Why your best people leave before they make it to Partner
Their reluctance to step up is rational. Reversing it is a long game most firms start far too late.
One of our trainers recently spent a day with a group of senior managers and directors at a professional services firm. The brief was simple: gauge how keen they were to step up to Partner. His summary should worry any firm leader. Most, he said, are happy where they are, even after several years in role.
These are the people a firm’s future is built on, and a good number of them have decided the top job is not for them.
The instinct is to treat this as a motivation problem and reach for the obvious lever: pay them more, dangle the equity, sharpen the incentive. That instinct is wrong, because the reluctance is rational. Listen to their reasons and they are a fair reading of the trade-off, made by people who have been close enough to the role to see exactly what it costs.
The package only rewards the few who consistently hit their number.
The work they most enjoy - delivery - falls away.
The target brings a pressure they don’t want to sign up for.
The work/life hit is one they have watched play out in others and do not fancy.
And there is a skill gap they know is there and have never been given the runway to close.
None of that is stubbornness or a lack of ambition. It is a considered ‘no’. And you can’t overturn that with a bigger bonus.
Two things are broken here, and both take years to put right rather than months. The first is whether the leap is achievable. The second is whether the destination is worth reaching.
Make the leap achievable, and start early
Most firms treat Partner readiness as a conversation in the eighteen months before a possible promotion: a stretch project, a leadership course, a franker chat about targets. By then you are trying to close a skill gap and shift someone’s sense of themselves in a hurry, against a backdrop of years spent watching what the role demands. It rarely works.
The foundations that make the step feel possible have to be laid far earlier. There are four to consider, and they map neatly onto the reasons the group gave for staying put.
Expertise is the foundation. Delivery quality, proven again and again, earns the case studies, testimonials, and repeat work that let someone trust their own judgement under commercial pressure. Without that base, Partner means improvising in front of clients at the moments the stakes are highest.
Network is about nurturing the relationships you already have. Be known, be trusted, get the call when the time comes. Nothing makes a number feel more achievable than knowing the first conversations towards it are already warm.
Authority is personal reputation, earned by being seen consistently over several years and sharing your expertise where your target clients actually pay attention. It takes a couple of years of visible, useful presence before a reputation starts doing real work for you.
Self-awareness is knowing your own patterns and your own energy, and understanding what you are trading before anyone asks you to trade it. People who know themselves well do not discover the true cost of Partner on the way up. They have already tested their limits, and can make a deliberate choice instead of a fearful one.
Build these four steadily and the promotion conversation changes completely. The skill gap has largely closed, because the growing happened gradually rather than in a panic. The target looks survivable. And, almost as a by-product, the person becomes someone worth watching.
Make the destination worth reaching
The second problem runs deeper, because it is about what people see when they look up. We work out whether a senior role is worth wanting largely by studying the people who already hold it. Nobody aspires to a version of ‘success’ they have watched at close range and rejected, and no amount of reward changes that. If the most visible examples at the top are people whose lives and ways of working others would not choose for themselves, the role loses its pull, whatever it pays.
I have sat exactly where that group is sitting. More than a decade ago, weighing up whether to stay at Bain and push on towards Partner, I looked hard at the partner group above me and could not find one person living a life I wanted. They worked too hard, travelled too much, and were permanently too busy. The money did not come close to compensating for the stress and exhaustion it plainly cost them. The things that would have kept me - interesting problems and brilliant colleagues at a slightly gentler pace for slightly less money - were not on offer.
Worse, the few who did protect their balance were treated as second-class, as though they were not serious. And the people who had built their whole identity around being seen as serious could not help but look down on them, because the alternative challenged everything they had chosen. The message to anyone watching was unmistakable: there is one acceptable way to succeed here, and it is the exhausting one. That’s why I left.
Here firm leaders carry a responsibility that has nothing to do with the individuals below them. If the loudest example of making Partner is someone the group does not quite trust or admire, all the readiness support in the world leaves the destination looking grim.
So leaders have a second job alongside building the pipeline: deciding, deliberately, who represents success. Whose story gets told. Who gets asked to mentor. If the honest answer is always “whoever posted the biggest number this year”, whatever they did to get it and whoever they became along the way, do not be surprised when your best people decline the invitation.
Two questions to ask yourself:
First, are you building the four foundations, expertise, network, authority, and self-awareness, in your senior people over years? Or are you hoping to install them in the eighteen months before a promotion? If it is the latter, you have started a long job far too late.
Second, look hard at your Partners. Are they people your best consultants would want to become? If not, fix that first. You can build all the readiness you like into your pipeline and it counts for nothing when the destination looks like somewhere no one wants to live.
Get both right and you won’t have to persuade good people to step up. They will be equipped for it, and they will want it.
If this is playing out in your own director or senior manager group, I would be glad to chat it over - you can book time here.
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