Starting a new job or joining a new company is exciting—but too often, leaders fail to plan. In this episode, Michael D. Watkins, author of the international bestselling book “The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting up to Speed Faster and Smarter,” shares his advice on how lawyers can successfully navigate job transitions. We talk about how to “negotiate success” with your boss, why it’s most important to learn and connect in the initial months in a role and how to build a relationship with a new CEO. As an added bonus, Michael also shares his thoughts about artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential and perils for our culture and how lawyers can help companies navigate ethical use of this transformational technology.
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Listen to the podcast here
About Michael Watkins
Michael D. Watkins is Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change. He is a globally recognized leadership transitions expert and author of the best-selling book The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter. A Thinkers50-ranked management influencer, Watkins has developed proven frameworks and tools to help professionals navigate personal and organizational change challenges.
He has spent the past two decades working with leaders as they transition to new roles, build their teams, and transform their organizations. In 2023, Watkins was inducted into the Thinkers50 Management Hall of Fame, which recognizes remarkable contributions to the realm of management concepts and ideas spanning many years.
The First 90 Days has become the classic reference for leaders in transition, and an authoritative resource on leading change. It has sold more than 1.5 million copies and been translated into 23 different languages. The Economist described it as “the onboarding bible,” while 800-CEO-Read (now Porchlight) called it one of the best 100 business books of all time. Amazon included it on its list of 100 leadership and success books to read in a lifetime.
Even the best-prepared leaders find the transition to CEO to be the most challenging in their professional careers. The stakes are high, and the uncertainties are great. All eyes are on you, but you may have few people who can act as trusted advisors.
The book, first published in 2003, outlines basic principles to help leaders transition quickly and efficiently to new professional roles. It identifies the most common traps into which new leaders fall and provides the tools and strategies to avoid them.
It was followed in 2009 by Your Next Move: The Leader’s Guide to Managing Critical Career Transitions, which offers additional guidance on how to apply the framework in different contexts and more turbulent times, exploring eight crucial transitions virtually everyone encounters during their career. Both books have since been updated and expanded, most recently with the 2019 publication of Master Your Next Move: The Essential Companion to The First 90 Days.
Over the past 20 years, Watkins has used his First 90 Days® methodology to help leaders make successful transitions, both in his teaching at IMD, INSEAD, and Harvard Business School, as well as through his private consultancy practice Genesis Advisors, which he co-founded.
Watkins has authored 15 books on leadership and negotiation and hundreds of articles for leading business journals. His work features in Harvard Business Review’s HBR Guides and 10 Must Reads series on leadership, teams, strategic initiatives, and new managers, and his article The future of team leadership is multimodal, co-authored with Robert Hooijberg, was the most-read piece of 2021 in MIT Sloan Management Review.
Predictable Surprises: The Disasters You Should Have Seen Coming, and How to Prevent Them was named one of the best business books of 2004 by strategy+business and won the 2006 annual Kulp-Wright Award from The American Risk and Insurance Association.
Two of his books on negotiation – Breakthrough International Negotiation: How Great Negotiators Transformed the World’s Toughest Post-Cold War Conflicts and Breakthrough Business Negotiation: A Toolbox for Managers – won the CPR Institute’s prize for best books in the field of negotiation in 2001 and 2003. His 2024 book, The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking, explores how executives can learn to think strategically and lead their organizations into the future.
At IMD, he directs the First 90 Days open program for leaders taking on challenging new roles and co-directs the Transition to Business Leadership (TBL) executive program for future enterprise leaders.
Before joining IMD in 2007, Watkins was an Adjunct Professor at INSEAD and Associate Professor at Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. While on the faculty of these institutions, he designed and taught world-class programs for high-potential leader development, corporate diplomacy, and strategic negotiation.
Originally from Canada, he studied electrical engineering at the University of Waterloo and business and law at Western University, before earning a PhD in decision sciences at Harvard University.
Transcript
I’m Michael Watkins. I’m a professor of leadership at the IMD Business School and Co-founder of Genesis Advisers. My fun fact is that, for the first time in 40 years, I have a new puppy.
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On this episode of The Legal Department, I’m excited to welcome Michael Watkins. He’s a professor at IMD, Co-founder of Genesis Advisers, and author of The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter, which has been described as the onboarding Bible and a book I used when I started my new role as general counsel. Michael, how are you?
I’m great. Delighted to be with you. Looking forward to the conversation. As I told you before we started, it’s going to be very interesting for me to see how transitions and lawyers connect with each other. Very much looking forward to it.
