Why your best people stop going the extra mile

What if your best people are not disengaged… but perfectly trained?

Most companies say they want people who go the extra mile.

People who help colleagues.

People who see the bigger picture.

People who do not just complete the task, but protect the outcome.

Then they build systems that reward the opposite.

They measure speed.

They measure volume.

They measure responsiveness.

They measure “tickets closed”.

And slowly, very smart people learn the rules.

Do what is asked.

Do it fast.

Do not create friction.

Do not ask the awkward question.

Do not help someone else unless it is visible, rewarded, or politically useful.

In other words:

They stop doing the right thing.

And start doing the measured thing.

There is a famous experiment with toddlers that explains this beautifully.

A researcher dropped a pen and pretended she could not reach it.

Most twenty-month-old children helped.

No bonus.

No policy.

No “helpfulness KPI”.

They just helped.

Then some of them were rewarded for helping.

A toddler bonus scheme.

Very cute.

Very corporate.

And then something strange happened.

When the reward disappeared, the rewarded toddlers helped much less than the children who had never been rewarded.

The reward had not strengthened the instinct.

It had damaged it.

Helping was no longer something you do because someone needs help.

It became a transaction.

“Is this worth it?”

Welcome to the modern workplace.

And yes, Legal is not immune.

A lawyer measured only on response time will respond quickly.

But may stop thinking deeply.

A lawyer measured only on volume will close matters.

But may stop spotting what actually matters.

A lawyer measured only on “business satisfaction” may become very popular.

And occasionally useless.

This is the danger of over-managing performance.

You think you are improving behaviour.

But sometimes you are narrowing it.

This is where Goodhart’s Law is useful:

The moment a metric becomes the goal, people optimise for the metric.

Not the outcome.

So the real question for a GC is not:

“How do I measure everything?”

The better question is:

“What behaviour am I accidentally training out of my team?”

Because the best legal work is often invisible.

The quiet challenge in a meeting.

The clause nobody asked about.

The risk pattern spotted across three separate conversations.

The business leader influenced before the wrong decision hardened into strategy.

That is not “extra”.

That is the work.

The problem is that it rarely fits neatly into a dashboard.

As Charlie Munger said:

That line should probably be printed on every legal department dashboard.

Because the problem is not that your best people stopped caring.

The problem is that the system taught them caring was not part of the job.

The best GCs understand this.

They keep the internal team focused on judgment, influence and the decisions that matter.

And when the work becomes too heavy, too specialised or too urgent, they bring in senior external capacity without turning variable demand into fixed structure.

Fractional senior counsel.

Contract specialists.

Niche experts.

Senior judgment on demand.

No fixed cost.

Zero learning curve.

Speak next week,

Rosa & Manuel