Managing Your Manager - The Golden Oldie
This blog series has been prepared following The Support Staff Community’s Managing Your Manager seminar on 7 November 2019.
Managing Upwards
Harvard Business Review describes managing upwards as “the process of consciously working with your superior to obtain the best possible results for you, your boss, and the company”.
It effectively means being aware of and working in a way that supports your manager’s working style and professional goals, which may mean adapting your own working style to suit them.
Learning how to “manage your manager”, or manage upwards, will make your working life a lot easier. By managing upwards, you will build a more meaningful working relationship with your manager which will lead to improving your communication and processes.
On the other hand, working against your lawyer's style and in a way that does not support them will only create friction within your working relationship and make your day to day working life more difficult.
There are many different working styles and personalities that you may come across during your career in legal support. As a legal support professional, you may often be working for lawyers that have characteristics that present certain challenges. To work effectively with your lawyer, it will be helpful to identify these characteristics and learn how to manage them.
In this post, we will be identifying the Golden Oldie Lawyer, and addressing some of the challenges that come with working for one of these types of lawyers.
The Golden Oldie
How to Recognise Them:
The golden oldie is a lawyer who has typically been practicing for many decades. They will often be resistant to change. They will rely upon hard copies, and will often ask you to print everything for them including emails from their inbox. They are usually hopeless with technology. Don’t be fooled though, some younger practitioners may still have a “golden oldie” personality.
How to Manage Them
Challenge 1: Bringing them into the 21st century
You may be able to encourage some lawyers to change and adapt to new systems and technology.
Explain to your lawyer, and show them in practical terms, how much time can be saved by implementing new procedures. Lawyers may often be shocked how much time it actually takes to do a small pile of filing or how many hours per day are taken up by monitoring and printing items in their inbox.
If your lawyer is reluctant to adopt paper-lite or paperless policies, you should reassure them about how you can assist in making these work, as follows:
Explain that by saving documents and correspondence into system with descriptive names, you can ensure that all documents are easily and quickly accessible by the solicitor (sometimes even faster than as if you were flicking through a physical file).
Create sub-folders within your file management system (if these do not already exist) to ensure that all categories of documents are saved together.
Liaise with IT to ensure that the systems are always working and accessible by the solicitor.
Arrange any IT training necessary to get the lawyer up to date on the electronic systems.
Remind your golden oldie lawyer that these policies are important because:
They are positive for the environment;
They save on space within the office (which is often hard to come by); and
They save you valuable time in printing and filing every single document that you could use for more important aspects of your role.
If your solicitor remains reluctant to adopt these policies, perhaps offer a compromised position. For example, agreeing to print and file all correspondence exchanged between the lawyers in a matter but not all of the correspondence exchanged between your office and the client.
Challenge 2: Accepting that they won’t change
Sometimes it will be hard, if not impossible, to change your solicitor's golden oldie habits. It is important to remember with managing upwards that your goal is to adapt to your solicitor's style. If having hard copies of documents is a priority for them, you may just need to accept this as part of your role in assisting this solicitor.
Stay tuned for further blog posts addressing other lawyer types, such as the anxious lawyer, the absent lawyer, the lifestyle lawyer, the micromanaging lawyer and more!
