What a Big 4 manager actually does

As a consultant, your job is your work: your deliverables, your workstream, your contribution. As a manager, your responsibilities go exponential — and almost none of the new ones are things you were assessed on when you were promoted.

You're managing your team, managing upwards to partners, managing clients, selling work, building an internal brand, coaching people, and building your own promotion case. Simultaneously. It is genuinely overwhelming, and nobody tells you that in advance.

Selling suddenly matters

The biggest shift: you're now expected to bring money into the firm. And the more you bring in, the stronger your promotion case gets. It felt grubby to me at first. It's simply the job.

There are two ways to do it. The first is selling projects — convincing a client that your team is the right one, usually against McKinsey, EY and everyone else who can also do it. The second is managed revenue: the revenue generated by the people you're responsible for. Managing a team of five means managing five revenue streams for the firm. Most people fixate on sales and forget this one entirely.

Every manager manages projects. So selling is how you actually differentiate yourself — which is why specialising matters. If nobody knows what you're known for, nobody brings you into bids.

Here's what that looks like in practice. During Covid, a partner in the Middle East had a relationship with a huge retailer that had just lost 95% of its footfall because every store had closed. The client asked: how do I make money from customers when the stores are shut, and what should I launch? Because I'd built a brand in customer and product strategy, that question travelled through about four people — and landed with me. I didn't find that bid. It found me.

You run the project now — and still do the work

As a consultant, you complete your tasks and help the team hit deliverables. As a manager you're running the whole project, sometimes several, and you're effectively doing two jobs at once.

You're still advising on the work your consultants are producing. But you're also on the plan, the timelines, the budget, the risks, the financials, the status reporting. You need to be high enough to advise a client on strategic decisions, and deep enough in the detail to actually help your team do the work.

And you're managing relationships in every direction: weekly account meetings with your own partners and project leads, covering risks, opportunities to sell more work, and — inevitably — some internal politics. Then client politics on top. The more senior you get, the more senior relationships you hold, sometimes speaking to the same people twice a day, mostly putting out fires before they start.

The thing that genuinely threw me

You become the expert. I was suddenly in CxO conversations as the product person, giving strategic advice on product decisions.

The hand that held yours as a consultant lets go, and you're afloat in the ocean on your own. People start looking to you as the role model in your field, and imposter syndrome arrives right on cue. That transition is rarely discussed and it is the hardest part of the grade.

Coaching your team is the best bit

Managing a project means managing people, and this is the most fulfilling part of the job by a distance. You become responsible for their development, their wellbeing, their happiness.

I try to understand what each person actually wants from their career, then find them the stretch that gets them there. Regular check-ins. Honestly asking how they are, and adjusting how I manage rather than expecting them to adjust to me.

There's a self-interested truth underneath the altruism, too: developing people builds a followership — a group who will speak up for you when you're not in the room. That's not a small thing. It's the same sponsorship dynamic that decides promotions, seen from the other side.

Then there's the firm itself

You get pulled into running the business. I sit in Customer Strategy and Innovation, and every week I'm looking at the revenue our operating unit is making, what the pipeline looks like, and helping resource my people onto their next projects.

You're also responsible for their performance. That means performance reviews — and sometimes difficult conversations about poor performance, which you have to be willing to have honestly rather than avoid.

And you build your promotion case on the side

Roughly 20% of my time goes on this, and it deserves its own warning.

Consulting promotion is a bit like Dragons' Den: you go round convincing people why you deserve the next grade — a long list, then a shortlist, then interviews. One of the things you're assessed on is how much future business you'll bring in: essentially the return a partner gets by investing in you rather than someone else.

So "I'll bring in more retail clients" isn't enough. You need a specific area of expertise and a credible plan to build a capability and a pipeline in it.

And the best way to build the case is to already be doing the thing. Mine was building a product practice inside Deloitte — so alongside client work and bids, I was coaching people in product, building the propositions, shaping what the offering should be, trying to sell product projects. Effectively running a small business inside the firm, on the side of the day job.

That's the same principle as the Scope Gap: act a level up before anyone gives you the title.

Would I warn you off it?

No. But I'd tell you the truth nobody told me: the manager grade is where you stop being paid to do the work and start being paid to carry it. If you're heading for it, get clear now on what you want to be known for — because the bids, the promotion case and the pipeline are all built on that one answer.

If you're weighing that jump, here's what promotion panels actually assess.