Team members don’t fire themselves or their colleagues

When faced with budget or headcount cuts, many general counsel create a team and charge that team to meet the objective. Teams can rethink the processes they engage in and teams can change relationships with outside counsel. Teams can chose and implement new software, and they can tackle many other management challenges, but teams cannot bring themselves to fire team members.

Only a general counsel can ultimately decide who and how many will be terminated. It just is not plausible that anyone on a team will volunteer to be terminated or nominate someone else on the team or in their reporting line to be terminated.

Because of this psychological and emotional limitation, teams may address cost solutions but not personnel solutions (See my post of Sept. 25, 2005 about the unique role of the general counsel.).