Someone capable handed in their resignation this month, and you didn’t expect it because they gave no indication that they were unhappy.
People leave for many reasons, and you may be right about this one: a better offer, or a change of direction. But there’s another way to read the situation that’s worth testing, and it’s easy to miss from the partner’s chair.
If your numbers show inconsistent time recording, write-downs, or a resignation you didn’t see coming, an operational blind spot may be why.
An operational blind spot in action
Someone on your team brings you a problem and asks for your thoughts. You know it well, so dealing with it is faster than explaining your thinking. So you say, “leave it with me.”
You read the situation as a chance to help, and to protect the quality your clients rely on. That’s a fair reading, and it’s part of why the firm’s work is trusted.
However, your senior associate experiences the same situation differently. When a problem moves to your desk, it leaves theirs. Over time, bringing it to you becomes the sensible thing to do, and it gets less clear which decisions are theirs to make.
Your intention is a good one. You care about your team and how the work turns out. That care is part of what built your reputation, and the firm’s. The cost is that your team gets fewer chances to solve problems themselves.
Capable people usually want room to use their own judgement, and when that room narrows, some adapt, some disengage, and some look elsewhere.
Neither reading is wrong. The gap between them is a blind spot. It sits in how the situation is read, not in your skill or personality, and you can’t see it on your own because the only view you have is yours. The Blind Spot Self-Assessment measures six day-to-day situations like this.
Why operational blind spots compound
Each problem you accepted was small, and each one felt worth taking. Together they become firefighting: one problem after another, each meant to be dealt with quickly, while your own work waits until the evening.
Why this isn’t a delegation problem
This isn’t a delegation problem in the usual sense. Delegation is about how you hand work out. This runs the other way, with problems coming up to you. Although, you hand out work well you still find you’re tackling problems your team should be doing.
Why surveys and 360s don’t catch it
You may already run engagement surveys or 360 feedback reviews and they have their uses. Engagement surveys are designed to read overall workplace culture. 360s rate leadership skill and behaviour, usually once a year. Neither is built to show what happens in the specific, day-to-day situations tied to the KPIs they actually move.
The everyday cost: what firefighting alone is worth
Take illustrative rates: £550 an hour for a partner and £200 for a team member, a gap of £350. Assume five hours a week firefighting on problems your team would handle at £200 if the answer were theirs to find. £350 × 5 hours × 46 weeks is £80,500 a year lost to firefighting. Swap in your own figures. That’s the rate gap alone, before a resignation or a write-down.
The cost when the pattern leads to a resignation
Not every resignation traces back to a specific pattern. A department can have several blind spots operating at once, and a departure can come from any one of them.
Thomas Telman’s data puts the cost of replacing someone at around 200% of their basic salary: recruitment fees, lost productivity while a replacement gets up to speed, and the work others absorb in the meantime. On an illustrative salary of £60,000, that is £120,000.
Find out where you may be exposed
Operational blind spots are hard to see from the inside, and costly to leave unchecked. The Blind Spot Self-Assessment covers six day-to-day situations, including this one. It takes three minutes and gives you a private read on where you might be exposed before the gap shows up in your numbers.