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.
Consider a mid-sized regional accounting firm we worked with. The senior partner being groomed for managing partner was, by every visible measure, the obvious choice. He carried the largest book of business in the firm's history, his clients were fiercely loyal, and his name on a proposal closed deals that had stalled for months under other partners. The outgoing managing partner had been grooming him informally for three years: pulling him into more meetings, copying him on more correspondence, treating the succession as a foregone conclusion that simply needed time to formalize.
Eighteen months into the role, the firm was quietly coming apart. Three equity partners had begun exploratory conversations with competitors. Associates reported that decisions which used to take a week now took a month, because everything routed through one person who could not delegate without anxiety. The new managing partner was working eighty-hour weeks, exhausted, and privately convinced that the partnership had become ungovernable: that his peers had simply become more difficult since he took the chair.
Nothing about his client work had changed. He was still, by a wide margin, the firm's top producer. What had changed was the demand placed on a completely different set of capacities, and those capacities had never been assessed, developed, or even named as part of what the role required.
The practical consequence, in firms like this one, is that promotion into governance happens on the basis of what someone has demonstrated, and the firm then discovers 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 himself, not out of ambition, but because distributed governance is uncomfortable in ways that high individual production never was. Production rewards being the best in the room. Governance requires being willing to not be the most important person in every decision, and to be comfortable when someone else is right and you are not.
This is not a character flaw. It is a predictable consequence of how the role was filled. The firm selected for one set of capacities: the ones visible in a P&L, and assumed a second, largely invisible set would either already be present or would develop on contact with the role. Sometimes it does. A producer who has had real exposure to ambiguous, high-stakes decisions: who has sat on a board, managed a difficult partner exit, navigated a firm-threatening client conflict: often has more of the governance capacity already in place than anyone realized, because nobody had been looking for it. But absent that exposure, the gap surfaces only after the title changes, when it is far more expensive to address.
Assessing leadership readiness separately from revenue production requires a different set of questions, and they are not questions most partnership compensation committees are set up to ask. Has this person been given real decision exposure: decisions with genuine stakes, made with incomplete information, that they owned and learned from, including decisions that went badly? Have they demonstrated the capacity to develop other people's capability rather than simply directing it, or competing with it? Do they understand the difference between the formal authority a title confers and the influence they have actually earned through relationships, and can they use both appropriately, including the uncomfortable cases where their formal authority exceeds their earned influence and they need to build the latter before leaning on the former?
There is also a quieter question, one that rarely gets asked directly because it sounds like it's questioning someone's ambition: does this person actually want the governance role, or do they want the recognition that comes with being asked? These are different desires, and partnerships routinely conflate them. A partner can want, very sincerely, to be seen as the firm's future, and feel considerably more ambivalent about giving up the client relationships, the autonomy, and the individual-contributor satisfactions that the governance role would require them to set down. That ambivalence, left unexamined, doesn't go away. It shows up later as someone who holds the title but never quite inhabits it: who keeps one foot in their old role because the new one was never something they fully chose.
None of this is an argument against promoting high producers into leadership. Some of the best managing partners we've worked with came up exactly that way. The argument is against promoting them on the strength of production alone, with the governance capacity assumed rather than assessed, and against waiting until the role has already been filled to discover what wasn't there. The assessment that should happen before the promotion is the same kind of assessment that, done after the fact, looks like a turnaround engagement: what is this person's actual relationship to authority, to ambiguity, to other people's development, and to their own changing identity as they move from doing the work to being responsible for the people who do it.
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, and by the time a firm discovers that, the cost is no longer a missed promotion. It's a partnership in the kind of quiet crisis that looks, from the outside, like everyone simply got harder to work with at the same time.