#17 – Meta Matters – Learning to Learn

Part 2 – What Can In-House Lawyers Learn from the Woes of BoJo? And What Can They Learn from HM the Queen?

Jun 07, 2022

I mentioned in last week’s issue that I’d been laid low by a nasty bug.

In fact it was the first of two, I think,the second turning out to be my second bout of Covid. Fortunately very mild this time, for which I’m extremely grateful to the wonderful scientists who designed the vaccines.

So lots of rest, lots of fluids and lots of TV over the Platinum Jubilee weekend here in the UK, which ran from Thursday 2nd June to Sunday 5th June.

For those of you who didn’t know, this year marks the 70th (Platinum Jubilee) anniversary of the accession of HM Queen Elizabeth II; in 1952, aged 26, she became Queen, not just of the United Kingdom, but of Australian, Canada, New Zealand, and a host of other counties too.

What this has to do with in-house legal and leadership, I’m exploring in this issue of Practical Counsel - looking at what in-house lawyers can learn from the leadership of Queen Elizabeth. I’m also looking at what they can learn from the leadership styles of those who come, and go with greater frequency than royalty - our politicians.

No sooner had the weekend of Jubilee celebrations come to an end than Members of Parliament of the current governing party, the Conservative Party, finally broke ranks and challenged their current leader, the current Prime Minister (Queen Elizabeth’s 14th), Boris Johnson, aka BoJo.

BoJo has just about survived; for now, at least.

In this issue, I’ll be arguing that in-house lawyers can learn as much from observing the leadership style of a PM, as they can from observing the leadership style of a top GC, or a top CEO or COO.

No guest contributor this issue. Next issue there will be a guest contribution from Mark Schaub, London Managing Partner of King & Wood Mallesons. Mark, an Australian of German heritage, living between Shanghai and London, will bring an interesting cross-cultural perspective to this topic.

Enjoy reading, and please comment and contribute to the debate by posting direct on Practical Counsel. Also, please write in with your unique people issues to me (practicalcounsel@substack.com) - I unequivocally undertake never to reveal your identity and will change key details of your situation so as to preserve your confidentiality and anonymity (unless you don’t want this). I also undertake to write to you personally with my own thoughts and comments on your situation and am always happy to follow up with a call on Zoom or similar.

‘Dear Jonathan’ … and Jonathan’s Reply

Dear Jonathan,

Really interesting topic in issue #16, ‘Meta Matters - And We’re Not Talking Social Media’. I enjoyed the analysis of Martin Wilson very much.

I’m a GC in Norway, running a medium sized in-house team. I have 3 direct reports and a number of more junior lawyers in my team. I don’t have an obvious successor and I struggle to work out how best to develop leadership skills in my reports.

I was interested in Martin’s analysis. And I’d be interested in your thoughts as to how best to have my direct reports to develop their leadership skills.

Regards,

Marisa (she / her)

—

Jonathan’s Response

Dear Marisa

Thanks for your question.

What you describe – running an in-house team and struggling to develop the leadership skills of your potential successors – is very typical, in my experience.

I’m going to approach my answer to your question in a way that might seem somewhat random, by reference to events that have taken place over the last few days here in the UK. That might seem a strange lens, given that you are based in Norway, but please humour me for a few minutes. As I will seek to argue, we can learn so much by just observing what’s going on in the world around us, and you can stimulate growth in your reports by encouraging them to learn from a range of sources, rather than focusing narrowly and exclusively on what’s in front of their noses.

It’s been a remarkable few days here in the UK, and I say that as someone who has lived in the UK all my life and by now seen a lot of events that have already made it into the history books.

This past weekend (Thursday to Sunday) was a four-day celebration of the 70 year reign of Her Majesty the Queen, Queen Elizabeth II. It was a weekend marked by a weird and wonderful range of celebrations and commemorations, from a formal service of Thanksgiving in St Paul’s Cathedral attended by leaders of all religions and the so-called ‘great and the good’, through to a huge concert outside Buckingham Palace, and, on Sunday, a four hour pageant, which I can only describe as slightly eccentric, but diverse, eclectic and very special. I’m sure there are plenty of clips on You Tube for those who want to sample a flavor of these events.

