Originally published on LinkedIn on 30 July 2026.
Situation 1: Work Review & Sign-off
The cost in your firm isn’t sitting in a report. It’s sitting in the gap between how you read a situation and how your team actually experiences it. Each week, one situation. One pattern. One operational cost.
This week: Work Review.
How the leader reads it
Reviewing a colleague’s work is one of the most natural things a partner does. You’ve built your reputation on getting the detail right, and you want the same standard to carry through everything that leaves the building under the firm’s name. So, you read the draft. You spot the phrase you’d have written differently, the argument you’d have led with, the clause you’d have tightened, and you talk the associate through exactly how you’d have approached it.
In your mind, this is care, not control. You want the work to be as strong as it can possibly be, and sharing your own approach feels like the most useful thing you can offer. Most partners would describe it the same way if asked directly. The intention is genuinely good, and few leaders set out to make review feel like anything other than support.
How the team experiences it
From the associate’s side, the picture looks different. They put real effort into the draft, made judgement calls, weighed options, and arrived at a version they were satisfied with. Then it comes back with a detailed account of everything the leader would have done instead, sometimes on points that were genuine errors, and other times on points that were simply a different, equally valid way of doing it.
Over time, that repeated experience starts to land somewhere quieter than the work itself. It becomes a small, cumulative knock to confidence. Not a single dramatic moment, but the slow sense that their own judgement is rarely the version that stands. Most associates won’t raise it directly either, since being talked through a better approach is such a normal, accepted part of firm life that it rarely gets questioned, even as it shapes how much confidence someone brings to the next piece of work.
What it’s costing you
Confidence is not a soft, side issue here. It’s the mechanism behind a real productivity risk. Support that goes beyond what’s actually required, however well intentioned, still lands as a message about how much someone’s own approach is trusted. Once that confidence is knocked, it doesn’t reset overnight. It takes time to rebuild, and while it’s rebuilding, people tend to play it safer. They stick closer to what they know will be approved rather than making the judgement call that would have made the work genuinely better.
That’s where the productivity risk actually sits. Not in hours logged, since a competent associate still moves through the next matter regardless. It sits in the confidence to commit fully to their own read of a problem, which is exactly the thing a firm needs more of as people grow into more senior work.
One question to ask this week
Think back to the last piece of work you reviewed in detail. Ask the person who completed it, plainly: “When I talked you through my approach, how did that land?”
Listen closely to the answer, not just the words but what’s underneath them. If it surprises you, that’s the gap the financial diagnostic is built to measure.
Want to learn more
The Financial Diagnostic starts by measuring how you read 7 situations. It’s the first step toward seeing where that read and your team’s experience diverge, and what that’s costing you.
Next week: Situation 2, Workload Assignment.