Leading people who are trained to look for trouble

By Sonja Cilliers and Maryke Swarts, PMRI · 12 September 2026

A head of legal took over a team of eleven and noticed, within a month, that every conversation began with what might go wrong. A new matter arrived from the business and the first response was the risk. A proposal from the commercial team arrived and the first response was the objection. A junior brought a draft and the first response was the flaw. The team was excellent; the business relied on it, and with good reason. The team was also exhausting to lead, and, she suspected, exhausting to be in. By Friday she was tired in a way that had nothing to do with hours.

She was observing a professional conditioning rather than a personality problem, and the first task of leading legal professionals is to understand it. The pattern is the same in a law firm, where a managing partner finds that every partners’ meeting turns into a catalogue of what the associates got wrong, and in chambers, where a senior advocate notices that the juniors she leads seem to arrive already braced. Wherever legal professionals gather, the room leans toward the threat, and whoever is leading the room has to decide what to do about that.

What the profession trains

From the first year of study, legal training rewards one cognitive habit above all others: anticipating what could go wrong. The good student sees the counter-argument. The good candidate attorney sees the missing clause. The good practitioner sees the regulatory risk nobody else in the room has noticed, and the general counsel who sees it before the deal is signed has earned her salary for the year. Over years this becomes automatic, running in the background at all times, and it is why a legal team is valuable to a business. Nobody should want to train it out.

It has a cost, though, and the cost is physiological. A brain that scans for threat continuously keeps the stress response engaged at a low level continuously. The prefrontal cortex, which handles planning, creative thinking, weighing options and emotional regulation, runs with less capacity when the threat system is active, because the two compete for the same resources. The team becomes accurate, reactive and tired, and its default emotional tone shifts toward wariness. People stop offering ideas, because an idea is a thing that can be wrong. Under a leader who is also vigilant, and most leaders of legal teams are, the tone compounds, and the whole department settles into a low hum of readiness for bad news.

Energy is contagious

The nervous system is not private. People in a team read each other’s state continuously and adjust to it, through tone, posture, pace and the emotional colour of what is said, and most of this happens below conscious awareness. Sigal Barsade’s study of emotional contagion in working groups, published in 2002, found that a single member’s mood measurably shifted the mood of the whole group, and changed the group’s cooperativeness and its assessment of its own performance; the paper called this the ripple effect, and every leader has felt it. One anxious senior in a meeting and the whole room tightens. One steady one and it eases.

The practical consequence is that the leader’s own state is the single largest input into the team’s state, larger than any policy or process. A leader who arrives braced for trouble makes a team that is braced for trouble, whatever the values statement on the wall says. A leader who can hold steadiness under pressure, and show it, gives the team a reference point that its own vigilance cannot supply. In a team trained to look for trouble, the leader is the only person in the room whose job it is to look for something else.

What the leader does

The first move is to manage her own state before managing anyone else’s, because nothing else works without it. That means the unglamorous work: sleep, actual recovery at the weekend, and knowing her own early signs of overload well enough to catch them on a Tuesday rather than in a resignation letter. The version of her that walks into the room on Monday morning needs to be the steady one, and steadiness under a heavy load is a physical state that has to be built and maintained. A leader who is running on four hours of sleep and three coffees will transmit exactly that, however calm her words.

The second move is to change the opening question. A team trained to look for trouble will always find it; that is the job, and the business is paying for it. But the order can change. “What does this matter need from us, and then what are the risks?” produces a different conversation from “what are the risks?” The first question engages the planning and problem-solving parts of the brain before the threat system has a chance to narrow attention. The vigilance is still used, in full. It is used second, and it is used on a matter the team has already understood rather than one it has only feared.

The head of legal in the opening paragraph did this quite literally. She changed the first item on the agenda of the weekly meeting from “risks and issues” to “what the business needs from us this week”, and left the risks as the second item. Within a few weeks the meeting was shorter and the risks were, if anything, better identified, because the team was looking at them with a clearer picture of the matter in front of it.

The third move is to make recovery visible and legitimate. Legal teams do not rest, because rest looks like weakness in a culture built on vigilance, and nobody wants to be the first to look weak. The leader is the only person who can change that, and she changes it by behaviour rather than by announcement. When the head of legal takes her lunch away from her desk, ends meetings on time, and says out loud that she does not read email after eight, she is regulating the nervous system of eleven people, which is the most senior work in the room. The same applies to the managing partner who leaves the building at a reasonable hour on a Friday and lets people see it, and to the senior advocate who tells her juniors that the brief can wait until Monday and means it.

The team she inherited is still excellent. The conversations now start differently, and the exhaustion has eased, in her and in them. The conditioning is intact, because the business needs it, and she would not have it otherwise. It is simply no longer running the room.

PMRI’s recorded session The Leadership Dilemma in Law goes through this mechanism in full: what legal training does to the brain, why the leader’s state sets the team’s, and what a leader of legal professionals can practically do about it. For a head of legal, the same material forms the basis of our work with corporate legal teams, and for partners and senior advocates it sits at the heart of our leadership development and coaching, shaped around the time available, whether a morning, a full day or two days. The programmes are developed jointly by a behavioural specialist and an advocate with 27 years in practice. If you would like to talk about what this might look like for your team, start a conversation with us. The first one is at no charge.