Not Everything Needs Fixing — And That’s the Point

I once had a conversation with a CEO about what she looks for when hiring a new General Counsel. I expected to hear the usual answers, business acumen, sound judgment, executive presence. Instead, she shared a lesson that bears repeating.

I'm paraphrasing, but her message was simple: a new GC shouldn't walk in the door ready to fix things. The first job is to learn the business, listen to the people, and observe the culture. Be curious about what's working before deciding what needs to change.

It wasn't advice I had ever consciously considered, but the more I reflected on it, the more I realized how important it is and how rarely we talk about it with new General Counsel.

The challenge is that lawyers are trained to believe we should fix things. It’s not ego, it’s just the way we are wired. We’ve spent decades honing the part of our brain that spots risk, anticipates problems, and solves them before they blow up. So when we step into a GC role, our reflex is to start making things more efficient, more compliant, less risky, and to do it as fast as possible. 

We genuinely think we’re helping. But that instinct can work against us. The irony is that the fastest way to become a trusted strategic advisor is often to resist the urge to prove your value immediately. CEOs rarely hire a General Counsel because they need someone to identify legal issues, they hire someone who can exercise judgment about which issues matter most to the business and when to act. Judgment begins with understanding.

Let me tell you what that looks like in practice. 

At our Ready Set GC programs, we heard two women share remarkably similar stories. Both were new in their GC role. Both were called on to offer guidance on a time sensitive issue. And both delivered legally sound advice, the kind you’d expect from someone highly competent and thoughtful. 

But the advice didn’t land well. And in hindsight, they saw why: 

• They hadn’t gotten buy-in from the right internal stakeholders. 

• They didn’t explore alternative approaches that might have been less aggressive or disruptive. 

• They didn’t fully consider the operational and revenue impact of their advice. 

  
  

The legal analysis was solid. But the delivery, timing, and context were off. The result? Friction with business leaders, credibility hits, and ultimately, solutions that had to be unwound and reworked. 

One of the biggest shifts in becoming a General Counsel is realizing that being right is no longer enough. Your advice has to be implementable. That means understanding who needs to support it, what pressures they are under, and what success looks like from their perspective. The legal answer is only one part of the business decision.

First, you may compromise your one chance to make a first impression.  When you lead with fixing, you’re unintentionally signaling that the way people have been operating is wrong. It runs the risk of landing as judgment before it lands as expertise. And because you’re new, you haven’t built the trust to soften that impact or get the buy-in you may need or want. 

Second, you risk fixing the wrong thing.  Every organization has history, context, and quiet reasons why something looks the way it does. Without understanding that, you might “solve” the visible problem while missing the real one entirely. Or you might dismantle something that was working exactly as intended. 

Third, you lose credibility before you’ve built any.  A GC who shows up with answers before listening looks like they’re making decisions off assumptions, rather than from knowledge, thought, or partnership. It could be interpreted as arrogance even if that’s the last thing you mean. 

This reminds me of our recent blog and webinar about a new GC’s listening tour. The need to be “strategic” has turned into a cloud of buzzwords we’re all supposed to live up to. But strategy doesn’t start with changing, fixing, or optimizing anything. It starts with listening. Real listening. Listening without racing to the conclusion you’ve seen before. Listening without assuming you already know how the story ends.  If you’d like to know more about how to conduct an effective listening tour, you can read about it here. 

And part of that is rethinking how we treat risk. Lawyers are conditioned to look for what could go wrong, and organizations need that. But not every risk is an emergency. Some risks are intentional. Some are already baked into the operating model. Some are tradeoffs the business has chosen. Some are opportunities disguised as risk. You can’t tell which is which until you understand the business. 

That’s really the heart of this whole mindset shift: you can’t fix what you don’t understand. And once you do understand, you often realize it didn’t need fixing at all.

• A GC who slows down earns trust. 

• A GC who listens earns influence. 

• A GC who understands the pressures, the history, the personalities, and the unwritten rules becomes the person the CEO turns to when it counts because they know you get the business, not just the law. 

  
  

The real work of a new GC isn’t arriving with answers. It’s arriving with curiosity. Everything else flows from that. Because curiosity builds understanding, understanding builds trust, and trust is what gives a General Counsel the influence to make meaningful change.

Deborah Solmor

Founder, Ready Set GC

General Counsel, Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF)