The high cost of leaders who stay in the weeds

Most recruitment boards can tell you exactly how their consultants are performing. They know placement numbers, billing targets, conversion rates and pipeline metrics down to desk level. But when I ask that same board how their leadership team is performing, the room goes quiet.

“They’re doing fine.”

“We have good people.”

And when I push for evidence, few can articulate what good leadership looks like, let alone measure whether senior people are genuinely adding value.

This gap is dangerous. Leadership teams consume major salary costs and have disproportionate influence over performance, yet they face far less scrutiny than the consultants they manage. 

The belief that senior people must be performing because they are experienced and well-paid is just that: a belief.

Don’t reward poor leadership 
Most agencies evaluate senior team performance through proxies that reveal very little. They treat:

• Team outcomes as proof of leadership success

• Tenure as a marker of capability

• Activity (meetings, reports, decisions) as evidence of value

None of these tell us whether leaders are actually improving the business, or simply managing what already exists while adding overhead.

The firms that address this blind spot recognise that leadership requires different metrics from consultant performance. Leadership is about building capability, executing strategy, and creating the conditions for sustained operational and commercial improvement, not making placements.

In many firms, leaders “drop down” into comfortable operational tasks instead of building capability. Managers then get dragged down another level. 

The result? Role compression. Everyone operating one layer below where they should, with no one actually leading.

Leadership metrics must reflect what leaders are actually paid to do: improve capability, execution and performance. Bonuses tied to revenue alone reward headcount growth rather than efficiency. This masks weak management. Guardrails must ensure that leaders only hire when efficiency improvements justify it - and personal billings can’t camouflage poor leadership. 

Leaders must also develop successors or lose the right to promotion. And where multiple leaders operate at the same level, shared metrics should break silos and force collaboration.