Me too. As we talked about before, lawyers, there are not a lot of professional development resources for lawyers, and transitions affect us just like they do any other executive or person moving into new or different roles. As I mentioned, a good friend of mine sent me your book as I started this new role. When I was preparing for our conversation, I went through, and I had underlined, and filled in some of the charts and exercises.
It was a really great way to remember why it’s such a great resource. Before we dig into the nitty gritty, it was published first in 2003. You’ve spent more than twenty years talking about it. It’s still an area of interest. I’m really curious about why you stumbled on it as an area of interest and how it’s kept your attention for so long.
The First 90 Days
It’s a great question, and I’m going to give you two answers to the question, Stacy. The first is what I thought the answer was for a long time. What I thought was the answer was that I got interested in the subject when I was teaching at Harvard and actually, ironically, at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. In those days, I was teaching negotiation and diplomacy. Primarily, I had done a PhD in negotiation and game theory. I was very interested in international diplomacy. I was writing extensively about it. I actually wrote five books on various aspects of international diplomacy, crisis diplomacy, and trade negotiation.
I started teaching a course jointly with someone at the business school related to organizational change through a political lens. We invited a guy to come to the program to talk. He was a coach who worked mostly with senior leaders in transition. I thought that was really interesting. There was this immediate attraction to the topic, which I didn’t fully understand at the time. We started talking, and eventually, we did some research together. We wrote a book before The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter that was published called Right from the Start: Taking Charge in a New Leadership Role back in 1999.
The book did, I think, reasonably well, but was a more academic book. That launched me down the road of focusing on transitions and eventually to work I did with Johnson & Johnson around helping their executives take charge and do leadership roles. That ultimately became The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter. Until probably a few years ago, that’s the story I would have told about how I got interested, but a very logical kind of “I started here, I ended up there” story. I got thinking about it. Actually, it was my wife who triggered the thought for me. When I was a kid, I moved every year between the ages of 3 and 11. I was in eight different public schools, almost always in different cities.
My early life was very much about moving from place to place, going to new places, having to transition into new places, figure out your place, get early wins, build alliances. Later, thinking about that, I realized that that was at the base of this profound interest in the subject because I lived it and suffered through it in many ways. I think that a deeper psychological connection to the topic is part of what’s kept me interested through all these years. I get a lot of pleasure out of helping people make successful transitions.
I think I’ve got some personal connection to it, I guess is what I would say, because I know what it means to do it and how hard it can be, to be the new kid, to be trying to figure out how to establish yourself. There are other funny connections here. One of my input strategies was I was usually the smartest kid in the class. Arriving was not necessarily welcome by others, as you might imagine, but I adopted this approach of starting to help the weaker kids by teaching them, essentially. I started to adopt this almost teaching MO. That’s core to who I am. An educator is fundamentally how I see myself. That’s some of the early connections.
Why a sustained interest in it? I think it’s a very rich subject, and there’s no shortage of things to look at. When you look at transitions, there are all kinds of dimensions. I coach senior leaders. I’m always learning new things. They’re always grappling with new things. The world is changing all the time. We talked briefly before we started about AI and technology, and the turbulence we’re seeing in the world. In the last ten years, I’ve probably written 50 articles on different dimensions of transition. My knowledge deepens over time, too, about the subject. I’ll give you a simple example. In the original edition of The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter, which was 2003, there was almost nothing about preparing yourself before you got into the job.
When I did the second edition of the book in 2013, there was a little bit of that. Since that time, how have you arrived well? How do you show up well in a new role? How do you begin to communicate a message when you’re taking a new job? What about your leadership presence? What about your energy as you go through transitions? There continue to be lots of interesting things. I’m in the process of writing the third edition of the book, which is proving to be challenging, actually. Challenging, maybe not for the reasons everybody would expect. It’s more, “I’ve got so much, how do I not make this too complicated?” How do I not ruin this little jewel by restuffing it with all the stuff I’ve learned since?” Anyway, that’s the combination of things. I think a natural connection to the topic, the world changing in interesting ways, and my learning about the subject deepening. That’s what has served my interest over time.
You didn’t ask for my advice, but in writing the next edition, what is so great about this, and there’s a ton of business books, there’s a ton of leadership books, is one of the things I liked about it was it’s simple and elegant and very clear. I love how the chapters start with an example. You can see yourself in whoever is stumbling into their next role or next company, and then you have practical things that you can do. It’s not just theory. It’s like, let’s get out our pen and paper and figure out how you’re going to do this. If you’re going to stuff it with more of that, please do.
