Leadership in Law
Leading people who are trained to look for trouble
Sep
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 and the first response was the risk. A proposal from the business 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 team was also exhausting to lead, and, she suspected, exhausting to be in.
She was not observing a personality problem. She was observing a professional conditioning, and the first task of leading legal professionals is to understand it.
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 sees the missing clause. The good practitioner sees the regulatory risk nobody else in the room has noticed. Over years this becomes automatic, running in the background at all times, and it is why a legal team is valuable to a business.
It has a cost. 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 and emotional regulation, runs with less capacity when the threat system is active. The team becomes accurate, reactive and tired, and its default emotional tone shifts toward wariness. Under a leader who is also vigilant, the tone compounds.
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. This is well documented, and every leader has felt it: one anxious senior in a meeting and the whole room tightens. 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. A leader who can hold steadiness under pressure, and show it, gives the team a reference point that its own vigilance cannot supply.
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 of recovery, sleep, and knowing her own early signs of overload, so that the version of her that walks into the room is the steady one.
The second move is to change the opening question. A team trained to look for trouble will always find it; that is the job. 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 vigilance is still used. It is used second.
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. 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 not being soft. She is regulating the nervous system of eleven people, which is the most senior work in the room.
The team she inherited is still excellent. The conversations now start differently, and the exhaustion has eased. The conditioning is intact, because the business needs it. It is simply no longer running the room.
If this was useful, there is one like it every month.
One idea, one practical habit, and the month's articles from the PMRI Library. Written for legal professionals under pressure.