Judgment has to become a career, not a chore
The scarcest skill in your organization has no title, no level and no promotion path, and that is a thing you can change.
The other half of the remedy, and the half that needs you specifically. The scarcest skill in your organization has no title, no level and no next step, and that is something a director can change and nobody else can.
Ask what happens to somebody who turns out to be unusually good at telling whether work is right. In most organizations: they are given more of it, informally, on top of their actual objectives, and it appears in their review as a line about being helpful.
There is no next step for it. No title that means it, no level that recognizes it, and nothing they can be promoted into by being better at it. So the people who are best at the scarce thing move away from it, correctly, because that is where the ladder goes.
| what exists now | what would have to exist |
|---|---|
| review as an expectation on everybody | review as a named part of some people's role, with time allocated |
| being good at it noticed in a review as helpfulness | being good at it as a reason for a promotion, statable out loud |
| no title | a title that means it, at more than one level |
| the best judges drifting toward producing, because that is where the ladder goes | a ladder that goes both ways, so the drift is a choice rather than a default |
What only you can do
- Name it in somebody's objectives, with hours. Not as a quality initiative — as a share of one or two people's time, defended when it costs output.
- Promote somebody for it, once, visibly. One promotion where the stated reason is judgment establishes more than any amount of saying it matters.
- Ask for the ratio from step three in review, more than once. A number nobody asks about twice is an event, not a measurement.
And the honest alternative. You can decline all of this on the grounds that the failures are survivable and the money is better spent elsewhere. That is a real position, it is much better than an aspiration nobody resources, and the number from step three is what lets you revisit it deliberately rather than by surprise.