Job Crafting Your Way to the GC Seat
- 6 days ago
- 5 min read
The Myth of the Specialist Path
There’s a quiet misconception about how people become General Counsel. Most people don’t become General Counsel because they’re the best specialist in a narrow area of law. More often, the role goes to someone with strong legal acumen and strong leadership capacity. The organization already knows you’re a good lawyer. What they’re looking for is more.
That said, there are certain areas of legal exposure that matter. They help you show up as well-rounded, with enough breadth to gut-check issues, see around corners, and exercise the judgment to know when to solve a problem yourself and when to leverage outside expertise. The challenge is how to get exposure to those areas if they are not within your current wheelhouse, role, or job description. A recent conversation I had with an in-house lawyer in the AI and data privacy space, who’s been thinking about her career growth, prompted me to write blog.
Naming the Process: Job Crafting
We talk about this often in our Ascend program for aspiring GCs, though until recently I didn’t have a name for it. In a conversation with Patty Carl, Chief Executive Officer of Highland Performance Solutions, and a featured speaker at our upcoming Ascend | Chicago program, she referred to it as job crafting. The term clicked immediately.
Job crafting is the idea that you don’t passively inherit your role. You shape it. You expand it. You steer it toward the skills and experiences you’ll need next. It’s about being deliberate with the opportunities you pursue inside the job you already have.
Why the GC Role Is Different
Legal careers tend to reward specialization. You build credibility by going deep — litigation, IP, transactions, regulatory, tax. Depth sharpens your instincts and strengthens your expertise. It makes you excellent at your craft. And because most in-house lawyers start their career at a law firm, they are usually hired to develop expertise in a specific area.
But here’s the problem: you rarely become General Counsel because of your legal specialty. Yes, there are exceptions. Highly regulated industries. Highly technical businesses. Moments when niche expertise is mission critical. But most organizations hire a GC for something broader.
The point here is that the GC role is enterprise leadership disguised as a legal job. It’s less about being the best lawyer in the room and more about being the most trusted business partner. Organizations are looking for someone who exercises sound judgment, sees around corners, and weighs legal risk alongside business reality. They want someone who can lead a team, partner with a CEO, and operate as an enterprise leader, not just a legal expert. And that shift requires range. And range doesn’t happen accidentally.
When Expertise Becomes a Constraint
This focus on specialization can be especially sticky for women. In How Women Rise, Sally Helgesen notes that many high-achieving women build careers by becoming indispensable experts, that person everyone relies on because they’re exceptionally good at a defined area.
That strength can quietly become a constraint. The expertise that earns credibility can also narrow visibility and limit exposure to the broader leadership experiences required at the executive level. The GC path rewards depth but it ultimately requires breadth.
The Experience That Builds GC Range
If you’re serious about the seat, certain arenas of experience consistently matter:
Labor & Employment
Understanding the full employee lifecycle of hiring, performance management, investigations, sensitive personnel matters, culture, and conduct puts you at the intersection of legal risk, people strategy, and reputation. This goes beyond advising on policies. It means working shoulder-to-shoulder with HR on workforce planning, executive matters, organizational change, and the moments that demand both legal judgment and human leadership.
Compliance & Ethics
GCs are stewards of institutional integrity. This is how trust is built and protected inside an organization and a GC should be able to weigh in and partner to steer the organization’s culture and conscience. This includes having exposure to the compliance lifecycle including:
• Codes of conduct
• Internal reporting structures
• Investigations
• Training programs
• Governance frameworks
Governance Exposure
You don’t need to be a technical expert in board procedure, but you do need comfort with understanding how a board operates in process and practically. Be well versed in:
Fiduciary duties
Board materials and processes
Committee structures
Advising leadership in high-stakes settings
4. Enterprise Risk & Crisis Leadership
The GC is often the steady voice when things wobble and they help leadership teams assess risk, pressure-test decisions, and navigate complexity that goes far beyond legal doctrine.
Business Fluency
This is what elevates you from legal advisor to executive peer:
Understanding financials
Knowing how the organization makes money
Seeing tradeoffs
Speaking the language of strategy
The Readiness Gap
Here’s the challenge: most of this experience doesn’t automatically come with your job description. There’s rarely a formal rotation plan. No one hands you a checklist called “GC Readiness.” The work that prepares you for the role often lives just outside your assigned lane.
That’s where job crafting comes in. It is an opportunity to intentionally shape your current role to build the exposure you’ll need for the next one. It’s the difference between waiting to be developed and choosing to grow. In practice, job crafting shows up in three ways:
You look for opportunities to take on work that stretches your range and increases your visibility.
You build stronger partnerships with the people who shape strategy and enterprise decisions.
You start seeing your legal responsibilities not just as issue-spotting, but as helping the business make smarter, more confident choices.
Framing Growth the Right Way
The key is to frame growth around contribution, not ambition. Focus on building capability in areas that matter most to the organization. Be specific about the experience you’re seeking and clear about your commitment to broader impact.
It’s also important to remember that roles are rarely as fixed as they appear. Job descriptions are starting points, not ceilings. The strongest path to expanding your role begins with credibility. Do excellent work. Deliver consistently. Build trust. When leaders know you’re dependable, they’re far more open to giving you room to grow.
From there, connect the dots. Show how expanding your scope helps you better support your manager, strengthen your team, and contribute more meaningfully to the organization’s goals. Framed this way, growth isn’t self-serving — it’s additive. It signals ownership, initiative, and leadership in motion. Strong leaders tend to welcome that energy, not resist it.
The Bottom Line
The lawyers who step into the GC seat rarely get there by accident. They get there because they treat their careers as something to design rather than something to inherit. And that work is worth starting now.
If you’re an aspiring woman GC who wants to go deeper on this work, join us at our upcoming Ascend program in Chicago on April 27–28. Here is a link to the agenda and registration form.
Founder, Ready Set GC