Professional services firms — law firms, medical groups, consulting practices, accounting partnerships — have a structural tendency to confuse two things that are genuinely different: the capacity to produce revenue and the capacity to lead. These are not the same thing, they do not develop on the same timeline, and they are not measured by the same instruments. But in most partnership structures, revenue production is what gets someone noticed, rewarded, and eventually considered for governance roles. Leadership readiness is assumed to follow from it.
It often doesn't. The skills that make someone a high-producing partner — client attunement, technical excellence, the drive to close, the comfort with transactional relationships — are not the same skills that make someone effective in governance. Governance requires the capacity to hold competing stakeholder interests simultaneously, to make decisions whose effects unfold across years rather than quarters, to develop other people's authority rather than accumulating it, and to sustain productive relationships with peers whose interests diverge from yours. These capacities sometimes develop in high producers. They do not develop automatically from high production.
The practical consequence is that firms promote into governance roles on the basis of what someone has demonstrated and then discover that what they demonstrated does not predict what the governance role requires. The senior partner who was extraordinary at client development becomes the managing partner who cannot distribute authority, cannot hold the partnership together across divergent interests, and slowly reconcentrates decision-making in themselves because distributed governance is uncomfortable in ways that high individual production never was.
Assessing leadership readiness separately from revenue production requires a different set of questions. Has this person been given real decision exposure — decisions with genuine stakes, made with incomplete information, that they owned and learned from? Have they demonstrated the capacity to develop other people rather than competing with them? Do they understand the difference between the authority they hold and the influence they have earned, and can they use both appropriately?
Most firms do not have good answers to these questions because they have never explicitly asked them. The next generation's readiness has been assessed by revenue metrics, and the governance question has been assumed to take care of itself. It doesn't.