In short: As firms automate junior-level work, the pipeline of people who used to earn the standing to challenge partners is disappearing. Power is concentrating at the top with fewer checks on it, and that’s a governance risk, not just an efficiency gain.

I’ve just read an excellent piece by Nik Kinley on what power does to a leader’s brain: how it sharpens focus and boosts confidence, but also distances us from the people we lead. The longer we hold power, the worse we get at listening. Importantly, power focuses and simplifies our judgement so that we make quick decisions based on generalisations and assumptions. It’s a good article, and I’d recommend it. But reading it left me thinking about a question it doesn’t ask: what happens when power becomes more concentrated in the first place, and fewer people are left in a position to challenge it?

Because that’s exactly what’s happening across our client base right now.

The leverage model is breaking down.

Traditional professional services firms ran on leverage: many juniors, fewer seniors, a handful of partners. Juniors did the labour-intensive work, and that work funded their own training. It was, whatever its faults, a self-correcting system. It also produced a pipeline of people at associate and manager level who, over years, accumulated the experience and the internal capital to challenge the top when it needed challenging.

As that junior level work gets automated, firms need fewer juniors relative to partners. The result is that decision rights and judgement calls are pushed upward, not through any deliberate power grab, but simply because there are fewer people who are able to question it.

Add to this the rise of the non-equity partner. Most firms have introduced the role to retain experienced talent who might otherwise walk. It’s a sensible retention tool on paper. In practice, it hands out status without power, and very little real influence. The title looks like a seat at the table. It rarely is one. What it actually does is concentrate financial ownership and governance voice among a smaller and smaller group at the very top.

We are already seeing the consequences.

I don’t think this is theoretical. Across our client base, we’re tracing more and more outcomes back to the same root: short-term, quickly made, oversimplified decisions. Reduced empathy for the people being led. A prioritisation of partner earnings above almost everything else.

This is where Kinley’s research becomes hard to ignore. Power narrows our field of vision and dulls our read on the people around us, and that’s happening at exactly the moment structurally fewer people are positioned to catch it, question it, or push back.

So, ask yourself, honestly, about the last reorganisation you signed off, the last round of retrenchments, the slashed training budget, the vetoed business travel. What was the long-term cost of that decision, and who around you could actually challenge it before you made it?

What can you actually do about it?

You cannot rebuild the middle overnight, and I’m not convinced you’d want to: some of what automation has taken out of that leverage model was genuinely unnecessary work. But you can build back the function that the middle used to serve, deliberately, rather than hoping it reappears on its own. Put real challenge back into governance. Give non-equity partners an actual voice in decisions that affect their teams, not just a title on an email signature. Track how many people outside the equity group have meaningfully pushed back on a partner decision in the last year, and if the answer is close to zero, treat that as a warning sign, not a sign of alignment. And before the next reorganisation or the next slashed training budget goes through, ask who in the room has the standing and the psychological safety to say no. If the honest answer is nobody, that’s not a governance gap. That’s a power problem, and it’s the kind Kinley’s research says will only get worse the longer it goes unchallenged.

Because here is the reminder I keep coming back to with our clients. Your primary role as a leader was never to drive profitability. It is to make sure your organisation survives for another generation.

That will be your legacy. Not this quarter’s numbers.

If this raises questions about how challenge and governance work inside your own leadership team, our Leadership Coaching and Culture Transformation work is built around exactly this problem.

Talk to us about this