Corporate Legal
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.
It is tempting to read that as arrogance, or as the usual complaint that legal is too busy. Both 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.
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 and delegation. The resilience session is about work-life balance and taking breaks.
A legal professional sits through the first twenty minutes and quietly concludes that none of it applies. She is right. Her work is different in kind. She signs her name to a decision that carries regulatory and reputational consequences. 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 and risk, and she is interrupted forty times a day by people who need an answer now. A slide about prioritising your top three tasks does not survive contact with that reality.
So the legal team learns to opt out. Legal training becomes technical training only: the regulatory update, the new legislation, the case law. 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.
What the business pays for that gap
The gap is invisible in the training report and visible everywhere else. Work escalates to the same two or three senior people because juniors are corrected rather than coached to own their decisions. Redrafts and missed details cluster late in the day and late in the year. Responsiveness to the business starts to look like a boundary problem when it is an attention problem. A general counsel loses a good associate to a firm, and the exit interview says money.
None of these appear as training needs, because nobody has connected them 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. 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. When a session begins with what the brain is 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, the room stops assuming it is doing something wrong. Only then do the tools make sense.
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. 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.
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.
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 and the resignations. The training budget was there. The culture was there. The material was built for someone else.
PMRI trains only legal professionals. The programmes are developed jointly by a behavioural specialist and an advocate with 27 years in practice, and they start with a conversation about what your legal function is dealing with. There is no charge for that conversation.
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.