What Is Managing Up?
As opposed to a “hard skill” like your technical legal knowledge, managing up is a “soft skill.” It is a set of character and interpersonal traits that characterize your ability to have effective working relationships with your bosses. Managing up includes the following characteristics:
- Understanding the specific objectives that your boss wants to achieve for an assignment.
- Learning your bosses' unique management, communication, and work styles.
- Awareness of your own communication and work styles.
- Aligning your work product, communication, and work style to those of each boss and their specific goals.
- Communicating with your bosses to clarify deadlines and set expectations.
The Significance of Managing Up
For new lawyers, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to work assignments. Bosses require different deliverables for various legal matters, whether a legal memorandum, court pleading, or a simple short answer to a legal query. Additionally, each boss has a unique management, communication, and work style. One partner may require more frequent email updates on your progress with the assignment, while another may simply expect to hear from you upon final submission. Your bosses may also have different writing styles and legal strategies. By considering your bosses' distinct work expectations and personalities, you can deliver the best results on their assignments throughout the office.
Adopt a Service Mindset
Managing up means meeting your bosses’ work expectations and not insubordinately challenging their actions or decisions. As a new lawyer, you must adopt a service mindset and strive to deliver work output that satisfies your supervising lawyers’ needs. However, a service mindset does not preclude having respectful yet open discussions with your bosses on the best strategies to take or how best to tackle an assignment. Rather, it means catering to your bosses’ needs, and instead of questioning their final judgment or instruction, ask why they did it for your own edification.
Understand the Goals of a Work Assignment
Beyond the express instructions of a given assignment, your bosses may have an underlying objective or broader goal they want to achieve with the work product. Assignments are usually not isolated projects, but part of a larger body of work. Actively reflecting on the big picture and understanding why the assignment is needed for the case or the client is an invaluable tool for new lawyers to ensure that their work product anticipates and meets the needs of their bosses.
Learn Their Work Style
Each boss has their own work style and idiosyncrasies. Do they prefer to communicate via email, in person, or by phone? How frequently do they want updates on your work progress? If they have a preferred writing style or legal strategy, how can you do your best to incorporate them?
As you continue working with your boss, they will naturally reveal more of their individual work style, and you will need to refine and adjust your approach consistently. However, when working for the first time with a new boss, it is best to ask them, or other more established individuals at the workplace, about their specific expectations and work preferences.
Proactively Communicate
Perhaps the most important aspect of managing up is communicating deadlines and work expectations with your bosses. Understand that your bosses are often busy juggling numerous workflows and might not always provide clear instructions or communicate their needs effectively. In other words, if something is unclear that you reasonably believe is important for execution, ask your boss.
Promptly clarify instructions regarding the assignment that are vague or confusing (which you cannot independently resolve despite doing the active self-reflection). Otherwise, you may waste time on work that completely misses the mark. To ensure that you are always aligned with your boss on expectations, inform them as soon as you discover any legal rulings or factual findings that necessitate making substantial changes to the previously agreed-upon approach for the work product.
If a deadline for a new assignment is not clear, do not be afraid to ask. If you genuinely foresee difficulties meeting the deadline, express your willingness to do the work but communicate your workload constraints. To show initiative, propose a reasonable deadline when you can realistically finish the assignment. Many new lawyers often hesitate to speak up for fear of appearing lazy or incompetent. However, by not speaking up, you run the real risk of missing deadlines. By accepting the task while explaining your workload limitations, you set realistic expectations while still demonstrating enthusiasm for the work. On the other hand, however, be careful about how frequently you negotiate these deadlines, as you do not want to make an impression that you cannot manage your time or do not prioritize new work.
The End Game to Managing Up
Managing up is an art you must master early and maintain throughout your professional career. Climbing the ladder to partner, chief legal counsel, or senior government lawyer does not imply that you become answerable to no one. It merely shifts your responsibilities to new groups or individuals: a partner is accountable to the law firm’s clients, while a chief legal counsel reports to the company’s board of directors, and senior government lawyers are responsible for answering to even higher-ranking officials in the bureaucracy.
Take the time to sit in the moment and appreciate and learn from the present rather than always looking for ways to jump ahead to the future. By understanding your current position, you will be better able to lead and empathize with those you are managing in the future while masterfully continuing to manage up at a higher level.
