A GC’s role never stands still

Linda Mouaz challenges assumptions about executive tenure, asking whether agility, context and impact reveal more about a successful career than the dates listed on a CV.

I recently read an article on LinkedIn by an executive search firm’s managing director on the shortening tenure of general counsel and other c-suite executives. I found it interesting and commented on the post.

Looking back at what I had written, I realised it got me thinking about more than tenure. I was reflecting on how we judge people’s careers, how much can change after someone accepts a role, and what we really mean when we talk about loyalty at work. Around the same time, I had a conversation that brought one of those questions into sharp focus.

WHEN THE ROLE CHANGES

A senior appointment is made at a particular moment, against a specific mandate and ambition set by the CEO, the board and/or the shareholders. You may be absolutely right for the organisation at that point in time, but none of those things stays still.

The organisation evolves, strategy and priorities change, markets shift, and new risks emerge sometimes suddenly and on a scale that was difficult to imagine when the person was hired. War, for example, can reshape a business’ priorities overnight. The CEO may leave, the board may take a different view of what the business needs, or a new CEO may bring a new direction. Even without a dramatic event, a role can expand or contract, and responsibilities can shift into areas that were never part of the original brief.

This is true for general counsel in a specific way. The legal function has become increasingly central to business decision-making, while the issues landing on a GC’s desk have become broader, less strictly legal and far less predictable. But the same is true of other senior executives. Few of us are doing exactly the job we were originally hired to do several years later.

That is why agility is incredibly important at the executive level. I do not mean changing direction every time the wind shifts. Rather, I mean understanding what the business needs now, not only what it needed when you joined. This includes learning new areas, adjusting your contribution and retaining your judgement as the context changes. The ability to do that should count for something when we assess a person’s career.

Yet we often seem to place greater weight on the length of each role. Three to five years in a senior role can be a meaningful chapter. It may be enough time to build a function, deliver a transformation or help a company through a difficult period. Staying longer can reflect commitment and real impact, but I am not convinced that a longer tenure is automatically evidence of greater success, nor that a shorter one should automatically be viewed as failure.

THE STORIES WE READ INTO A CV

I was reminded of how strongly people still rely on that assumption a few days ago. I was discussing a senior executive’s profile with a colleague, a senior director. I found the career path genuinely interesting. This person had worked for a multinational, before joining a startup, where she took a hands-on role and moved across different functions. She had led a department, then moved into fintech, and later into a government-related organisation. To me, that demonstrated curiosity, strong agility and an openness to different industries. More broadly, it suggested someone willing to bring different perspectives to the table, take risks, stay close to the work and learn how different kinds of businesses.

My senior colleague looked at exactly the same CV and drew a completely different conclusion. For him, he saw that the senior executive had spent eight years in one company (multinational), then three years at another, two years at the next and one year in the latest role. His immediate reaction was that the executive was unstable. He went further, suggesting that she probably had been hired to establish a specific department or function, failed to deliver, and had therefore left, or been asked to leave each organisation where she stayed for less than three years. What struck me was that the eight years appeared to be the only part of her career he had really noticed. Everything that came afterwards barely seemed to count. I must admit, I found that disturbing.

I was genuinely shocked. We were looking at a sequence of dates and job titles. We did not know why the person had left any of those roles, what the mandate had been, what had changed, or what she had or had not achieved. Yet failure was assumed to be the explanation. The CV did not tell us that story, we supplied it ourselves.

What surprised me was how quickly a varied career became a negative. I had looked at the same sequence and seen someone who had worked in very different environments. Each move could have added a different kind of experience. Of course, that does not prove the person delivered in every role but neither does a shorter stay prove that she did not! The point is that we were filling in the gaps with assumptions, and one of us was treating those assumptions as fact.

QUESTIONS, NOT CONCLUSIONS

I know that repeated short tenures can raise fair questions, and those are entirely reasonable things to explore in a recruitment process. But they are questions, not conclusions. A CV records only when someone joined and left. It rarely tells you whether a role was restructured, whether the mandate or CEO changed, whether the company ran out of funding, whether the culture was untenable and toxic, or whether the person was simply not given the authority or resources needed to do what they had been hired to do.

Culture is a significant part of this discussion and one of the hardest things to assess before joining. A candidate can ask good questions and meet people across the organisation, but culture remains largely abstract until you experience it from the inside. You do not always know how decisions are really made, how leadership responds when results disappoint, or whether the values on paper the employees’ experience. Sometimes the fit is right and sometimes it is not. Sometimes it becomes clear only after the job begins that the role, the environment or the expectations are different from what either side believed they had agreed to.

That does not mean every early departure is justified, or that an executive should leave as soon as a role becomes difficult. Senior positions take time, people have a responsibility to deliver, and organisations are entitled to ask what was achieved. But it is equally simplistic to assume that someone who leaves before the three- or five-year mark has not delivered. There may be a good reason or a poor on, but we should find out before reaching a conclusion.

The expectation to stay for a minimum period can also distort the conversation. If three years is treated as the point at which a move becomes acceptable, then a person who leaves at two years and half years may be judged very differently from someone who leaves few months later, even if nothing meaningful changed during that period. The number starts to stand in for an assessment of performance and character. But I am sorry to say, that is a lot to ask of a date on a CV.

RETHINING LOYALTY

I also think we need to look more closely at the way we talk about loyalty at work. An organisation hires an individual because it believes it needs them. Later, it may decide that its needs have changed and terminate the relationship. That is very generally treated as a business decision. Yet when an executive decides that a role no longer works for them, we may call them disloyal or unstable. Why is the assessment so often different depending on which side makes the decision?

Of course, there is a difference between making a considered move and treating every job as temporary. I am not suggesting that tenure is irrelevant or that commitment does not matter. But loyalty cannot mean that only the individual is expected to stay while the organisation remains free to change the terms of the relationship. If the mandate, the culture or the opportunity changes, it seems reasonable for the executive to reassess their position too.

A BETTER WAY TO ASSESS

For me, the better conversation is not, “How many years did they stay?”. It should be: what were they hired to do? What did the organisation need at the time? What changed? What did they deliver and in what circumstances? And, if they left, do we know why? Those answers will not always be neat, but they will tell us more than a rule that says three years is safe and anything less is suspicious.

A general counsel’s role, like the organisation around it, never stands still. Perhaps we should also rethink how we judge the people who take on that role and allow them to move on as well.

Text by:

Linda Mouaz, group general counsel and compliance officer at a single-family office, Dubai