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How GCs can break the leadership bottleneck
As leadership bottlenecks present a significant challenge for law departments, one general counsel outlines practical steps that leaders can implement to effectively support the career advancement of senior lawyers seeking to progress in their roles.
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Speaking in an episode of The Corporate Counsel Show, Adrian Moffatt, the executive general manager and board member at Ausco Modular, discussed the challenges posed by leadership bottlenecks for senior legal counsel wanting to progress in their legal careers. He also shared insightful advice for general counsel on effectively navigating and overcoming this issue.
In the same episode, he shed light on the growing challenge facing senior in-house lawyers, who are increasingly finding their career progression stalled by the limited pathways to the general counsel role.
Moffatt has shared the concerns he regularly hears from senior legal counsel on his team regarding the impact of leadership bottlenecks – situations in which leaders inadvertently impede team progress.
He noted that such experiences are often described as “demotivating” and can leave individuals feeling “stuck” in their career paths.
When senior lawyers feel there is no clear pathway to advance their careers, Moffatt explained that this could lead them to choose between “sticking it out and hoping that someone moves on” or “looking for opportunities outside the company”.
This observation is not merely anecdotal; Moffatt referenced a recent Axiom report, which revealed that “57 per cent of in-house lawyers feel that they must change employers to advance in their career”.
With attracting and retaining strong talent being of utmost importance to a legal team’s success, he emphasised that addressing it requires a dual approach in “general counsel needing to step up, but legal counsel also needs to step up for their own career development”.
The significance of general counsel taking the initiative to tackle leadership bottlenecks comes with its own set of challenges. As Moffatt noted, many people are concerned that “if you start developing someone, [does this hold] a threat ... that they could take your role?”
For those general counsels who share this worry, Moffatt stressed the need to “show courage and step into that development role even though sometimes it’s uncomfortable to do so”.
Moffatt emphasised that the key to overcoming leadership bottlenecks and enabling senior lawyers to advance in their careers lies in “putting a plan in place”. However, he cautioned that implementing such a plan “is not going to happen overnight”.
While he acknowledged that such a plan could take “12 months, 18 months [or even] two years” to fully implement, Moffatt stressed that, as a general counsel, “if it can get optimal performance out of my senior legal counsel ... that is really good, rather than having them sit there demotivated and disengaged looking for another role”.
“[As] general counsel, we’ve got to normalise that career aspiration discussion with our teams because that’s what will drive your teams, that’s what will motivate them and make them high performers.
“If you’re engaged in their development and they can see that you’re helping them [with their] development, they’ll give back through performance and engagement,” he said.