THE GUT CHECK SERIES · Failure · No. 9
One leadership question, examined. A new one every Tuesday.
Did you Consult Your Attorney?
Everyone knows what CYA stands for, and everyone knows when you do it: after the fact, once things have gone sideways and you need a paper trail. My favorite reading runs the other way. Consult Your Attorney. Not a shield you raise when it is already too late, but a question you ask while you still have choices.
Granted, actual legal counsel sits outside the reach of most people, and most decisions never need it. But when it matters, it matters fast, and the quick decision becomes expensive before you can blink. So what about the times you do not need a lawyer, but you do need counsel?
Counsel is not permission. You are not asking whether you may proceed. You are leveraging an education or a set of experiences you do not have. This is not who is empowered to tell you no, which is a question about your own room. These are advisors outside it, disinterested third parties whose standing comes from what they were trained in rather than where they sit.
Start with what you expect from an expert, because it is the smaller half. The attorney, the safety officer, the finance lead, the master tradesman: each spent years learning to see one category of consequence that stays invisible to you no matter how hard you look. The attorney does not read your agreement and form an opinion, they read it and see obligations and objections. The safety officer looks at your timeline and sees the sequence of reasonable compromises that ends with somebody hurt, badly. That is trained perception, and raw intelligence is no substitute: you cannot think your way into someone else’s twenty years. All of which you assumed. It is what you thought you were buying.
The larger half is the one nobody sells you on. Facts do not carry fixed meanings. The same action reads one way in one context and differently in another, and context moves whether or not you are watching. The choices you made at the beginning may have been exactly right then: loud, scrappy, everywhere at once, and they bought the attention and revenue you needed. Operate that way two years in, against a name that now stands for something, and those moves are no longer scrappy. They are cheap, and they are spending down the very thing they built. Nothing about the tactic changed. Its meaning did. You remember it working. The expert sees it aging, because they have watched the arc before and know where it bends.
Which changes what counsel is for. It is not a gate you pass once and stand behind. The decision you cleared correctly two years ago may be uncleared today, and nothing will announce it. Circumstances do not send notice. You asked, you were told it was sound, and it was sound. What nobody printed on the label was the shelf life.
So why do we skip it? Rarely because we believe the expert would be wrong. Usually because we believe we already have the picture, or because we got it once and never thought to ask whether it had aged. Competence is what closes the door. The better you are inside your own discipline, the more natural it feels to assume your view covers the field, and the less likely you are to notice where your training stopped and your confidence kept going. The blind spot is not ignorance. It is sufficiency.
None of which makes the expert right. Training narrows as it sharpens. The safety officer will always find a safety reason to slow down and the attorney will always find exposure, and that is exactly what you went to them for. Apply discernment to the data and reasonableness to the rules. Counsel you are not free to overrule is not counsel, it is approval. And a leader who consults everyone about everything has found a respectable way to never decide. The expert widens your view. They do not take your chair.
Make it a step rather than an instinct. Name the fields your decision crosses where you hold no training. Then run the harder list: the practices you have not questioned since the day they started working, and the clearances you are still standing behind. Find one person for each and go while your mind is still open, not for their blessing, but for their sight. You will spend an afternoon. You would have spent a year.
Gut check: name one field the decision in front of you crosses that you were never trained in, and one thing you are still doing because somebody competent blessed it long ago. Someone can see each clearly. Answer honestly why you have not called them.
Row Well and Live.
Next in the series: Right, Not Just Correct. The Gut Check series runs every Tuesday. See every question so far, or start at the beginning with Nobody Meets a Standard They Can’t See.
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