August 2026

Step outside the fire to lead through it

By Jahnna McKeag

Making time you don’t think you have.

When the house is burning down, you can’t see the whole picture from inside it. That’s one analogy that has stayed with me throughout my career, and it’s the closest thing I’ve found to a universal truth about leadership.

As a leader, it can often feel like your challenges are unique. Spend time talking with a number of GCs, however, and you quickly see the consistencies across organisations. And these conversations aren’t all that different from those happening in other teams, such as Finance, Sales or Operations.

Every leader is trying to deliver for the business, support their people, and prepare for what’s coming next. Everyone is busy. Everyone feels under pressure. Everyone is trying to make good decisions with limited time and competing priorities.

I’ve led teams myself, and today I spend my week advising and supporting GCs and senior legal leaders. While the day-to-day issues may be different across disciplines, the leadership challenges are remarkably familiar.

Which is why I’ve come to believe that the biggest challenge in leadership isn’t any single decision. It’s creating enough space to make good decisions in the first place.

Protecting your team’s capacity to think

One of the quieter warning signs that a team is under pressure isn’t that everyone is busy. Every legal team I speak with is busy. 

It’s when strategic work keeps getting pushed to next week. Senior lawyers stop coaching because they’re caught in delivery. Leave is postponed. Longer-term projects lose momentum. Everyone is working incredibly hard, yet it still feels like the team is falling behind. 

That’s rarely a sign that people aren’t capable. More often, it’s a sign they no longer have the capacity to do their best work.

The goal isn’t to work harder. It’s to protect your team’s ability to focus on the work that matters most.

Look beyond what’s immediately in front of you

When every day is filled with urgent requests, competing deadlines and constant interruptions, it’s easy to become consumed by today’s work. Before long, you’re solving the problem directly in front of you without ever stepping back to ask whether it’s the right problem to solve.

The legal teams I see operating most effectively aren’t immune to that pressure. They’ve simply become much more deliberate about creating space to think beyond it.

One of the most valuable conversations a leadership team can have is surprisingly simple: what does medium to long-term success look like? Not just this week’s priorities or the matters currently sitting in the inbox.

• What does success look like six months from now?
• What’s happening across the business that will eventually land on Legal’s desk?
• What new projects are on the horizon?
• Where are the risks and opportunities?

Those conversations don’t eliminate uncertainty. But being clear on where you’re headed makes it easier to plan, prepare, and navigate through change.

Knowing what you need to get there

The next conversation is just as important: how are we going to get there? This is where I often see legal leaders’ thinking shift.

The immediate response to growing pressure is often more people. Sometimes that’s exactly what’s needed. Sometimes it isn’t.

Recently, I was speaking with a GC who believed the team needed another full-time lawyer. As we unpacked the challenge together, it became clear the capability already existed within the team. What was missing was capacity. A significant procurement project was about to absorb months of attention, pulling senior lawyers away from strategic work, mentoring and partnering with the business. The answer wasn’t a permanent hire, it was bringing in the right support for that project specifically, freeing the existing team to focus where it added the greatest value.

I’ve seen the opposite as well. Sometimes capacity isn’t the issue at all. The work ahead demands specialist expertise that simply doesn’t exist within the team today. These are different problems, and they deserve different solutions.

Capacity and capability aren’t the same thing. Solve for the wrong one, and you’ll still be exhausted next quarter.

Stepping outside the house

Leadership will always involve difficult decisions. The leaders I’ve admired most, and the legal teams I’ve seen perform at their best, aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the largest teams.

They’re the ones who deliberately create space to step outside the day-to-day, understand where they’re heading, and make thoughtful decisions about what their team will need to succeed.

Because when you’re standing inside a burning house, every problem looks urgent. Sometimes the most important leadership decision is stepping outside long enough to see the whole picture.

If you stepped outside your house right now, what would you see?