Look for your successor and make yourself redundant as soon as you take a senior legal role, a veteran CEO says.
The hard skills you bring to a job, like commercial or corporate law expertise, is essential to getting into a senior role, but if you want to climb into leadership you can’t keep focusing on that or else you’ll spend your career in your specialty, Bob Cahill said in a webcast with LinkSquares Chief Legal Officer Tim Parilla.
“It’s one of my pet peeves,” said Cahill, former CEO of G-P, Fetch Storage, KaBloom, Warcloud and CIDC, all software companies. “People think it’s job security to say, ‘I’m the only one who can do this,’ but that’s actually the fastest way out the door, in my view.” Cahill continues to serve as an advisor to G-P.
As an in-house lawyer looking to grow into a general counsel or other leadership role, you have to look at how you can do your job better, which means embracing technology to handle non-substantive work and finding and nurturing talent to take over your job so you can move up.
“If you’re doing your job well, you’re taking that next step,” said Cahill, who began his career in finance. “So, right away, you’re trying to figure that out. People who do that are going to have the best success at climbing the ladder.”
Cahill called finding and developing talent the most important skill of a leader, and rather than being afraid they’ll do your job better, you want to mentor their success. But the opposite is also true: you want to see which people have hit their limit and risk becoming static in their job.
“Not everyone is infinitely scalable,” he said. “The real art form is seeing who’ll hit their ceiling six months ahead of time, because if you need to swap out a senior leader, it might take six months to backfill that role.”
People hitting a ceiling doesn’t mean they’re failing, he said. “It’s just that they maxed out of what they’re capable of doing at your organization.”
You could have a senior person who thrives in a leadership role when the organization is at 100 employees, but as that grows into 250, or the company generates another $100 million in revenue, that person is no longer in their comfort zone.
“As companies scale, executives who evolve anticipate that growth and adjust to it and are going to find a longer tenure than others,” he said.
Getting talented people to take over your duties is becoming more important because the role of in-house legal leader is changing, he said; you’re expected to bring strategic insight to your role and not just make sure the terms you’re putting in contracts are good.
“The GC or CLO has evolved into much more of a business advisor in the last 10 years or so, similar to the CFO,” he said. “These roles used to be deemed as overhead, not necessarily strategic or core – more of a back-office function. Now, it’s, ‘Let’s bring a legal prism into our business, operations and strategy, and think out front: what are the things we need to be doing?’ Now I look at the GC as a partner in the C-suite with the other executives.”
