The skills you're not getting credit for (and why they matter more than you think)
“The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.”
Earlier this month in Female Lawyers' Club, we hosted a brilliant masterclass with Mandy Rees, a commercial real estate lawyer turned certified coach, burnout survivor, and someone who genuinely understands the juggle of building a legal career while also having a life outside of it.
The session was called The Silent Edge: How Soft Skills Win in Law, and it was SO bang on topic for female lawyers.
Here are the key insights, along with some practical things you can take away and actually use.
The skills you're already using aren't a nice-to-have. They're a competitive advantage.
There are certain skills that are highly valuable for lawyers and yet which are not talked about very often.
I’m referring to things like deep listening, emotional regulation, relational intelligence and intuition.
These are the abilities that let you pick up that a client's real worry isn't the drafting - it's what their board is going to say. That let you sense something's off in a deal before anyone has articulated why. That make a distressed junior feel safe enough to admit a mistake early, before it becomes a much bigger problem for everyone.
The legal profession doesn't put these in your KPIs. Your billing target doesn't capture the time you spent steadying a colleague who was about to quit, or diffusing a negotiation that was about to collapse. But the research is clear: firms with strong emotional intelligence in their leadership consistently outperform those without. Clients rate calm judgment and the ability to anticipate risk among the most valued traits in their advisers. Replacing a mid-level associate costs far more than the invisible effort it took to keep them.
These skills aren't “soft”. They're just harder to measure. And that's a problem with how law firms currently measure success, not a problem with the skills themselves.
Why we suppress them, and what that costs us
The problem isn't that you don't have these skills. It's that the environment often makes it hard to use them openly, and tends to reward ways of working that don't come naturally to many of us.
So we push the deep listening to one side and try to appear more direct. We absorb everyone else's stress without naming it. We say yes to the extra task because no one else volunteers and it feels easier than the discomfort of silence. We keep going on what Mandy calls Warrioress mode, getting everything done, holding everyone together, saying yes when we mean no, until eventually we hit the wall.
Mandy described the cost of this with uncomfortable precision: mental fatigue that doesn't lift on weekends, replaying conversations on the drive home, wondering if you came across firmly enough, overfunctioning as a way of managing self-doubt, resentment building because the emotional labour you're doing every day simply doesn't show up on the appraisal form. And then, finally, starting to wonder whether the next level is actually worth it.
None of this is you getting it wrong. It's what happens when you run on one mode, full throttle, without the rest of your toolkit anywhere in sight.
The five feminine leadership modes, and how to use them deliberately
Mandy introduced a framework she uses with her coaching clients: five leadership modes that most women already have, but tend to use unconsciously, or have driven underground entirely.
Queen: She sets direction, makes decisions, holds boundaries. No guilt, no people-pleasing, no imposter syndrome. She's the part of you that can say "that deadline doesn't work for me, I'll have it Friday" and stop there, without the paragraph of justification that usually follows. For many of us, this particular muscle is seriously underdeveloped.
Mother: The steady, calm presence in the room. She emotionally regulates, absorbs anxiety, holds people together. Incredibly powerful when used well, but when she's on all the time, she ends up absorbing everyone else's stress with nothing left over for herself.
Connector: She builds trust, reads the room, notices the energy. She's the reason clients move all their work to you, and why colleagues choose to confide in you rather than anyone else. The catch is that she struggles to come forward when you're depleted, so she tends to go quiet exactly when you need her most.
Warrioress: She gets things done. She pushes back. She keeps going on no sleep. Mandy said that without exception, every female lawyer she has worked with has a high Warrioress, which is also why so many of us hit burnout. When she's running at full capacity for long enough, she eventually hands back all her weapons and collapses. Does this sound familiar?
Strategist: She sees the bigger picture, trusts instinct, spots what isn't being said. She's the part of you that knew something was off about that deal before anyone else clocked it, or sensed that a team member wasn't really ok, even when they insisted they were fine.
The point, as Mandy put it, isn't whether you have these. You do. The question is whether you're using them deliberately, or whether they're running you.
A few practical things to try this week
At work: query a deadline without over-explaining ("that doesn't work for me, but I can have it by Friday"); leave a meeting without volunteering for the task no one else has claimed; block one hour to think about where your career is going and protect it as seriously as you would a client meeting. You may find my Career Reset guide helpful for this.
At home: put one evening in the diary that is yours and commit to not rearranging it; hand over a household task and let it be done differently without stepping in to correct it; try saying "I need help with this" without then listing all the reasons why you need help.
The bigger picture, as Mandy put it, is this: if your career is going to last, it has to work for you as a woman in it. That means bringing your natural strengths in deliberately, not as an alternative to being excellent at the law, but as the thing that makes you sustainably excellent at it.
One comment from a member during the session really stood out. She said she had spent three years at her previous firm thinking she wasn't any good at law, when really she just wasn't a good fit for that particular version of leadership. Hearing Mandy name these things so clearly helped her see that it wasn't her. It was the model.
That is exactly why we keep having these conversations.
Enjoy the rest of your week.
Rachel
Ps. The recording of Mandy's masterclass is available inside Female Lawyers' Club. Not a member yet? You can find out more at femalelawyersclub.com/join.