Big Sis Briefing Should We Require Legal Leaders to be Licensed?

If you operate heavy machinery at work, you need a licence.

If you work with children, you need a clearance.

If you manage people in law, you need… nothing at all?

That gap gets harder to defend as workplaces evolve and managing humans is no longer framed as a soft skill. It sits squarely in the space of legal risk, psychological harm and organisational liability. We have explicit obligations now around psychological safety, bullying, harassment, respect at work and mental health injury.

These are enforceable duties and no longer abstract values.

Once something carries legal and safety consequences, we usually respond with standards, training and regulation. Not to punish but to reduce harm. In blue collar industries, this thinking has existed for decades. If the risk of someone getting hurt is high, you raise the bar for who operates the equipment. You train them properly, test them and require renewal. You accept that skill fades and standards evolve.

People management involves risk that is less visible but no less real. A poorly handled performance conversation can spiral into anxiety or disengagement that lasts years. Chronic stress caused by inconsistent leadership erodes confidence, health and trust. Unchecked behaviour from someone with power creates damage that ripples through teams long after that individual leaves. Humans are complex and power dynamics amplify everything.

Yet most lawyers step into leadership roles with little formal preparation. They get promoted for technical excellence, availability or tenure, then handed responsibility for other people's livelihoods, wellbeing and professional identity. When things go wrong, we frame it as a personality issue: a bad egg, a difficult team member, a culture problem.

More often, it's a training gap. Law is no exception.

The obvious counter-argument here is cost.

Adding mandatory certification creates compliance burden, particularly for small law firms that can't afford dedicated HR functions or external training providers. Such a fair point but the question is whether the cost of doing nothing is actually lower?

Because sub-par people management already costs you. Turnover from bad managers costs recruitment fees, lost productivity and knowledge walking out the door.

Psychological injury claims costs time, settlement payments and reputational damage. Disengagement costs output and competitive advantage. Safe Work Australia estimates the annual cost of work-related mental health conditions at over $10 billion with leadership behaviour as a primary driver of that figure.

The argument that the market already weeds out bad managers assumes businesses are accurately pricing leadership failure and they're not. The costs are diffused and delayed. Even firms with leadership development programs often deliver them after someone's been managing people for years. The damage happens in that gap.

A toxic manager might hit their billables while burning through staff. By the time the damage becomes visible, they've been promoted or moved sideways. The people who bear the cost are workers who develop chronic health issues or leave our industry entirely.

You can argue this is just more regulation when we already have laws against bullying, harassment and discrimination. True. We also have laws against workplace injuries and we still require forklift licences. Existing protections tell you what not to do. They don't ensure people know what to do instead.

The gap between "don't bully people" and "here's how to give difficult feedback without causing unnecessary harm" is where most legal leaders currently operate and that gap is expensive.

There's a reasonable concern that requiring formal qualifications creates a talent bottleneck and removes the opportunity to learn by doing. This doesn't have to mean pre-certification before anyone can manage. It could mean probationary periods with supervision, mandatory foundational training within the first six months or so and skills assessment at defined intervals. Allowing people to practice under supervision while building capability sounds awfully familiar…

The point is ensuring baseline competence exists before someone has unsupervised authority over other people.

Right now, you can't accurately assess whether someone is qualified to lead you before you start a new job. There's no credential to check, no public register, no way to verify that the person hiring you has ever been trained in basic people management. You're trusting a LinkedIn profile and an interview process that tells you almost nothing about whether this person will create a psychologically safe environment or make your working life miserable.

In every other context where someone has power over your safety, we have ways to verify their competence before you're placed in their care. Leadership is the exception.

I concede that training won't fix character and some people are genuinely unsuited to leadership. But right now we have no reliable way to identify that before someone does damage. A practical skills assessment wouldn't eliminate bad actors but it would make it harder for them to rise unchecked. It would also make it easier to performance manage people out of leadership roles when they fail objective standards rather than subjective cultural fit.

The cynical take is that making leadership more expensive will just accelerate automation and flatten hierarchies. Maybe. If your business model only works when you can promote people into management roles without training them, your business model has a problem. Flatter structures with fewer, better-trained leaders might actually be the better outcome. Quality over quantity.

There is a risk that adding more duties of care makes managers too cautious to give honest feedback at all. This assumes the current system is producing candid, effective feedback and mostly, it's not. Most managers avoid difficult conversations entirely because they don't know how to have them without it going sideways. Proper training makes hard conversations less risky, not more, because people know how to navigate them without escalating harm.

Who would design this leadership test, who administers it, what's the renewal cycle and who pays for it?

All legitimate questions.

All solvable if we decide the problem is worth solving.

Plenty of industries have figured out how to credential people at scale. The administrative complexity is not a reason to avoid the conversation because when we look at the data, the current system is not working.

Workplace mental health claims are rising, engagement scores are falling, malaise and cynicism are rife amongst younger generations and turnover attributed to management is persistent across the industry, and outside law too. We can keep treating this as an individual problem or we can treat it as a systems problem. Systems problems require systems solutions.

The cost of poor leadership is felt one way or another.

You can pay upfront for training, assessment and standards, or you can pay later in turnover, claims and damaged people. I suspect that the second option is currently more expensive but it’s just harder to see because the costs are spread across multiple budgets and multiple years.

This is a discussion worth having because the gap between what we expect from our legal leaders and what we equip them to do keeps growing. Good intentions are not enough and hoping people figure it out along the way is no longer a low risk strategy.

The path forward doesn't have to start with regulation.

What if we began with a voluntary credential? Let firms and individual leaders opt in to formal assessment and certification in people management. Create a recognisable standard that signals competence, then let the market decide. My bet is that talent would gravitate toward managers and firms with that credential, particularly younger lawyers who are increasingly willing to walk away from toxic environments.

If you're choosing between two roles and one reports to a “certified leader” while the other reports to someone who's never been assessed on their management capability, which are you picking? Voluntary adoption could prove the value before we ever need to mandate it as an industry.

If leadership competence genuinely matters to business outcomes, firms with certified managers will out-perform and out-recruit. If it doesn't, the credential fails and we learn something useful.

Either way, we'd have data instead of assumptions.

Onwards.

💖

Mel