Although you’ve got to be careful. My father, who was a very funny guy, used to say there are only two kinds of people in the world, complexifiers and simplifiers. The book, I think, is fairly elegant and fairly simple, but I am, by nature, a complexifier. I just have to be careful, right?
No, you need a good editor.
That’s what I’ve got. We’re working with exactly. So, no, but good.
Something you said in terms of your own early childhood as the new kid always, and noting that you were often the smartest kid in the class, I don’t want to overstep here, but that can be what it feels like as a lawyer moving into a new role, a new company. I don’t know if you spend any time around law schools, but it’s all handraisers. It’s all the kids that were in class, always calling on me. They’re all, you have a whole field of them.
Hermione Grangers.
There you go. That’s exactly it. It can be challenging, especially because, as I said before, there’s not a lot of professional development tailored to lawyers. When we get into a new role or get into a new place, we think our job is to be the best and to help and be the smartest and solve the problems, and not everyone likes that. No one wants a know-it-all.
There’s probably a bit of almost a reflexive tension about, “That’s the lawyer,” right?
For sure.
A couple of smaller, really delicate, small details. I actually did a year of law school years ago. I enrolled in an MBA, I’m Canadian originally, MBA at what’s called in Canada the LLB, it’s basically a JD program. I did the first year of business school, and I did the first year of law school. I transferred from there to Harvard to do my PhD. The year of law school, I have never regretted doing because I learned some very important things about legal mindset and legal reasoning. There were dimensions of the law I absolutely loved. I loved contract law. I loved jurisprudence. I loved the legal philosophy side.
I didn’t like criminal law very much at all. The more code-based stuff didn’t resonate with me too much. I concluded at the end of that year that I was not destined to be a lawyer. I didn’t have the right mind, fundamentally, to be a lawyer, but I learned a lot, and I certainly have never regretted it. When I was teaching at HBS, I had a colleague, Constance Bagley, who was teaching business law at the business school. She wrote a book called Winning Legally: How Managers Can Use the Law to Create Value, Marshal Resources, and Manage Risk. Her basic premise, which I thought was fascinating, was that the very best lawyers are the ones who are enablers of the business and not the naysayers.
The very best lawyers are the ones that are enablers of the business and not the naysayers. Share on XSometimes you have to hold the line. There’s no question we’re not going to go there, that’s going to just get us into trouble. But I think that orientation to value creation for the best lawyers is something that I took away from the discussions I had with her, and it stuck with me, that your role is not just to say no, your role is also to figure out how to say yes. Does that make sense?
That is the core. I just did an episode with Kate Dugan, the general counsel of Energizer, and her tagline is, “Don’t say no, ask how.”
To your point, I get that it can be a little bit tough.
Because you’re trained and you got to peek into it. You’re trained to know who’s going to get called on and who’s right. What advice, drawing from your work, do you have for folks who are hardwired to be the smartest in the class?
I think it’s going to sound very simple, but you’ve just got to curb your enthusiasm and curb your ego as you’re coming in. Just ask lots of questions, and I wouldn’t say be humble but don’t project arrogance in the midst of it. I think that assuming you’ve got things to learn is essential. When I talk about transitions, I would say that the foundation of every successful transition is learning and connecting. It’s not deciding and acting. If you’re the basis, the fundamentals of what you need to do early are mostly about learning and connecting.
Eventually, you can transition into deciding and acting and beginning to do things. That tendency to come in and want to show you’re the smartest person in the room, or show you’ve got the answer, or demonstrate that you’re going to add value, is often highly counterproductive, not just for lawyers, but for anybody. I talk sometimes about the big traps that people fall into in transition, Stacy. The first one is sticking with what you know, by which I mean assuming that what made you successful in previous roles is going to make you successful in the new role. When, in reality, what got you there typically won’t get you here.
There’s always an adaptive challenge that you have. The other one is what I call the action imperative, the feeling that you need to prove that you belong there and maybe start to take action or make decisions before you actually really need to. That can be very dangerous.
Job Transitions
A couple of things I want to pick up on there. First is especially, and maybe we should frame because there are different types of transitions, but getting to a new company. I just remember going through an interview process, and people are telling you what they want this role to do. I felt, at least, like, “This is my to-do list. These are my goals. I’ve interviewed all these people, and they’ve told me they want a lawyer to do X, Y, and Z. I’m going to show up with my backpack on day one of school, get the to-do list, and start crossing things off.”
