How to Get Considered For Manager Roles When You’ve Never Managed Before: 5 Tips

As you climb the corporate ladder and aspire to be a manager, you may notice these senior management jobs are rare and require applicants to already be managers. How can you be considered for a management role when you’ve never had direct reports? Five tips below.

1. Work for a company that is growing quickly. You can then carve out an area and staff people under you. And if you are already at a company that’s not super dynamic, there are still things you can do!
2. Volunteer to work on any new businesses, technologies, or areas of law. I’ve seen people in privacy, blockchain, privacy, compliance, open source, and legal ops roles all pick up direct reports.
3. Volunteer for any kind of management experience. For example, you can probably manage some interns (or set up an intern program if one is not in place already).
4. Quantify your impact. For example, you may have created a template on X for the rest of the team to use, which resulted in $ or %. Or perhaps you are a senior member of the team and serve as a resource on Y.
5. Consider dotted line relationships. Perhaps you have led a key project consisting of cross-functional teams or other lawyers who do not report to you, but you still were able to generate a good result. That’s impressive!

Remember: If you are asked, “Have you managed?”, the answer is not no. Be able to list where you have served as a leader and what your impact has been.