How in-house leaders can resolve challenges and create workplace transformation

What does it mean to be a legal leader in today's workplace? Mark Smith, Director of Strategic Markets at UU��ֱ��, explains how General Counsel and senior in-house counsel can overcome the complex leadership challenges they face in the workplace, in order to create better results for their organisations.

Watch our short video as Mark Smith explores leadership challenges for legal teams and offers one quick win.

Strategic in-house leadership

What types of leadership challenges are typically faced by in-house legal teams? The recently coined phrase, BOCA – “Blurred boundaries, Overload, Complexity, Ambiguity” – reflects the characteristics faced by leaders in today’s workplace. As business leaders, General Counsel can identify with these more than ever – particularly the challenge of increasing complexity in the workplace.

As Mark Smith notes, “Traditional problems usually have a right or best solution. But increasingly as in-house leaders we’re facing a paradox, where we have a seemingly insoluble problem that is characterised by two opposing ideas.”

In a recent UU��ֱ�� report, leadership expert Dr. Paul Hughes from the Center for Creative Leadership explores the question of what it means to be a strategic in-house legal leader.

The report looks at how today’s most effective legal leaders are combining theory and best practice with their real-world experiences to resolve complex situations and generate meaningful value for their organisations.

Read: In-House Leadership’ to learn more

Workplace dilemmas - too difficult to resolve?

In-house leaders must learn to navigate the tensions and dilemmas that appear when conflicting demands emerge in a complex organisation.

These tensions and dilemmas can often present ongoing, unsolvable situations that must be addressed. Unlike general problems, which may have clear answers and solutions, these are 'paradoxes' that contain seemingly opposing ideas.

Organisations and individuals that effectively manage such dilemmas perform far better than those that do not. It’s crucial that in-house leaders learn to address and manage them.

Here are some examples of impossible to answer questions that might occur within an organisation:

While the answers to these paradoxes are not obvious, in-house leaders can manage these conflicts with a strategic perspective. By doing this, they’ll support the move towards the wider goals of their organisation.

Learn more: ‘In-house leadership'

One quick win for legal leaders

In the video, Mark Smith offers some suggestions on how General Counsel and legal team leaders can make immediate progress with one quick win.

Can you build time in for you and your team to reflect on your week’s work? Think about key incidents that took place, and reflect as a team:

What were the objectives?
What assumptions were we making?
What happened?
What lessons have we learnt?

Use these quick learnings to prepare to be fundamentally better next week. Incremental learning can make a big difference to our performance.

Practical support for in-house leadership

Lexis+® UK is the leading legal guidance and research platform for in-house counsel. It is packed with useful guidance, market insights and latest legal news for in-house legal teams.

Our In-House Advisor module contains practical resources focused on management and leadership; everything from navigating international influence challenges to toolkits for onboarding new members of your team.

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About the author:

Sarah leads marketing for the In-House and Academic legal communities. She is passionate about customer-centric marketing and delivering data-based insights to help clients get the best use out of UU��ֱ�� solutions and products, and ensure they succeed in their roles.

Prior to her role at UU��ֱ��, Sarah specialised in delivering large B2B marketing programmes across a number of industries, including Financial Services, Technology and Manufacturing.

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