Anna didn’t open LinkedIn to leave MSL; she opened it to see where she stood.
She scrolled slowly, not looking for jobs or updating anything yet. Just browsing, reading the titles, and the language people used to describe themselves after leaving MSL: Senior Associate, Counsel, and Director.
Anna hadn’t been mistreated or overlooked. She was busy and trusted. She was involved in important matters, yet she was suspended, working within a system that assumed the next step would reveal itself without ever naming it. The firm assumed progress would happen on its own.
Anna lived with that assumption every day.
She thought back over the last few months.
Her feedback from the partners was positive but nonspecific. The conversations concluded with “keep doing what you’re doing,” and the meetings mentioned leadership but did not define it.
Nobody was holding anything back. There just wasn’t anything solid to hold onto.
Anna realized that what unsettled her wasn’t uncertainty itself. It was the expectation that she should be able to live with it forever and that effort alone would eventually lead to leadership, influence, and opportunities without a plan.
She closed LinkedIn without updating her profile, not because she felt reassured but because she now understood something clearly: if the firm was going to assume her development would take care of itself, she needed to pay closer attention to how others were designing theirs.
Elsewhere in the firm, Margaret was doing the same thing, just in a different way.
Margaret had stopped counting departures. She was observing patterns—who left quietly, who stayed but disengaged, and who asked fewer questions than before. What troubled her wasn’t dissatisfaction; it was resignation.
Margaret sat at her desk late one evening and then opened her notebook.
She didn’t write observations; she wrote conclusions.
First:
Good intentions are not a system.
She paused.
Then added a second line beneath it.
Assumption is not a development strategy.
She underlined both.
Margaret knew the firm hadn’t decided to leave development to chance.
It had simply never decided to design it. For years, the assumption had filled the void that:
People would infer expectations, leadership would emerge naturally, and business development would begin when someone was ready.
But the assumption held only as long as people believed the system was paying attention.
That belief was weakening.
Margaret looked back at the notes she’d been collecting.
Not complaints or demands, just signals. Associates weren’t asking for guarantees. They were asking how effort translated into growth.
If the firm doesn’t find a way to make development visible instead of leaving it to assumption, it will keep losing people who are otherwise deeply invested. Not all at once, but quietly.
Margaret closed her notebook and leaned back.
She wasn’t searching for a program or a slogan; she was seeking an idea or a structure that could turn effort into direction without forcing people to guess their path.
Anna and Margaret didn’t know what the other was doing that night, but they were reacting to the same thing.
A firm that worked hard, a culture with good intentions, and a development path that everyone assumed would explain itself.
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