Originally published on LinkedIn on 13 August 2026.
Every firm carries a cost that never shows up as its own line in your P&L. Instead, it shows up as movement in the numbers you already track every month. This week, that’s your own chargeable hours and your leverage ratio. That cost comes from one place, the gap between how a leader reads a situation and how their team actually experiences it. Each week, this brief takes one situation, highlights the pattern behind it, and shows exactly which number it moves.
How the leader reads it
Two people are involved in this Situation: you, the equity partner who made the promotion, and the senior associate you promoted to salaried partner, now responsible for leading a team of their own.
The morning the promotion is announced, something quietly doesn’t change. A client calls with a tricky question, and instead of the new partner fielding it alone, they still copy you in, just to check. A resourcing decision comes up on their team, and they still knock on your door before deciding. You don’t ask them to, it just happens, the same way it always has, because neither of you has actually marked the moment where that stops.
Weeks later, you’re still in the room for calls that were meant to be theirs, not because you insisted, but because nobody drew the line.
How the newly promoted partner experiences it
For the newly salaried partner, those same moments land differently. Copying you in on the client question, or knocking on your door before deciding, doesn’t feel like a choice they’re making freely, it’s more a safer move, the one less likely to go wrong.
Over time, that produces a specific kind of hesitation. Rather than building the instinct to decide independently, both for their matters and for the team now reporting to them, the instinct that develops instead is to check with you first. The capability the promotion was meant to build develops much slower than it should.
What it’s costing you
This shows up in two places you already track. Your own capacity stays tied up in decisions that should have moved to the new partner, time that could otherwise go toward higher value work, business development, oversight across the wider practice, measured in the chargeable hours you’re not freeing up to spend there.
At the same time, the benefit leverage ratio is supposed to produce doesn’t actually materialise. The firm is now carrying the cost of a salaried partner, in salary, in status, in client-facing presence, without the added decision-making capacity that role exists to provide. On paper, you have another partner leading a team. In practice, you’re still leading it through them.
Why your current reporting might not show this
A performance review could catch this, in theory, if it asked both the equity partner and the newly promoted partner the same two questions: is the equity partner still stepping in unprompted, and is the new partner still checking first? In practice, it’s usually one sided. The performance review asks the newly promoted partner how they’re doing. It’s not designed to ask the equity partner whether they’re still stepping in. So, both patterns go uncaptured.
An engagement survey and a 360 review don’t ask those questions either. An engagement survey measures how people feel about the firm overall, motivation, satisfaction, whether they’d recommend it as a place to work, a temperature check on sentiment, not a read on how someone handles a particular moment like this one. A 360 review measures how one individual is perceived by a handful of peers, gathered once a year, telling you something about someone’s general style, not whether authority has actually moved from you to them, day to day, decision by decision.
None of the three tools map back to a number either. Even if an engagement score dips or 360 flags something is off, none of them tell you what’s actually happening underneath it: that your own time is still going toward decisions that were meant to be theirs now, or that the firm isn’t getting the added capacity a more senior title is meant to provide.
One question to ask this week
Think of the last senior promotion you made. Ask yourself plainly: when did they last make a significant call about their team or their matters without checking with me first?
If you can’t remember, that’s worth sitting with.
Stepping Up is one of the operational blind spots quietly costing firms real money, in hours that never get freed up, and in capacity the firm is paying for but not getting. If you want to know whether it’s happening in your own firm, and what it’s costing, the Financial Diagnostic is free and built specifically around your firm. It starts with a short 10-minute call to get your report underway.
Next week: Situation 4, Scope & Brief Changes.