No sooner had these events ended on Sunday afternoon than there was feverish speculation of a fresh threat to the leadership of our Prime Minister, Boris Johsnon, who has – as has been internationally reported – been under sustained attack in recent months for his handling of a number of issues, most persistently his handling of the so-called Partygate Affair, a series of events that took place in his official residence, Number 10 Downing Street, while London and the UK was in lockdown due to Covid.

Yesterday, BoJo’s own Members of Parliament (the 359 Conservative MPs, who are the largest bloc in the UK’s Lower House, the House of Commons) took part in a so-called vote of no confidence, a procedural mechanism that is available when 15% of Conservative MPs submit letters declaring that they lack confidence in their leader.

BoJo narrowly survived that vote, but over 40% of his MPs voted against his leadership, leaving him in a parlous position, which many commentators are saying he will not survive. I’m not a betting man but I just looked at the so-called betting odds on one website, and these are – ‘to NOT be Tory [Conservative] leader at the next General Election’ 1/2; ‘to be Tory leader at next General Election’ 30/17.

As I say, I’m not a betting person (I’ve never actually placed a bet in a commercial betting shop or online), but the way I read those odds, it isn’t looking good for Alexander Boris Pfeffel de Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and First Lord of Her Majesty’s Treasury. Several people have told me that if you want the best guide to what’s going to happen next, the betting odds rarely lie.

What on earth does this have to do with your question, Marisa? What do the goings on in the UK have to do with in-house leadership, and specifically how best to grow and develop leadership skills in the next generation of in-house leaders?

In his piece last week, Martin Wilson, Chief General Counsel of Phillips, argued that developing leadership skills requires practice, practice and more practice. He referenced the writing of Matthew Syed, who himself references the research that developing complex talent requires many thousands of hours of practice (10,000 plus hours to be precise).

Martin talked about the importance of instructional guidance – viewpoints and experiences offered by experienced practitioners and veterans, and learning specifically both from their successes and failures. He talked about the value of reading these viewpoints and experiences, or watching and listening to them.

This was of course music to my ears as the publisher and writer of a newsletter on leadership, management and relational skills.

My insight – or the insight I am seeking to articulate – is that the best leaders learn from everything going on around them, not just the formal instructional material, helpful as such material is, in my view.

What we have seen in recent months in the UK is a stark contrast between two styles of leadership. On the one hand we have the leadership of Her Majesty the Queen, which is a study in the exercise of self-restraint and what is nowadays called ‘soft power’ (defined by some as the ability to co-opt rather than coerce – “in other words shaping the preferences of others through appeal and attraction”)1.

It is a rule of the (unwritten) British constitution that the Monarch nowadays must not get involved in political or similar issues. His or her role is that of a constitutional monarch; all political power is vested in the UK’s political institutions, primarily the UK Parliament, the so-called ‘Mother of Parliaments’2.

So the Queen, by convention, says nothing controversial, does nothing controversial.

And yet, by an overwhelming margin, according to opinion polls, the people of the United Kingdom regard Her Majesty as a role model – and a model leader - who has projected and modeled clear values during her 70 years as Queen – values of public service, devotion to duty, fidelity, constancy and persistence.

How she has done this would be the subject of a whole other essay. The point is that an astute observer can study this remarkable woman’s leadership, and how she has projected clear and unambiguous leadership (not always, there have been slip-ups – she is after all, only human) for 70 years.

Contrast Her Majesty’s leadership with that of BoJo. It is said – including by his sister, Rachel, that BoJo declared as a young child that he wanted to be ‘world king’. I myself encountered him and observed him as President of the Oxford University Debating Society (the Oxford Union), when I was at University in the mid-1980s. He stood out as an unmistakable talent, with a shock of blond hair and an aura of self-assurance that I well remember, I then being a significantly less self-assured teenager.

BoJo has had all the gifts, many would say. The gift of intelligence (although many now believe his intelligence is somewhat less impressive than they once believed), the gift of good birth, the gift of a top education, the gift of patrician good looks, at least as a young man.

And yet. And yet.

Look where we are now. Just two years from having been elected as Prime Minister with a landslide majority, he is mired in a controversy from which he seems unable to escape. Barely 60% of his own Members of Parliament have confidence in him. He is vilified by many as the worst Prime Minister in their lifetimes. I regularly read the online Comments of the London Times newspaper (traditionally a Conservative leaning newspaper) and there is barely a positive voice in favour of Boris. He is regarded by many as a liar, someone who lacks constancy, a serial cheat, someone who flouts the rule of law, who thumbs his nose at international treaty obligations; someone in short who far from being a role model, is a pernicious narcissist.

