Big Sis Briefing: Managing Up When Your Manager Was Never Trained to Lead
I want to start with a story I have told many times in coaching sessions but never written down.
I was once in a junior lawyer role that was created because the previous lawyer had moved on. My new manager had loved working with my predecessor, the way that managers sometimes do when someone makes their working life considerably easier than it would otherwise be.
One day, my manager said something to me that I have never forgotten. They told me they missed the other lawyer. Not as a throwaway comment but as a direct comparison. They said they missed them because they “managed up” so well.
I sat with that for a while. Our relationship was fractured, which I can take accountability for to a point. I wasn’t in a psychologically safe place in that workplace, I wasn’t confident and I was struggling in ways I didn’t fully understand at the time.
But the thing that struck me most was simpler than all of that. I didn’t know that “managing up” was something people did. I didn’t know it was a skill, let alone one my predecessor had been deploying deliberately and with great impact.
Today, I want to talk about what I didn’t know then and what I think most junior and mid-career lawyers still aren’t being told.
First, let’s name the thing
Managing up is not brown-nosing, it is not office politics and it is not performing enthusiasm you don’t feel in order to be liked. Managing up is the skill of understanding what the person above you needs in order to feel confident in you and proactively and consistently giving them that.
It is communication design, it is reading a room and anticipating the questions your manager will face from their seniors and pre-answering them before anyone has to ask you to.
It is also, in the legal profession, almost never taught.
The metrics that get you promoted in private practice are usually billing and tenure. In-house, it is marginally more nuanced, but not by much. Leadership capability, the actual skill of developing people, communicating clearly, giving useful feedback and building trust within a team, is almost never what carries someone into a management role in law.
What carries them is that they were good at the law, they stayed long enough and someone decided they were next (or they threatened to leave if they weren’t promoted).
The result is that most junior and mid-career lawyers are being managed by someone who is technically excellent at what they do and has received almost no preparation for leading people. I’ve written about this in more depth here but the short version is this: in most legal environments, the licence to lead is granted by default rather than earned with intention.
It is a structural problem that often falls on the junior lawyer to learn how to navigate.
A helpful reframe
When your manager is inconsistent, hard to read or gives you almost no useful feedback, the instinct is to take it personally, to conclude that you are doing something wrong, the environment is broken or that this person simply doesn’t like you.
Sometimes those things can be true.
But more often than not, what you are looking at is someone who never learned how to give feedback. Someone who never learned how to delegate, how to articulate what they need from their team or how to make a junior lawyer feel seen and encouraged.
They arrived in a leadership role because they were a good lawyer and they are doing their best in a job they were not actually prepared for and practicing in real time, on you.
Understanding that does not excuse it. Poor leadership has real costs and you don’t have to pretend otherwise. But it does give you somewhere useful to stand. It moves you from waiting for something to change to asking what you can actually do from where you are.
What managing up looks like in this context
Managing up with an accidental leader is different from the generic advice about knowing your boss’s communication preferences or learning when they like to have meetings. When the structure above you has a gap, you are often quietly compensating for things that should already be in place.
Here is what that can look like in practice:
You make your workload visible without being asked. Your manager is probably not tracking what is on your plate, not because they don’t care, but because no one taught them to. A short, clear, regular update that reaches them before they think to wonder does more for your professional relationship than almost anything else you could do.
You brief up before they get ambushed. When you sense your manager is anxious or when you know something is coming that their seniors will have questions about, you get ahead of it. You don’t wait to be asked. You bring the summary, the recommendation or the status update before the pressure lands on them. Read the room and be proactive.
You create your own feedback touchpoints. In a well-led environment, feedback is structured and regular. In most legal environments, it isn’t. If you are waiting for a formal review cycle to understand how you are tracking, you may be waiting a long time. The move here is to ask specific, answerable questions rather than vague ones. Not “how am I doing?” but “was this the level of detail you needed on that matter?” or “is there something about how I’ve been structuring my updates that would make your life easier?” Specific questions get specific answers and they signal that you are thinking about the broader relationship, not just the task in front of you.
You read their signals as information rather than judgment. When your manager seems distracted, short or difficult to reach, it is tempting to internalise it. To assume you’ve done something wrong. Often, what is actually happening is that they are managing pressure from above that they haven’t shared with you. That is useful information. It tells you when to take more off their plate, when to keep things brief and when to hold your questions for a calmer moment.
Let’s be honest about all of this
It is not fair that this falls to you.
The more capable person in a dynamic often ends up compensating for the structural gap and that is a genuinely uneven distribution of emotional labour that you are allowed to name. If you are carrying the weight of a relationship that the structure above you should be maintaining, you are doing two jobs and I am not going to dress that up as a “growth opportunity” and just leave it there.
Remember, you can always leave.
Finding an environment with strong leadership is a very legitimate career decision and sometimes it is the right one. You are allowed to decide that you have done enough compensating and it is time to find somewhere the structure actually supports you.
But if you are staying and you are committed to where you are for your own reasons, managing up is one of the most transferable and underrated skills in this profession.
What you build here, the ability to read people, to communicate clearly under pressure, to make a working relationship function when the conditions are not ideal, travels with you into every role you will ever hold. These are not “soft” skills.
They are the hard skills that can determine whether you get to do interesting work, whether people advocate for you in rooms you are not in and also whether the careers of the people you eventually lead look different from yours.
The lawyers who figure this out tend to be the ones who get ahead and stay ahead. Not because they played the game better but because they understood the board with a Birds Eye view.
The one thing to do this week
Identify the person above you that you are currently finding hardest to work with.
Sit with this question honestly: is what I am experiencing a character problem or a capability gap?
If it’s a character problem, you might need to read this.
If it is a capability gap, identify one thing you could do this week to make their job easier in a way that also makes yours better. One proactive update. One pre-emptive brief. One specific question instead of a vague check-in.
Start there and see what happens.
✨
Mel Storey is the founder of Counsel Media and host of the Counsel Podcast. She regularly writes the Big Sis Briefing on legal careers, modern leadership and the realities of building a media business in public. Follow her on Instagram @careerbigsis for more.