Which is a really dangerous way to proceed for a few reasons. I think one is they don’t necessarily know exactly what they want when you arrive, and they don’t necessarily recognize that you’ve got a learning curve to climb before you can deliver value. You’ve got to be very careful about setting expectations. I always tell the folks I coach, negotiate the process of engagement. Negotiate what’s going to happen. You’re going to spend a certain amount of time focusing on the learning piece and getting deeply immersed in the business. Then, you’re going to start to do things. That chapter in the book about negotiating success is, I think, particularly critical.
That one’s underlined a lot, and I want to get into that a little bit later.
That would be awesome. The other piece of it too is that, and again, my little jokes about these things, joining a new organization is hard, in part because recruiting is like romance and employment is like marriage. During the recruiting process, I’ve got my best suit on, you look great, I’ll always do the dishes, and I like your mom, all the stuff that goes. Then there’s the cold, harsh light of cohabitation.
Joining a new organization is hard in part because recruiting is like romance and employment is like marriage. Share on XYou’ve got to live with each other, and that’s different. I always, again, tell the folks I coach about this who are joining organizations, once you’re in the role, be sure to check, recheck, and re-recheck what you’re there to do, what your mandate is, what your scope of action is, and who needs to be supportive of what you’re doing. Because what you learn during the recruiting process is not necessarily the full truth and may not even be all true in terms of what you’ve learned.
Or they may change their mind. They’ve set out what they think are the organizational goals or what they think the new position is going to do, and then they change their mind and maybe they don’t even tell you.
Maybe they don’t tell you, which is why, again, it’s so hard to check or recheck. Sometimes they don’t even know because they don’t fully know the situation you’re going into and may have misconceptions about the situation that you’re in. Also, there may be multiple stakeholders, stakeholders that you didn’t necessarily really connect to during the recruiting process that turn out to be extremely important. You’ve got to then figure out how to integrate those needs.
I know, curb your enthusiasm and resist the action imperative. I think you’ve got some good suggestions for helping folks come up with a learning plan, which I think is a way to channel your energy around action.
I think that the word energy is very important. In addition to the work I do with The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter, I also teach executive programs at IMD, senior leadership programs, and more and more, I organize the work I do around leadership in terms of energy. It’s fundamentally about how you mobilize, focus, and sustain the energy of the organization, but also how you mobilize, focus, and sustain your own energy.
To your point, you can direct that energy early into being very thoughtful, focused, and disciplined about the learning and connecting process. If that helps you reduce the anxiety levels of feeling like you’re not doing anything, great. That’s fantastic because it’s just so critical.
Before we got on, we were talking a little bit about my transition and a colleague. I was at my old organization for fifteen years. I said I knew every closet, I knew who did what, I knew who to call. When I joined my new company, a colleague said to me, it was a generous comment, he said, don’t be too hard on yourself, you’re going to feel dumb for a while.
I was like, at the time, what are you talking about? Don’t you know, I’ve been doing this thing for a while? He was absolutely right. Even though I had technical expertise and I had this other experience, I didn’t know where the bodies were buried. I didn’t know who to call. It was that advice about really taking the time to learn, listen, and connect that is crucial.
I think that it connects nicely to something talked about a lot, which is the idea of robust vulnerability. You are vulnerable when you’re taking a new job. You don’t know everything. You sometimes don’t even know what you don’t know. Sometimes there are those hidden landmines that are there. That’s the vulnerability part. The robust part is confidence. You’re going to figure it out. You’re going to figure it out. Maybe I wouldn’t necessarily express it as you’re going to feel dumb for a while.
You’re going to feel like you don’t have the full picture for a while. You’re going to feel like there may be some vulnerabilities you’re not aware of. You may feel a little insecure sometimes about what’s going on, but just have confidence that fundamentally you’re going to figure it out. As long as you’re thoughtful and organized about what you’re doing, it’s going to be okay. Uncomfortable, for sure. Especially if you have high control needs or high standards, unrelenting standards for yourself, it can be super hard.
You were in that law school class, you saw that’s who we are. Back on the action imperative, because this is, again, thinking about lawyers, and I think, unlike certain other roles, we might have things, even in your first week, that are like a crisis, a new lawsuit hits your desk, a scandal, we’ve got to terminate the executive, and you are where people come. If you haven’t had the time to build those connections or learn about the business, you’re flat-footed, but you don’t have the luxury of saying, like, let me just deal with that a day, six months from now.
