Pierre Gentin, global general counsel of the consulting giant McKinsey & Co., said he manages his legal department in two dimensions—professionalism and passion.

Unlocking that passion, he said, means giving all legal department employees the freedom to bring their own style and charisma.

“People come to work and have AirPods in their ears, and you can actually see that they are physically energized. They’re listening to a podcast or listening to something inspirational and then they take off their AirPods and you see the energy level collapse,” Gentin said.

Gentin was the keynote speaker Monday on the opening day of ALM Global’s two-day General Counsel Conference East in New York City. The session, moderated by Heather Nevitt, editor-in-chief of Corporate Counsel, Inside Counsel and Global Leaders in Law, was titled “The Transformative Power of Professionalism and Passion.”

Gentin, who joined London-based McKinsey in 2019 and is based in New York, said in-house lawyers are not always clear about what objectives they’re trying to achieve or what it means to be a professional in their organization.

He sees the road map as straightforward.

“What I’ve tried to do at McKinsey is articulate for our team three very, very precise objectives,” he said. “One is enhanced client service. Second is protecting our firm and the third is deepening relationships with our internal clients. This is non-negotiable,” he said.

Gentin developed his leadership skills through a long and varied career. Before joining McKinsey, he was with the law firm Cahill Gordon & Reindel. And earlier, he spent nearly two decades at Credit Suisse in a variety of roles, including global head of litigation, regulatory enforcement and employment law.

Since his arrival at McKinsey three years ago, McKinsey’s legal department has doubled to 300 people, and the company’s workforce overall has surpassed 40,000 workers spread across 170 global locations.

He said the legal department’s growth is in response to the needs of the company.

“Scale is actually as much of an opportunity as it is a challenge,” he said “The challenge of scale is organization. The bigger you get, the harder it is to operate in an organized way. And that’s why I think when you scale there’s a premium that you have to place on organizational design.”

One of the milestones of Gentin’s tenure was the launch last year of McKinsey Legal Lab, a first-of-its-kind innovation incubator and accelerator for the legal department.

At a time the pandemic left workers feeling disconnected and stressed, the lab provided new opportunities for learning and collaboration and for employees to embark on projects that tap into their passions.

“What I love about McKinsey Legal Lab is it’s a different kind of leadership. It’s not leadership in the sense of we’re supervising these people or doing these contracts or supervising our IP lawyers. It’s leadership to pull together people around the department to volunteer or to be mentors or to have relationships with universities or to do charity.”