General Counsel’s Role in Mitigating Organisational Burnout

Constance E. Bagley, CEO, Founder, and General Counsel, Bagley Strategic Advisors LLC, USA

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.

Currently CEO, Founder, and General Counsel, Bagley Strategic Advisors LLC, and Visiting Professor of Law, Copenhagen Business School. Professor Bagley taught for multiple years in graduate and executive programs for managers, directors, and lawyers at Stanford, Harvard, and Yale universities. She is a popular public speaker and the author of multiple articles and books, including Winning Legally: How to Use the Law to Increase Value, Marshal Resources, and Manage Risk (Harvard Business Review Press), The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Law and Strategy, 5th ed. (co-authored with Craig E. Dauchy), and Managers and the Legal Environment: Strategies for Business, 10th ed.

Bagley Strategic Advisors is a boutique consultancy offering customized advice, master classes, workshops, and high level training for executives, including in-house counsel and board members. She has extensive experience teaching and preparing materials for in-house counsel, both in master classes for general counsel at firms like MassMutual, Microsoft, Prudential Financial, and CVS Health, and at the Practicing Law Institute’s Corporate Counsel Institute. She has coauthored multiple book chapters and articles with Mark Roellig, former General Counsel and Executive Vice President of MassMutual Financial, and coauthored a piece on compliance in the Harvard Business Review with Bruno Cova, former General Counsel of Fiat and Chief Counsel to the Administrator of Parmalat in the wake of its massive fraud.