My reaction to that is wonderful. That’s fantastic because that’s an opportunity. Let me explain why it’s good. I think that it’s an opportunity to immediately connect with people around an important issue, and immediately show that you’ve got some value to add to the process. When I advise people, again, about transitions, I’m always saying anything in your organization that is in turnaround is an opportunity to get an early win. You can go in there, you can begin to get into problem-solving mode, and you can add value precisely because there is a crisis going on. That assumes you’re good at dealing with those things.
Don’t stumble because getting early losses is worse than, you know. It’s the flip side. We know that if you get early wins, it creates momentum, it builds your credibility, but early losses can be devastating. If you have something like that and you offer bad advice, and the whole thing blows up and a huge settlement or judgment is rendered against your organization, that’s probably not a good thing. The flip side is if you’ve got an immediate opportunity to connect with people, and begin to show you add value with the advice you’re getting, that’s an opportunity. Exhausting. Don’t get me wrong. It’s exhausting, and you may need to put out a lot of energy to make it happen.
I’d say I think you still need to bring that curiosity to those situations, even if it is something that’s in your wheelhouse and you have an idea about how to handle it or it’s in your technical area of expertise. I think you described the transition. I love this. Joining a new organization is like an organ transplant and you’re the organ.
It’s so good. Also recognizing when it isn’t in your wheelhouse and maybe needing to pull in other expertise. Also, I think to your point, Stacy, these things can also be a great opportunity to learn about the organization, the other key people in the organization, the culture, and the way things work in the organization. If you’re able to have at least part of your brain focused on, what am I learning here? Being a bit reflective about the experience and not just getting totally immersed in the crisis management. I think that’s an opportunity too, potentially.
You had another phrase that I like called work avoidance, that you can keep your head down in your desk too much early on and not spend enough time out and curious and connecting.
That term was coined by a guy named Ronald Heifetz, who was a colleague of mine at the Kennedy School of Government, and he was a psychotherapist who did work on leadership. He pointed out the tendency we have to avoid the hard stuff sometimes. It’s understandable when you’re under pressure and you’re feeling a bit insecure. It’s easy to try to push it away a little bit for sure.
Hidden Transitions
There’s another concept. I know there are many different types of transitions, and one that you wrote about, which is particularly, I think, applicable to in-house counsel, is what you call hidden transitions. It’s when you get new responsibilities, new duties, new direct reports, but it’s not necessarily a promotion. You’re not moving anywhere.
You’re not necessarily getting compensated for it happening. I think that the issue there is that those sometimes are the hardest transitions of all, in part because people aren’t recognizing that you’re going through a transition and maybe you’re not really framing it as a transition. The hidden part is both hidden from others, but maybe also hidden from yourself at some level, and anytime something like that happens, when there’s a major shift in responsibilities or the team, my advice always is to treat it like you’ve got a new job. Imagine you’ve got a new job. What would you be doing if you were just coming into the situation?
That usually means going back to the learning and connecting piece to a degree and not just plowing forward, continuing to do what you’re doing. It also means stepping back and asking about the overall way you’re organizing work and connecting. Because if you’ve been just given three more people, each with their own caseloads, you’re unlikely to be able to continue to lead the organization the way you did before. By the way, I expect there’s a pretty big difference between you being there as an individual contributor, focusing on a certain set of issues, as opposed to you being there as the leader of a group of lawyers within the context of New York. There’s got to be a very big difference between those.
I want to give just an example of one of these situations. I was with a new friend who was the chief legal officer of a big company, and they added HR to her portfolio. They added government affairs under her portfolio, internal communication, all these things that aren’t really in the traditional legal wheelhouse.
Many times, lawyers get risk management, claims, compliance, and those sorts of things. But as you get further afield, further out from those core legal responsibilities, it feels harder almost to get up to speed. It feels like really a situation that could be really tragic. You could make a bad footfall there and not realize it.
This is a variation of a more general type of transition, which is a specialist-to-generalist transition, as I call it. What it means is you’re no longer leading people who know a whole lot about what they do. They know more about what they do than you do. The way you lead needs to change fairly dramatically when that happens. First of all, you need to understand enough about those domains to be conversant to a degree, but then it becomes critical to get the right people leading those parts of the organization. It’s absolutely essential that you do that.
