Your Greatest Strength Might Be Your Biggest Blind Spot

How Tax and Accounting Leaders Unknowingly Limit Their Teams by Applying Technical Instincts to Human Relationships

Sarah had spent fifteen years becoming one of the most respected tax professionals at her firm. Her technical knowledge was exceptional. Her work was precise, well-documented, and audit-ready. Clients trusted her. Partners relied on her. When a leadership opportunity opened up for this seasoned accounting professional, she was the obvious choice.

Two years later, something was quietly wrong. The work was still excellent. Deadlines were met. Clients were satisfied. But three of her strongest team members had left in eighteen months, and the ones who remained were competent but disengaged. They executed their assignments reliably and went home. Nobody was bringing new ideas to the table. Nobody seemed to be growing.

Sarah was confused. She was doing everything right, technically speaking. What she had not yet seen was that the leadership blind spot costing her team was not a lack of skill or effort. It was that the very habits that made her an exceptional tax professional were the same habits making her a difficult person to work for. And in the accounting profession, she was far from alone.

The Two Ways People Default to Trust

Before examining what happens in the workplace, it helps to understand something more fundamental about human wiring. Psychologists who study trust and relationship behavior have identified two primary defaults that shape how people approach new relationships and situations.

Some people extend trust first and adjust downward based on evidence. They enter relationships with an assumption of good faith, give others the benefit of the doubt, and reserve judgment until behavior warrants otherwise. Others require trust to be earned before extending it. They are observant, cautious, and deliberate about who and what they rely on. They are not cynical, but they are careful.

Neither default is superior. Both are rational responses to lived experience, shaped by early relationships, personality, and the environments a person has moved through over time. A person raised in a stable, predictable environment tends to develop a trusting default. A person who experienced inconsistency or betrayal early in life tends to develop a more guarded one. These patterns form long before we are conscious of them and they follow us into every professional context we enter.

What is less commonly understood is that professional environments can reinforce and amplify a natural default over time. And few professional environments do this more powerfully than tax and accounting.

How the Profession Shapes the Default

Tax and accounting professionals are trained, from the earliest stages of their careers, to assume that errors exist until proven otherwise. Every number is verified. Every assumption is documented. Every conclusion is supported by evidence. This is not pessimism. It is professionalism, and in the technical work, it is entirely appropriate.

The problem is that this orientation does not stay neatly inside the boundaries of technical tasks. It becomes a cognitive habit, a default lens through which information of all kinds gets processed. Over years and decades of practice, the instinct to verify, check, and withhold judgment until evidence is sufficient becomes deeply ingrained. The profession rewards it. Promotions go to people who catch what others miss. Reputations are built on precision and skepticism applied rigorously. The message the profession sends, consistently and clearly, is that caution is competence.

By the time a skilled tax or accounting professional reaches a leadership role, they have often spent a decade or more having their most skeptical instincts validated and rewarded. This is worth sitting with for a moment. Not because it is wrong, but because it sets up a specific and predictable challenge when that same person is now responsible not just for technical output but for the development and performance of other people.

When Rigor Becomes a Leadership Liability

Consider what the trust-withholding default looks like in practice when applied to people rather than numbers.

A partner reviews every client memo that leaves the team, regardless of whether the staff member who wrote it has two years of experience or ten. The stated reason is quality control. The experienced team member experiences it as a signal that their professional judgment still has not been earned. Over time, they stop investing in the quality of their thinking because they have learned it will be reviewed and revised regardless.

A manager gives feedback almost exclusively in the form of corrections. She is thorough, specific, and technically accurate in every note she provides. What she almost never communicates is what was done well, because she was trained to find what needs fixing and fixing is where she directs her attention. Her team members, particularly the newer ones, begin to wonder if they are capable at all.

A director, with a major deadline approaching, watches a senior staff member struggle with a complex issue. After a few minutes he takes the work back and completes it himself. He frames this as helping. What his team absorbs is that when the pressure is real, he does not actually trust them to deliver.

None of these leaders are malicious. None of them would describe themselves as distrustful of their teams. In most cases they would say the opposite. But behavior in daily habits and under pressure reveals the actual default, regardless of what a person believes about themselves.

Why This Is So Hard to See

The reason this blind spot is so persistent is that it does not feel like a blind spot. It feels like professionalism.

When a leader reviews work extensively, it feels like maintaining standards. When they focus feedback on errors, it feels like helping people improve. When they take work back under deadline pressure, it feels like protecting the client. Each individual action has a legitimate-sounding rationale, and in isolation each one might even be appropriate. The problem is the pattern, and patterns are much harder to observe from inside them than from outside.

There is also a feedback problem unique to this environment. In tax and accounting, technical errors tend to surface quickly and visibly. But the cost of withheld trust shows up slowly, quietly, and in ways that are easy to misattribute. A team member stops contributing ideas not because anything dramatic happened but because the cumulative experience of having their work thoroughly re-examined has taught them that their independent thinking is not particularly valued. A high performer begins exploring other opportunities not because of a specific incident but because, after several years, they have not been given meaningful autonomy and they are not willing to wait much longer. The connection between the leader's trust default and these outcomes rarely gets made explicitly, which means the pattern continues unchallenged.

A Different Way to Look at It

The goal here is not to suggest that tax and accounting professionals should abandon their standards or become less rigorous about quality. The technical demands of the work are real and non-negotiable.

The shift that matters is learning to distinguish between two things that currently feel identical from the inside: technical standards, which are professional requirements, and control habits, which are optional and worth examining. Reviewing a junior staff member's client letter is a reasonable quality control step. Reviewing a seven-year senior's analysis for the fourth time is something else, and the difference is worth being honest about.

One diagnostic question that can help make this distinction more visible: Am I doing this because the risk genuinely requires it, or because not doing it makes me uncomfortable? The first is professional judgment. The second is a habit worth questioning.

Where to Start

Self-awareness of this kind does not develop from reading a single article. But it can begin with a few deliberate steps.

Start by reflecting honestly on the last significant piece of work you delegated. Did you review it once, or multiple times? Did the number of reviews reflect the actual risk level of the work, or your comfort level with letting go? There is a meaningful difference between those two things, and most leaders in this profession have never been asked to separate them.

Consider asking one trusted colleague or direct report a single honest question: "Is there anything I do that makes you feel like I don't fully trust your work?" Then listen without defending. The answer, whatever it is, is useful data.

Finally, think about the professionals on your team who have been there the longest. Are they more capable and more confident than they were two years ago? Or are they reliably competent but not noticeably growing? The trajectory of the people around you is one of the clearest signals available about whether your leadership trust is calibrated in a way that serves them and not just protects you.

If this reflection surfaces something worth examining, the next article in this series explores what withheld trust actually costs your team — and why those costs rarely show up where leaders expect them to.

Sarah eventually came to understand what had happened on her team. It did not happen all at once, and it was not entirely comfortable to see. But once she could distinguish between her technical identity and her leadership identity, she had something she had not had before: a choice. The habits that built her career were not going anywhere, and she did not need them to. She just needed to learn when to use them and when to set them down.

That, it turns out, is a skill entirely worth developing.

Related Articles:

• Part 2: The Silent Tax on Your Team: What Withheld Trust Actually Costs

• Part 3: Busy Season Doesn't Lie - What Pressure Reveals About Your Leadership (coming soon)