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Promoting one of your high producers into leadership without first teaching them how to lead isn’t development. It’s a risk transfer.
That sentence may sting a little because it describes the approach so many firms undertake.
A talented advisor consistently drives revenue. Clients grow to trust them. Over time, the team comes to respect and trust them. The individual works hard and knows the business, so the firm promotes them to a leadership role.
Suddenly, however, they’re expected to manage people, give feedback, delegate, coach, resolve conflicts, run meetings, develop talent, and make decisions that impact the corporate culture. Yet no one ever taught them how. The vast majority of these top producers were trained to be advisors rather than leaders. Most tell us they had to learn how to lead on the job – via the ‘school of hard knocks.’ It’s a gap that’s evident all across the industry. According to SHRM research studies:
- Only 44% of managers globally have received formal management training
- 90%+ of HR executives cite ‘people managers’ as critical to organizational success
- Job satisfaction is nearly 2X higher among workers with highly effective managers
These findings are further reinforced by Korn Ferry’s latest Workforce 2025 research which shows that employees are more engaged when managers empower them, provide resources, and offer real support. But engagement significantly drops when managers are overwhelmed or when organizations cut back on management support.
Why Leadership Development Matters: Managers Shape Your Firm’s Lived Experience
It’s not the corporate values posters tacked up in the lunch room. It’s not the annual retreat agenda. And it’s not the title structure. It’s the managers who lead teams that have the biggest impact and decide:
- How feedback is delivered
- Whether accountability is real
- Whether talent is developed or ignored
- How high performers can best be challenged
- Whether or not underperformance will be tolerated
- When and where meetings are useful
- Whether people feel seen, stretched, and supported
For an advisory firm, leadership development isn’t a ‘nice to have’ – it’s essential, it’s operational and it’s economic. It impacts growth and retention, the client experience, and ultimately your enterprise value.
So, are you and your leadership team currently doing enough to develop new leaders? Your answers to the following five questions will give you a much clearer indication as to your firm’s ability to put that commitment into action:
- Do we conduct performance reviews more than once a year?
- Do our managers hold one-on-one meetings at least monthly?
- Do our employees receive regular, consistent feedback?
- Have we clearly defined what meeting, exceeding, and far exceeding expectations look like for every role?
- Are our managers being held accountable for engagement, retention, and development?
If you feel as though you’re falling short when it comes to helping managers become more effective leaders, now’s the time to take more direct action. Here’s how:
Step 1: Define the leadership role.
Most leadership problems stem from vague expectations. A person is promoted to manager, but the role is not clearly defined. Are they accountable for performance? Development? Culture? Retention? Delegation? Career pathing? Recruiting? Client experience? Growth?
Put it in writing. A leader should know EXACTLY what they own. They should know which decisions are theirs, which require alignment, and which belong elsewhere.
Step 2: Define what strong performance looks like.
This is where your firm probably needs more discipline. Don’t just say someone is ‘doing well.’ Define precisely what that means. For each leadership role, describe what meeting expectations looks like. Then describe exceeding expectations as well as far exceeding expectations.
- Meeting expectations might mean the leader holds regular one-on-ones, provides timely feedback, follows through on commitments, and keeps the team aligned.
- Exceeding expectations may require the leader to also develop talent ahead of need, improve team capacity, reduce confusion, and help others make better decisions.
- Far exceeding expectations could indicate that the leader effectively develops new leaders, builds scalable systems, improves retention, and makes the business less dependent on any one person.
Once you define the levels, performance conversations, calibration, compensation decisions, and development plans improve. People stop guessing.
Step 3: Build a feedback cadence.
In today’s fast-paced environment, annual reviews are simply far too slow. By the time reviews take place, everyone already knows about guidance that should have been imparted and problems/pitfalls that should have been addressed months earlier.
Managers need to hold regular one-on-ones and provide feedback in real time. They should be regularly asking what is working, what’s unclear, what needs to change, and what support is required. They should also be uncovering what skills the employee is developing, what they are learning, and where they want to grow.
Feedback should not be dramatic or confrontational. It should be a normal part of your everyday conversations.
Step 4: Hold leaders accountable for the people they lead.
This is the part many firms tend to avoid. A manager should be evaluated not only on their personal production or technical competence, but also on the engagement, retention, development, and performance of their team.
If a leader is personally successful but leaves behind confusion, burnout, or turnover, that’s not strong leadership. But when a leader develops people who can take on more responsibility, and those people in turn begin to develop others, that’s something with true enterprise value.
There is a difference between being impressive (personal production) and being invaluable to the firm's future (leadership).
At ClientWise, we encourage clients to create leadership scorecards for every manager that include five key measures: communication rhythm, feedback quality, talent development, accountability, and team health. These scorecards should be reviewed quarterly and coached to, with compensation based on the results.
This is not about making your managers perfect. It’s about making leadership development observable, coachable, and measurable.
The best firms don’t make the common mistake of assuming leadership comes naturally from experience. Sure, experience matters. But it’s not the same as leadership capability. A person can spend twenty years in the business and still avoid hard conversations, delegate poorly, run disorganized meetings, and fail to develop others.
The firms that most effectively develop leaders ultimately win because they build more leadership depth – avoiding relying on a single founder, a single rainmaker, or a single heroic operator. And leadership depth is what allows your business to grow without breaking.
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What Coaching Questions Help Advisory Firms Develop Leaders?
- Which leaders in your firm have been promoted based on production but never trained to lead?
- Where have you clearly defined performance, and where are people still guessing?
- Which leadership behaviors should be measured because they shape culture and retention?
- What would change if managers were held accountable for the growth of the people they lead?
Topics: Team Development Leadership Coaching Most Recent - 2026
