Improving Your Management Style and Ultimately Your Well-Being
For many female lawyers, managing other employees is a delicate balancing act of managing personalities, work flow, and goals. It can be complicated by tight deadlines, long hours, high pressure, and of course, people’s personal lives. Working on improving your management skills will benefit your own well-being as well as the happiness and success of your team.
When you think about yourself as an individual, give yourself an honest review of your greatest strengths both as a person, and as a lawyer. Are there some areas where you could use improvement? These likely affect your management style and work life, and there are several key qualities a great manager has. Use the strengths and areas for improvement you noted above to evaluate yourself on these management qualities:
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Emotional Intelligence
Women are typically able to forge better emotional attunement with our team. This includes having self-awareness, empathy, and the ability to handle interpersonal relationships and personalities.
- In practice: In our firms, people often work under intense stress. Clients are demanding. Deadlines can be tight. Trials are grueling. A manager who can recognize when a team member is burning out and respond with compassion is not just kind—they're strategic. It benefits us all to take care of one another, and fostering an environment where fellow employees can come to you when they are overwhelmed, burned out, or need compassion is a key to success.
- How to develop it: Start with active listening. In meetings, listen without interrupting. Reflect back what people say to confirm understanding. Practice mindfulness to become more self-aware of your reactions and stress triggers. If you are stressed, how are your employees handling it? If you have a lot of tight deadlines, is the work spread out or falling on just a few key players? Check in with your staff and look for external cues of distress or burnout.
- Communication Skills
Clarity, conciseness, and consistency are markers of good management. Being clear about expectations and deadlines will save a lot of headaches, and being consistent/reliable with your communication helps with work flow and stress management for you and your employees.
- In practice: This works for clients, other attorneys, and staff.
- How to develop it: Figure out a system that works for you—i.e., calendaring deadlines or sending via email, and develop regular check-ins and ways to ensure things don’t slip through the cracks. Unfortunately, sometimes these processes develop from something being missed/errors, but that’s ok. Learn and grow from it. When going over expectations, provide samples/examples if that will help, and resources/references to assist, and be there if your guidance or advice is needed. Decide who handles what client contacts.
- Integrity and Accountability
Good management and leadership is built via trust. Teams thrive under leaders who hold themselves accountable and stick to their word.
- In practice: Model behavior and hold yourself to the same standards you expect from others. Follow procedures, meet your own deadlines, and be transparent when errors occur. Discuss these openly and how you can correct them and avoid them in the future.
- How to develop it: Set standards for accountability and tracking of work flow. Review your actions against your expectations/demands regularly and for those you oversee. Admit when you're wrong; own it and make a habit of figuring out what you can improve personally and systematically. Be open to feedback and allow channels for this, either formal meetings or regular check ins.
- Delegation and Trust
Micromanaging stifles creativity and breeds resentment. Delegating effectively means assigning responsibility and trusting your team to deliver. This can be really hard, but it’s worth it and will really let your staff and office flourish and grow.
- In practice: In law, everything feels urgent and critical. It’s tempting to hover over junior associates or paralegals. But if you're always jumping in to “fix” things, they’ll never learn and you won’t feel the ability to let go. Empower your team with the tools and authority to handle their work.
- How to develop it: Match tasks with team members’ strengths. Give clear instructions and ensure everyone understands the expectations and deadlines, and then step back. You can ask for final review, or give to a more senior person in the same role. Schedule regular check-ins rather than hovering.
- Organizational Skills
Good managers plan ahead, juggle competing priorities, and anticipate issues before they arise.
- In practice: Managing attorneys or staff often involves balancing multiple case deadlines, client demands, and court schedules. Figure out a system that works for all parties, test it out, and tweak as needed. Don’t expect perfection immediately. If someone else has a strategy or system that works, learn it, and implement it.
- How to develop it: Find some way to formalize your systems, whether that’s project management software or simple checklists. Check in with others at your firm for how they do things, and ask outside of your firm. Evaluate your systems at regular intervals.
While managing employees and your work will feel vital, do not forget about yourself. Burning out will not make you a better lawyer or manager. You can’t take care of your clients, your colleagues, or your family if you aren’t taking care of yourself. If you need help, ask for it. Being honest about yourself and where you are at will encourage your office and firm to do the same.
Being a manager means knowing people—how they work, how they struggle, and how they grow. It means leading with clarity, fairness, and vision. And it means leading by example. These skills don’t come overnight. But with practice, intention, and humility, all of us can develop them. Start where you are, be honest with yourself, and stay committed to growth, for your sake and for the people you work with.
Judith Conway is a trial attorney with Cooney and Conway with experience in representing victims of serious personal injury and wrongful death, from the initial client introduction through trial and appeal.
This article was originally published in The Catalyst (September 2025, Vol. 31, No. 1), the newsletter of ISBA’s Standing Committee on Women and the Law.