I do see examples, by the way, where legal has got HR. The risk there is that HR then gets run like part of the legal department. It becomes a legalistic function as opposed to the other parts of it that are so critical, like talent management, succession planning, and all the other stuff. I think you’ve got to be careful when that happens, not to define the new function through the lens of what you know how to do. It’s back to that danger of what got you here won’t get you there. I just wrote an article about cross-functional leadership, which is a related topic. The basic idea of the article is that cross-functional leadership is a lot like cross-cultural leadership.
Each of those functions, like HR or IT sometimes, has its own subcultures. You need to understand those subcultures to a sufficient degree to be able to lead them effectively. Do you need to be an expert in HR? No, right? But you need to understand enough about HR to be conversant about what’s going on in the function, understand the function as a whole, and know how to recruit people who can lead that function for you effectively. By the way, in a version of this that I was involved in, I’ve been coaching the chief communications and policy officer for a global pharmaceutical company, an amazing leader.
She’d come in from another pharma company where she’d basically been doing the communications piece and not the policy piece. She was completely all over the communications piece, she professionalized, and she got a great team, but with the policy side, that was brand new for her. She had never really touched it. We had these conversations about how she was going to orient herself to that piece. Step one was making sure it was being led effectively. Because if it wasn’t being led effectively, that takes you down a whole different road. If it is being led effectively, then you can afford to take some time to learn about that function.
She spent close to a year, and at the end of that year was very deeply knowledgeable about the policy side of the business and could begin to think about how to reshape that part of the organization in ways that she thought made sense. It’s an interesting transition, and I wouldn’t call it exactly a hidden transition, but it’s a challenging one. You’re asked to take on an entirely different function, almost as a big change.
It is a big change, and many of us who are in what I call the big chair, the general counsel or chief legal officer role, you have a lot of confidence because you’ve succeeded up to this point. You have been given the responsibility, and it’s almost flattering to say, she’s great, we can give her these other things.
Pile it on.
I’m telling you, lawyers are an interesting breed. You’re not going to shirk away from work or challenge, but I have very rarely seen organizations recognize that we need support. It’s an onboarding, essentially. I have rarely seen organizations devote resources to helping folks be successful like that.
You’ve got to hope that the people you’re inheriting are reasonably good at what they do. That you can trust them to be doing what they’re doing, or you’ve got a very big challenge. I’ve got another question for you, actually, about legal transitions too, or maybe legal. That transition from being an individual contributor to leading a group of lawyers has got to be a really hard transition at some level.
Especially if you’re still carrying your own individual load at the same time, it may be different. I’ve seen this in law firms, Stacy. Also, I’ve seen it in other professional service contexts where you’re expected to be a player-coach almost. You’re carrying your own clients, but you’re also leading a group of others. Does that make sense? Is that what happens?
I did an episode with an executive coach where we talked about it. To the point, lawyers are very well trained in being lawyers, being technical, issue spotting, and trying to help you mitigate risk. We are not good managers by and large. If you have been somebody who has been a line lawyer, associate GC, and maybe not had any direct reports, and then, because you’ve been so great at that, you’re over a team, you’re not prepared for that unless you’ve done some of your own work. It’s definitely an area.
I would guess that’s a really big transition the first time it happens, and maybe one where people struggle to do it. I think you’re not the only profession in which those kinds of transitions happen. You and I have a mutual friend who’s in healthcare and two physician leaders with very similar problems. You’ve got these people who are amazing clinicians, and amazing researchers, but not necessarily at all effective in leading. In fact, often coming out of situations where they have a lot of authority, they’re giving the orders in the operating room and then find that doesn’t work so well.
That’s a great observation, the authority. I’d say you have a little bit of that as a lawyer, especially if you come from a law firm, and you’re more like calling the plays on the legal strategy. But yes, having to move from an “I know the answer, I’m in charge” to “I’ve got to influence others to come along with me.” I can’t just wag my finger and make it happen.
That’s a big shift. That authority-to-influence shift is a big shift. That also connects to some of what’s in the book around building alliances. It’s not necessarily a reflex on the part of some people to understand stakeholders and understand they need to build alliances to be successful in these situations, because they haven’t had to right up to that point. They’ve been able to rely on expertise as a source of power and authority as a source of power. All of a sudden, you’re in a situation where those are not irrelevant, but they’re not as important as they were.
Even again, talking about different kinds of transitions, going on to an executive team, and being the general counsel or chief legal officer. If you’re going to be great at it, you’ve both got to be great at that role, but you’ve also got to be great at being an enterprise leader. You’ve got to be great at thinking about the organization as a whole, and you’ve got to hopefully be contributing to the larger strategy of the organization. That, again, is a very large transition.
