"They'll find other opportunities to make up the hours. You're management now, Alicia. You're not an associate. Stop pretending that you are. Will the other associates grumble about you? Yes. But if you pretend you're still their peer, they will grumble all the more, and they will come to hate you. This is not the Queen's Hamlet. You cannot dress up as a peasant here. So stop it. It is galling to them, and it is galling to me."

Gorgeous. And not only fair in that Diane Lockhart way that brooks no nonsense, but also a perfect description of where Alicia's at: Dividing the pie into so many pieces that everybody goes hungry, Alicia most of all. To be middle-management is to be caught in the middle, and it involves a learning curve full of overcorrection one way or the other, and it involves invisible walls and windows above and below you, that you must acknowledge but never admit aloud. It is galling to do otherwise.

How do you solve a problem like Alicia? Take the thing she's doing -- a kind, a compassionate, an equitable thing that solves nothing -- and put it in the context of her greatest fear: Causing offense, being the bad guy. Confusing nice with kind, and soft with weak. The powerlessness of power, when you confuse authority with stewardship and vice versa. She has a tremendous capacity for learning this one, because she's hyperaware, always, of other people's internal states, but she has to stop reacting to that instinctively, like she usually does, and start acting on it intellectually, like Will usually does.