value today to him, to the company? I don't wait to be told. The job of a leader is not a battlefield promotion when done right. It is a really hard job because you are left with a blank sheet of paper and you have to figure out what you want to be known for. And you have to reinvent that every quarter and every year. So I get annoyed when my leaders are like, What am I supposed to be doing? I don't know, you tell me. And my executive commons.

Cecilia Ziniti: 42:45

That's exactly right. I I love that. So first of all, I'm calling your executive coach. My current one, you know, got a gig and she and they're amazing. She's very, very good. But I'm ready. So I'm I'm working with this coach. But I love that of like this blank page because funny, I I don't think I realized it before I became a CEO, but that's what a CEO is too. Because the company can be anything, like any of the hundred projects that you're working on, you can double down on. We're very lucky at GC AI with strong product market fit. We could build deeper in commercial, deeper in regulatory, where we've got, you know, a roadmap a mile long. But like, what are the things that we're going to focus on? And even down to like, you know, what podcasts or webinars I do, right? It's like, how am I building the brand? How am I doing this? Like that blank page issue of like, yeah, no, I this is like man, I'm having so much fun.

Danielle Sheer: 43:29

Jesus had this quote that I loved and I had it up on a wall for a long time. The job of a senior executive is to make a small number of high quality decisions. If you find that you are your own personal firing range of decision and choices throughout the day, you're missing the point. Like the point is you set the direction, you set the vision, you set the budget, you set the communication tone, you know, whatever it is that's important to you. And then you hire the best you can find, the best that you believe you can develop. And they're supposed to be part of the rising tide lifts all boats. But when you've got people on the team who are flailing, either they're the wrong fit or they need to hear this message, which is figure it out and come and tell me what you want to be known for by the end of the year. What is it that you're gonna accomplish? Just pick one thing because sometimes they need some confidence to believe that they can do it. So just just get just get a couple points on the board. It doesn't even have to be huge. Just you need to tell your prove to yourself again that you can accomplish something that matters. And then we'll go bigger and we'll go bigger. So one is, you know, making I I like to coach that often and people need to hear it, and I need to hear it all the time, you know. Two is if you had to identify it, what is your biggest need right now? And if somebody is not in a good place or is swirling, but tell me, tell me an unmet need that you have. And it forces them to put words to what's going on with them.

Cecilia Ziniti: 44:51

Yes, yes. I love that. All right, Booker Podcast, The Change the Way You Lead. Last question for the lightning round.

Danielle Sheer: 44:57

Uh book, and it's Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom. And the reason why is because he literally had to forgive people who did terrible things to him and his people in order to usher in a new era for South Africa. And I think that is just a story that I try to reduce into its simplest form of don't assume bad intentions if you want to change the world. You have got to turn the page.

Cecilia Ziniti: 45:21

Danielle, you move through change with honesty, curiosity, clarity. If you could leave listeners with one thing in this episode, I mean you've had like about 17 truth bombs. I'm I'm like, I'm literally gonna like print it, print this out. But one thing you want to leave our listeners with.

Danielle Sheer: 45:35

I would um I would think about something you're scared of. I was scared of AI. I was scared of what it meant for our profession. I was scared of what it meant for me as a leader, as a lawyer, and then figure out how to make it matter to you in your life. Just take that fear ahead on. I'm sure glad I did. I'm sure glad you founded the company you founded so that I had a you're you're so kind.

Cecilia Ziniti: 46:01

No, I at Replit we had one seek pain and it and as a leadership principle. And it is actually like like lean into it. I think that's it's incredible advice. And I'm so glad. Like this was really lovely. Danielle, thank you. I'm so I'm so I'm so delighted we had this conversation. So that was my conversation with Danielle Shear. She's the chief trust officer at Commvault and just an incredible leader who shows what it looks like to scale with integrity, with clarity, with humility. Like all all the words, Danielle is just an incredible inspiration. So follow CZ and Friends wherever you get your podcasts. You're gonna learn about legal teams, you're gonna get truth bombs on leadership and how to lead with impact. Visit gc.ai. We'll get you taken care of. If Danielle can kind of turn the page and be into AI, I think you can too. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.