You’ve got managers who are good – technically excellent, on top of their client lists, well-liked by their teams and their clients. On paper they should be the future of the firm.
But they’re not stepping up. Work that should stop at their desk lands on yours. They’re reactive, heads-down in the technical, not developing their people or bringing in new work, not thinking about the firm beyond their own patch. And with partners heading toward retirement, you are quietly wondering who’s going to run the place – because right now, everything still runs through the partners, and the partners hold all the main client relationships.
The obvious reading is that these managers aren’t partner material. You’ve probably tested it: sent them on leadership courses, waited a few years, watched little change. So, you start looking outside – hire the missing layer – while worrying how your loyal managers will take being passed over. And somewhere in the back of your mind sits the thought half the profession is thinking: maybe it’s generational. Maybe this lot just don’t want the responsibility – they want to be fed.
I’d be careful with all of it, because none of it is the problem.
The problem is that no one has ever asked these managers to think like owners – so they’re doing exactly what you trained them to do, brilliantly. They manage their list, they hit their numbers, they keep clients happy. That’s the employee brief, and they’re excelling at it. Work routes up to you not because they’re weak or unwilling, but because an employee hands the hard thing up – that’s what employees are supposed to do. Ownership has never moved down, so of course everything still runs through you. You can’t delegate your way out of that, and hiring an external partner just relocates the same bottleneck. (Leadership courses don’t fix it either – “leadership” is abstract; it never tells a technical manager what to do differently on Monday.)
So, the question I put to managers isn’t about leadership. It’s concrete: how would you think about this if you owned it? That’s a switch a technical mind can actually throw – and once it’s thrown, the manager stops asking “have I managed my list well?” and starts asking “is this business working?” Completely different questions, with completely different behaviour behind them. One keeps the work flowing upward. The other stops it – because an owner has no one above to hand the problem to.
In one firm, two experienced managers had been stuck in exactly this pattern for years. The retiring partners had all but written them off; recruitment was already on the table. As a last resort, I was asked to work with the two of them.
I didn’t train them and I didn’t manage them. I reframed the question – from running a client list to running a business within the business – and let them live inside it. It wasn’t instant; it took a couple of months for the new thinking to show up in what they actually did. But it showed up. The upward-delegation started to stop. They began developing their teams instead of just doing the work, thinking past their own patch, seeing the firm the way an owner sees it. Both stepped up to equity partner – the incumbent partners fully behind them, wondering aloud why they hadn’t gone down this road years earlier.
Nothing about those two had changed. They were the same people the partners had nearly given up on. What changed was the question they were asking themselves – and that came from a conversation, not a course. So, before you conclude your own people aren’t the future, let’s talk about the conversation no one’s had with them yet.