Here too, I am not going to analyse the rights and wrongs of the current debate as to BoJo’s leadership. Here too, I make the point that an observer can learn so much about leadership by watching and listening, and attending to the commentators. I would make the same point, of course, about observing other leaders, be they political leaders, or leaders of industry or commerce or other fields of endeavour.

What I’m trying to do in Practical Counsel is to provide a range of rounded views and perspectives on leadership – and more generally on the leadership, management and relational skills that are key skills for the in-house lawyers who are going to make it into the so-called C Suite.

Sometimes what I write will seem, to some, random and unfocused. This is deliberate. My strong view is that many in-house lawyers (and many private practice lawyers, too, incidentally) are too narrowly focused. They are laser focused on their technical skills, sometimes sharply focused on the operational – more rarely, in my experience, having the breadth that the C Suite would actually like to see in their legal leaders.

That breadth is an ability to focus not just on the specifics of legal risk – but to take a broader view, to understand the commercial realities of the business, to set those commercial realities into a wider context, to be able to have intelligent conversations with senior C Suite leadership that transcend legal risk and add value to the enterprise above and beyond the legal core. The legal core is, of course, critical. But it should be a given. What lies beyond the legal core is the value add – and this is what the C Suite sees as gold dust, and why expansive but reliable GCs and CLOs are at such a premium.

I hope this goes some way to answering your question, Marisa. Not a complete answer, I know; but a helpful answer, nonetheless, I hope.

More of this – and more insights into what it takes to learn these skills – in the next issue of Practical Counsel, out later this week.

As always, I encourage members of the Practical Counsel community to write in to me at practicalcounsel@substack.com with your people problems and issues that are currently concerning you, or that come up for you regularly. And, as always, I will anonymise your observations / issues and preserve confidentiality and write to you individually in response to any scenario that I use in this newsletter.

Best wishes

Jonathan

This week’s key takeaways

1.     In last week’s issue, Martin Wilson, Chief General Counsel of Phillips, argued that the acquisition by in-house lawyers of leadership skills – like any other specialist talent – requires practice. He cited relatively well-known research that 10,000+ hours are required to acquire and refine these skills.
2.     Martin argued that senior in-house lawyers can learn from the successes and failure of other senior in-house lawyers. Also from instructional guidance, be that written or otherwise.
3.     In this week’s issue I reference current events in the UK – specifically the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee and the political woes of Prime Minister Boris Johnson - to argue that senior in-house lawyers can and should learn leadership lessons from as broad a canvas as possible, not just focusing on lessons learned from other senior in-house lawyers.
4.     More broadly, I argue that what makes the most valued senior in-house lawyers is an expansiveness of approach that goes well beyond being a mere guardian of legal risk for the corporation or enterprise.
5.     The most sophistical organisations look for their top in-house lawyers to operate at C Suite level. To be most highly valued, the GC or CLO and other top lawyers will have a similar basket of leadership skills to other members of the C Suite. Some of these skills and perspectives are way outside the traditional ‘comfort zone’ of the in-house lawyer.
6.     These skills and perspectivs will be explored in more detail in subsequent issues of Practical Counsel.

And now …….

Contribute to the debate and write in with your comments and observations. Also write to Jonathan with any other people issues you face as an in-house lawyer.

Jonathan can be reached by email at practicalcounsel@substack.com

A note for you picky lawyers; and a plea for tolerance

I am a British lawyer by background and went to both school and University in the UK. So my English is British English. I have taken a conscious decision to write this newsletter in British English, but to try to avoid phrases that aren’t common outside the UK. Sometimes, though, I’ll use a phrase that isn’t commonly used outside the UK, without realising that it is a Britishism. I also endeavour to use the vernacular spellings of my contributors (e.g. to use US spellings for a US contributor), but won’t always get this right.

My plea is for you to tolerate the British spellings and grammar and the occasional Britishism. And to focus on the substance of the newsletter rather than the occasional (to you) annoying turn of phrase, bit of grammar or unorthodox spelling, or the occasional inconsistency in spelling as between, for example, UK and US ‘standard’ spellings.

Thank you and best wishes,

Jonathan Middleburgh

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