In-house legal department leaders know that their own personal knowledge and skills can only take them so far in effectively supporting their organization and achieving professional success for themselves. Few lawyers rise through the ranks to become a general counsel or chief legal officer without having surrounded themselves with highly talented, capable people along the way. Being a strong leader requires having a strong team supporting you.

What does it take to build a successful legal team? While the answer is far more than what can be covered in a short article, there are three discrete, though interrelated, priorities that successful leaders follow:

1. Assemble teams with people who have different skill sets and different analytical perspectives.
2. Maintain a strong, organizational commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace, but also recognize that such a commitment, in and of itself, does not ensure having a successful team.
3. Remember that even successful teams grow stale and will require the periodic infusion of new thinking and new voices.

When assembling a team of legal professionals, where the pool of candidates is comprised of the most highly educated and accomplished, an important first step is to build a team with different analytical skills to ensure multiple views and perspectives are considered in the process of solving problems. Everyone has a unique decision-making style, meaning: a) their approach to identifying the problem or issues; b) the way in which they go about analyzing the problem; and c) how they construct the solution or the proposed course of action to the challenge being faced.