Corporate Legal, Thinking
Why your legal team skips the leadership programme
Sep
Most large organisations in South Africa train well. There is a learning and development budget, a calendar of workshops, a leadership programme for anyone above a certain grade, and a development day or two each year that the whole business attends. The legal function is on every invitation list. Ask the head of learning how often legal actually turns up, and the answer is usually a small smile, followed by a story about the year the general counsel sent apologies to all four sessions and then asked, in December, why her team seemed so worn down.
It is tempting to read that as arrogance, or as the usual complaint that legal is too busy. Both readings are wrong, and the real reason matters, because it is the same reason the legal function is one of the most under-supported teams in the organisation, and the same reason a good in-house team can quietly degrade for years without anyone noticing until someone senior resigns.
The material was built for someone else
Corporate training is written for the people who make up most of the company: sales, operations, finance, technology. The examples are about pipeline, targets, projects and process. The leadership model is about influence, delegation and having difficult conversations. The resilience session is about work-life balance, taking breaks and switching off notifications. All of it is sound, and all of it is built for a different kind of work.
A legal professional sits through the first twenty minutes and quietly concludes that none of it applies to her. She is right. Her work is different in kind. She signs her name to a decision that carries regulatory and reputational consequences, and if she is wrong the consequence lands in a regulator’s letter rather than on a dashboard. She is expected to be available to the business within the hour and to be correct without exception. Her cognitive load is several complex matters held in mind at once, each with its own facts, law, risk and personalities, and she is interrupted many times a day by people who need an answer now. There is a hard ceiling on how much of that the mind can hold. Nelson Cowan’s review of the working memory literature found that the number of separate items a person can actively hold in mind at once is closer to four than to the seven that is so often quoted; the paper is among the most cited in cognitive psychology. A head of legal with nine live matters who loses the thread of one of them is over the limit of the equipment rather than disorganised. A slide about prioritising your top three tasks does not survive contact with that reality, and she knows it by the second slide.
So the legal team learns to opt out. Legal training becomes technical training only: the regulatory update, the new legislation, the case law seminar. Everything about how the team thinks, decides, leads and holds up under sustained demand is left to chance, in the one function where the cost of a degraded decision is highest. The general counsel goes to the leadership programme once, out of loyalty to the head of learning, and does not go back.
What the business pays for that gap
The gap is invisible in the training report and visible everywhere else, once you know where to look. Work escalates to the same two or three senior people, because juniors are corrected rather than coached to own their decisions, and so they learn to pass the decision upward. Redrafts and missed details cluster late in the day and late in the year, when the reserves are lowest. Responsiveness to the business starts to look like a boundary problem, with legal accused of being slow or obstructive, when it is an attention problem: a team with no capacity left to be fast. A general counsel loses a good associate to a firm, and the exit interview says money, because money is the easiest thing to say.
The scale of this is more than anecdote. The International Bar Association’s 2021 global report surveyed thousands of legal professionals across many jurisdictions and describes a profession under sustained strain, in private practice and in-house alike; the full report is worth an hour of any head of legal’s time, and it also sets out what employers can practically do. None of what it describes appears as a training need in the annual survey, because nobody has connected the symptoms to their cause. They are performance problems with a mechanism: a brain working under a load it was never designed to carry indefinitely, without recovery, in a professional culture that trains people to look for trouble.
What works instead
The legal team will engage with training that starts from its own reality, and it will engage quickly, because legal professionals are fast learners who have simply been offered the wrong material. In our experience, three things make the difference.
The first is the mechanism before the method. Legal professionals reject instructions that arrive without an explanation, and rightly so; it is what they are trained to do with any assertion. When a session begins with what the brain is actually doing under this kind of load, why working memory has a hard ceiling, why decision quality declines through the afternoon, why vigilance becomes the default state and what it does to the prefrontal cortex, the room stops assuming it is doing something wrong and starts taking notes. Only then do the tools make sense, because now they are answers to a problem the room has recognised rather than advice imported from a different industry.
The second is legal specificity. The examples must be a sign-off, a regulator’s deadline, a business unit that wants an answer today, a junior who hands the matter back upward. The session must be built by people who know what a corporate legal function deals with, and delivered by someone who can hold a room of legal professionals, which is a particular skill; the room will test the presenter in the first ten minutes, and a presenter who has never had a matter of their own will not pass.
The third is fit. The programme does not have to be an eight-session commitment. Many legal functions start with a single morning on workload and burnout, a half day for the leadership team, or a talk at the year-end function, all of it inside the training culture and budget the organisation already has. What matters is that the first session lands, because the legal team decides in the first hour whether this one is for them, and a first session that lands opens the door to everything after it.
A question for the head of legal and the head of learning
Look at last year’s development calendar and count how many sessions the legal function attended. Then look at the escalation pattern, the redraft rate, the hours logged after eight in the evening, and the resignations. The training budget was there. The culture was there. The intent was there. The material was built for someone else.
PMRI trains only legal professionals. Our work with corporate legal teams is built around exactly the reality described above, and can be shaped around the time the function has, from a single talk or short session to a full day or two days with the whole team. For a head of legal who wants a sense of the approach first, the recorded webinar The Leadership Dilemma in Law covers the leadership side of the mechanism, and High-Performance Productivity for Legal Professionals covers the workload side. The programmes are developed jointly by a behavioural specialist and an advocate with 27 years in practice, and they begin with a conversation about what your legal function is actually dealing with. If that would be useful, start a conversation with us. There is no charge for the first one.
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