Because you can be super good at leading the function, but not be effective at the level of the executive team and really making things happen. It’s the two-hats problem, learning to both be there wearing the legal functional hat and also being there as an enterprise leader.
That is absolutely a challenge. I actually had a friend who was a general counsel, and they went back to a law firm because they told me, “I’m great at being a lawyer. I’m not great at being an executive.”
This also gets us, by the way, into interesting territory too. Because, again, the analogy to physician leaders, and I do a fair amount of work with R&D leaders in pharma, for example. It’s a very similar thing. You get these people who’ve got the biggest brains on the planet. I do a program at IMD for tenured professors in Swiss R&D institutes, they’re as smart as they come. But no one ever told them when they started their PhDs, “By the way, you need to be a leader, because you’re going to be leading research teams, you’re going to be leading research groups.” In this program, I often describe them as accidental leaders. It wasn’t really what they signed up for, and it’s not at some level what they enjoy doing.
They probably think it’s a hassle.
It creates a vulnerability, but the good ones get it. The good ones who have the impact they want to have get that they have to step up to be leaders. But it’s a struggle, often initially, for them to do that. Also, how do you assess whether someone who’s a good lawyer is going to be a good legal manager? To your point, how do you develop someone? I would say the same thing about physician leaders. I would say the same thing about R&D leaders. How do you not just assess them, but how do you develop them to be effective? Because there’s not much often given to make that happen.
CEO Transition
Again, back to why I started this podcast is to at least have resources for people who want to develop. I think it doesn’t take too long when you make a transition to realize you don’t have the tools to do it right. I’m excited to share your work and your thought leadership with the legal audience.
One other transition, which I don’t think is in the book, but happens quite a bit, is a CEO or big leadership transition. That’s not one that you are taking on, it’s something that kind of happens to you. I wonder if we could talk a little bit about if you had advice on how should lawyers onboard, or how should we approach a CEO transition.
I was just taking a note because I think it’s a really interesting point. I actually was asked to write an article about transitions from the point of view of the team that’s getting the new leader, which is the more general example of what you’re talking about. CEO transitions, they’re huge, they’re seismic examples of that. They are. It’s the new regime, it’s the new coming in place. It’s typically a very consequential process when it happens. Versions of that also happen, Stacy, at all levels.
Where, congratulations, you’ve been part of a team, and that team has a new leader, and you’ve got to figure out how to position yourself relative to that particular process. Knowing that the leader is coming in with a sharp eye on assessing the team, deciding whether it’s the team that he or she wants it to be, probably making changes to the team. How do you position yourself in a situation like that? Is that what you’re getting at?
Yeah.
I actually have what I think will sound like ridiculously simple advice for that. It boils down to doing your job. Do your job. Keep doing your job. Don’t try to position yourself. Be helpful in the process. Be thoughtful in the process. Be confident in your abilities, but do the job. Because most people coming into those roles very quickly see through the people who are trying to position themselves. It doesn’t serve you generally to do that. You don’t want to be disappearing either.
You want to be present. You want to be suitably supportive of what’s happening. As a general counsel, you’re going to play an critical role in helping brief the new CEO about the range of challenges on the legal side and otherwise that the firm is facing. Being an enthusiastic part of that onboarding process is absolutely something you should be doing. Providing the very best information to that new CEO, probably even before they’re on board. The other piece, I think, is how do you, I suspect it’s not my world, Stacy, but I suspect that the best general counsels serve as trusted advisors to the CEO.
The best General Counsels serve as trusted advisors to the CEO. Share on XHow do you position yourself to be seen as a trusted advisor to that CEO? I’m assuming you had that relationship with the previous CEO. You have some idea of what it means to be a trusted advisor. Of course, you do, given what you do. That’s the kind of thing I would be focusing on early on. Does that make sense to you?
Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been through actually a lot of CEO transitions in my travels. You’re exactly right. It is, you want to be steady. You don’t want to be seen as a brown-noser, but you want to be helpful. Hopefully, if you’ve been around for a while, help them, guide them through things that you know.
I think, again, the CEOs I work with, often the general counsel, the CFO, and the CHRO are the absolute core set of advisors on legal issues, money, and people. You should be part of the core. You absolutely should be part of the core of the organization, but how you position yourself to do that, I think there’s a lot, obviously, to making that happen.
AI
We could talk a lot. There’s so much in the book. I want to, again, encourage people to check it out, because although there is a lot forthcoming at some point, there’s just a lot of really tangible, practical advice in there. I did want to just noodle a little bit with you about AI, because you’ve written a lot about it, both cautionary and, I would say, hopeful and practical about what it can do for us. As we talked about before, in-house lawyers are in an interesting position, where we are many times seen as the guardrails for the organization.
As you should be, Stacy, because the organization needs guardrails around AI. I wouldn’t diminish in any sense the criticality of that role, because there are so many ways we’ve seen great examples of the ways that businesses can go badly wrong with AI. People dump incredibly precious IP into these learning models, not realizing they just compromised the integrity of the IP, or they program a chatbot that makes promises to customers that are probably costly to the company, or Canada was that.
Or swears at the customers. That’s nice too.
Or it goes off on some tangents, but keep going. First of all, I think I recommend everyone get out in front of AI. My stepdaughter is at Cambridge studying law, in her third year. Fortunately, with a placement already with a London-based law firm, the future for young lawyers with AI is going to change so much. Because these systems are going to deliver a lot of what junior associates and paralegals do. What are the implications of that just for the profession?
There’s the whole piece about what you do as the chief legal officer or general counsel to help your organization grapple with the realities of AI when it’s going to be so transformational. I absolutely mean it when I say that it’s going to be completely transformational. We are literally on just the leading edge of what I think is going to be a profound transformation, not just in business, but in society, economies, the whole deal. I’m always saying to people, it’s a tsunami, learn to surf here, or you’re going to drown. Tell me more about what interests you about it.
One of the challenges, and there’s definitely a transition approach here, is a transition lens to bring to this question, but I would just say that lawyers don’t want to be the department of no. Everybody is so excited about this lightning-in-a-bottle technology, but we need to ask certain questions. We need to make sure we’re not giving away the family jewels and we are not alienating our customers. For me, I deal in the area of personally identifiable health information, PHI. I don’t want that anywhere. We live in a world of risk and protection. Those two things, exuberance, and enthusiasm for technology and risk mitigation, are often on a collision course.
I think, how do you manage those trade-offs? Because I can tell you too, that it’s not a good idea if the organization is not actively experimenting with AI. There are profound competitive disadvantages to it, but also, to your point, there need to be those guardrails, there need to be those controls. Privacy, obviously, is a big issue. Risk management. If you’re going to start having AI-based systems make diagnoses, that’s a really big deal, and keeping humans in the loop. How long do you keep humans in the loop when the machines are doing a better job than any human can do?
It's not a good idea if the organization is not actively experimenting with AI. Share on XWhich is, I know you know, beginning already to be very close to happening. You look at radiology, and there are more and more studies that show AI systems consistently outperform basically all but the very pinnacle of radiologists. What do we do with that? I don’t personally feel comfortable yet getting into an airplane with no pilot up front. How comfortable are we getting a diagnosis that’s purely machine-based about something that could really be life-and-death oriented? I think there’s just so many profound questions.
I think it goes back to your earlier advice about learning and connection, being curious, and learning about the technology. I was chatting with another GEC colleague about how gen AI and machine learning are different. Lawyers need to learn a little bit about the technology before we can really help you develop a risk management approach.
Actually, I’ll send you something about this. I just gave a keynote in Las Vegas last week, and I’m still a little jet-lagged from that, because I live in Zurich, about exactly this. About the difference between analytical, machine-based AI and generative AI, and just how different they are. To put it really simply, analytical AI, which is machine learning plus some other stuff, analyzes, and generative AI generates. In that difference is a profound set of implications for what happens.
I appreciate the encouragement to experiment. I also appreciate your willingness to speak up and say, be careful here. It’s not magic.
I would love to see a world in which the only people controlling the development of this profoundly important technology are more than just tech CEOs. We need governance, we need guidance, we need judgment. We don’t need people who are evangelists and stand to benefit profoundly being the sole drivers of what is going to change our world.
Well said. On a lighter note, I ask all guests the same final question. I’ve used music my whole life to change my mood and help me get pumped up. I can think back to the songs that I listened to going, driving into my first day of work. What is your pump-up song?
I gave this little thought because there are actually multiple answers from multiple different genres and time periods of music to the question, but if I go back to my absolute roots, it’s Led Zeppelin and it’s Kashmir, and if you know the song, it’s got this incredible driving rhythm. I seriously often listen to it before I’m about to go on stage to do a major presentation because it always just really, really pumps me up.
That’s the perfect way to end the conversation. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.
A pleasure to be here. Thank you.
