The Pattern That Quietly Kept Me Working Weekends (Even When I Had an Amazing Team)
Another 6am start. The office was quiet, the sun just coming up, and everything looked calm on the surface. What I didn’t realize then was how much of that calm depended on me holding everything together.
There’s something I haven’t said out loud before about how I ran my law firm.
From the outside, it looked tight.
Clean systems.
High standards.
Consistent work product.
And all of that was true.
What wasn’t obvious was how much of it was being held together by me.
Not because it had to be.
Because of how I was operating.
At the time, I would have told you I just cared about doing things well.
I had high standards.
I took pride in the work.
I wanted clients to have the best experience possible.
All of that was true too.
But it wasn’t the full story.
Behind the scenes, there was a pattern running that I didn’t recognize at the time.
My perfection loop was being enforced by my need for control.
And it showed up in ways that looked completely reasonable.
I would revise client document language over and over again.
Even routine language.
Even when it was already more than sufficient.
Not because it needed to be better.
Because I needed it to feel “perfect” (the ever-elusive standard).
I subtly trained my team to come to me with questions.
Not overtly.
I wasn’t demanding it.
But I was always available.
Always the final check.
Always the one who “just made it better.”
So they did what any smart team does.
They deferred.
Even when they were fully capable of making the decision themselves.
I didn’t fully trust their work.
Not because they weren’t good.
Because I didn’t trust that things would hold if I stepped back.
So I stayed involved.
Just enough to keep everything “on track.”
What I didn’t see then was that I was reinforcing the very thing I was frustrated by.
If everything runs through you, your team will keep bringing things to you.
If you keep improving everything, they’ll assume it’s not quite right yet.
If you stay the final decision point, they won’t fully step into ownership.
That’s not a team problem.
That’s a pattern.
And it’s a costly one.
It cost me time I didn’t need to be spending.
It cost me mental bandwidth I didn’t have to give.
It cost me the ability to ever feel ahead.
Because I was doing work that no longer belonged to me.
So I worked weekends.
[I wrote about this more personally here.]
More than I can count.
Not because the firm required it.
Because my internal operating system did.
This is the part most firm owners miss.
[How this shows up in your firm.]
You can have the right people.
The right systems.
The right structure.
And still feel like everything depends on you.
Because, in practice, it does.
Not structurally.
Behaviorally.
Once I started to see this, it changed how I thought about everything.
I didn’t need a better team.
Or more refined systems.
I needed to stop reinforcing the pattern that kept pulling everything back to me (perfection > need to control everything to enforce it).
That’s a much harder shift to make.
Because it doesn’t look like fixing something.
It looks like letting go of the thing that’s been making you feel safe.
It’s a pattern I didn’t fully see for a long time in my own practice and wish I had seen sooner.
If you’re starting to suspect a pattern running in the background of your firm that isn’t serving you, you’re not alone.
Most people never look at this layer.
But when you do, things tend to shift faster than adding more systems or people.
