General Counsel’s Role in Mitigating Organisational Burnout

Abstract

We continue to witness high levels of stress and burnout among in-house counsel and managers. General counsel (also called ‘lead in-house counsel’) can play a pivotal role in mitigating burnout by promoting what Amy Edmondson calls ‘psychological safety’ — a shared belief within a team that taking ‘interpersonal risk is safe’. We also discuss first author Pernille S. Pedersen’s work on the corrosive effects of shame. We then draw on the five elements of the dynamic capability the second author Constance E. Bagley defined as ‘legal astuteness’ and apply them to psychological safety. We conclude by explaining how the general counsel can orchestrate firm-specific training and other practices as part of the top management team’s and the board’s efforts to change the workplace from one where the employees are, in the words of Jeffrey Pfeffer, literally ‘dying for a paycheck’, to one where employees can thrive.