Success is silent, friction is loud: the leadership challenge in legal

Federica Pavesi, General Counsel at AideXa Bank in Italy, explores one of the less visible challenges of legal leadership: helping teams recognise the impact of work that often goes unnoticed, navigate setbacks and understand why what they do matters.

A commercial team can celebrate a deal won. A product team can celebrate a launch. A finance team can point to numbers.

What does a legal team celebrate?

A dispute that never happened? A risk identified early enough that nobody outside Legal will ever know it existed? A contract negotiated in a way that allowed the business to move forward without exposing the company to unacceptable risk?

There is a paradox in leading an in-house legal team: some of our best work is not always immediately visible.

When Legal works well, very often nothing happens. There is no litigation. No regulatory issue. No last-minute crisis. The deal closes, the product launches, the company moves forward.

And everyone moves on.

When something goes wrong, however, Legal suddenly becomes very visible. A contract takes longer than expected. A risk cannot be accepted. A proposed solution does not work. Someone hears the word “no”.

Success is silent. Friction is loud.

I believe this is one of the most interesting leadership challenges inherent in the role of an in-house legal team.

Making impact visible

Imagine a major project involving several business functions.

The Legal team spends weeks negotiating agreements, challenging assumptions, coordinating external advisers and finding solutions to issues that could have stopped the project.

Eventually, it launches.

The organisation celebrates the launch – as it should. But unless someone tells the story of what happened behind it, the lawyers involved may experience their contribution simply as another contract completed.

This is where leadership matters.

Saying “great job, team” is nice. Explaining why it was a great job is much more powerful.

“This project launched on time because someone identified this issue early. We avoided that risk because someone challenged the original structure. We found a workable solution because two people refused to stop at the first legally correct answer.”

It connects activity to impact.

I have become convinced that one of the responsibilities of a GC is to help people see the impact behind the work they do every day.

Legal teams spend a remarkable amount of time preventing things. We should occasionally recognise what did not happen: the dispute that was avoided, the problematic clause removed before signature, the regulatory issue identified before launch.

None of these produces a spectacular announcement. But they are part of the value Legal creates.

There are also less obvious ways in which an in-house team contributes to the organisation.

External legal spend is a good example. As people develop expertise, matters that may once have required external support can increasingly be handled internally. The immediate benefit is efficiency, but there is also a longer-term one: knowledge and experience remain within the organisation and become available for the next matter too.

This kind of progress can be easy to overlook precisely because it happens gradually. There is no single moment to celebrate. A question that once required external advice simply becomes something the team knows how to handle.

For a leader, recognising that evolution matters. It helps people see that developing expertise is not only personal growth: it gradually increases the capability and autonomy of the entire team.

Sometimes value is not something new that appears. It is something you no longer need to buy.

As GCs, part of our role as leaders is to help our teams connect what they do every day with the impact it creates for the organisation.

Explain the “why” twice

Leaders are often told to explain why a task matters before asking someone to do it.

I think there is a second “why” that is just as important and much more frequently forgotten.

Explain it again afterwards.

What happened because we did this?

Did the business launch faster? Did we make a decision possible? Did we avoid a risk? Did we discover that a proposed route was not viable before investing further resources in it?

The difference may seem small, but it changes the narrative from “I reviewed twenty contracts this month” to “I helped twenty commercial relationships move forward.”

That distinction matters, particularly in functions where output and impact are not the same thing.

When priorities change

Someone can spend months working on a project and then see priorities change. A proposal can take a different direction. A carefully designed process may need to be reconsidered as the organisation evolves.

This is part of working in any organisation, particularly in a fast-changing environment. But understanding why something has changed does not necessarily make it less frustrating for the people who invested time and energy in it.

The easiest response from a leader is: “Priorities change. We need to be resilient.”

It is also, in my view, one of the least useful.

The better question is:

What do we keep from this?

Perhaps the team developed expertise it did not have before. Perhaps an analysis can be reused. Perhaps relationships were built. Perhaps the work helped identify a better route forward.

Resilience is not pretending that setbacks do not matter. It is making sure that the experience is not lost with them.

Sometimes people just need to complain

There is another lesson about resilience that took me some time to appreciate: not every frustration needs to be fixed.

Sometimes someone comes into your office because a project has changed after weeks of work. Sometimes their contribution has gone unnoticed. Sometimes an urgent request arrives at the end of an already difficult day.

And sometimes they simply need to complain.

Our instinct as managers is often to solve the problem, explain the context or put things into perspective.

But not every difficult emotion requires a management solution.

Being available to your team also means creating a place where people can occasionally be frustrated without having to turn that frustration immediately into something constructive.

Sometimes I can fix the problem. Sometimes I can explain why a decision was made.

And sometimes I cannot do anything about it.

But I can listen.

This does not mean encouraging endless complaining or allowing negativity to become part of the culture. Leadership also requires knowing when it is time to stop discussing what went wrong and decide what comes next.

The difficult part is knowing the difference.

Because resilience is not asking people to suppress frustration. It is allowing them to experience it without letting it define what happens afterwards.

The morning after something goes wrong

GCs experience setbacks too.

A proposal we strongly supported is rejected. A project changes direction. A strategic priority suddenly shifts.

Our teams notice how we react.

This does not mean leaders should pretend to be unaffected. People usually recognise artificial optimism anyway.

But there is a difference between acknowledging uncertainty and transferring your anxiety to everyone around you.

I suspect teams learn resilience less from what leaders say about change than from watching what leaders do the morning after something goes wrong.

Do we look for someone to blame? Do we behave as though the setback invalidates everything that came before?

Or do we acknowledge what happened, understand it and start deciding what comes next?

That behaviour creates culture far more effectively than any presentation about resilience.

Leadership as translation

Legal leaders translate constantly.

We translate law into business decisions. Risk into choices. Complexity into something an organisation can act upon.

But perhaps we have another translation job inside our own teams.

We need to translate work into meaning.

Not every success will be visible. Not every project will follow the path we initially expected. Not every decision will go our way.

People do not need leaders to promise them certainty.

But they do need to understand two things: why what they do matters, and where they are going next.

Sometimes, one of the most important things a General Counsel can do is simply make both visible.

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