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A Leading Consulting Firm Faced a 50% Failure Rate Among Newly Hired Partners—Here’s What We Uncovered
When professional services firms make strategic hires at the Partner level, expectations are high. Experienced hires (“direct admits”) are expected to step in, hit the ground running, and drive business results quickly. But what happens when half of those hires don’t succeed?
That’s the challenge a leading global consulting firm faced. Their direct admit Partners, Principals, and Managing Directors (PPMDs) were taking 3–5 years to gain traction, and 50% were failing to meet their performance requirements in the expected timeframe.
Given the investment in these leaders—and the essential industry expertise they were brought in to deliver—this wasn’t just a talent issue. It was a roadblock to the firm’s ability to execute its strategy.
That’s when Kinavic Leadership Acceleration was brought in.
The Challenge: Slow Time to Traction Led to 50% of Direct Admit Partners Failing
The consulting firm knew that hiring direct admit PPMDs was critical to executing their strategy because those hires brought much-needed industry expertise and experience in areas the firm was looking to grow.
The problem was, their direct admit hires weren’t producing results fast enough. Despite their credentials, 50% of new PPMDs struggled to integrate, operate effectively, and meet performance expectations in the expected timeframe.
As the consultant to consultants, Kinavic was brought in to assess and identify the barriers to performance and design a performance acceleration program to help PPMDs leverage strengths and address barriers to help them perform better, faster.
The goal was to reduce time to traction for direct admit PPMDs and, by doing so, improve retention and drive business results faster for the firm.
Kinavic's Solution: A Partner Performance Acceleration Program
At Kinavic, we combine data-driven insights with active performance coaching to accelerate performance and business results specific to the role.
We don’t deliver classroom-style learning. Instead, we follow CCL’s 70-20-10 Rule and provide real-world experiential learning opportunities to help Partners perform within the day-to-day activities in their role.
For this engagement, we started by using psychometric assessments to uncover personality traits and tendencies that might be predictors of and barriers to PPMD success.
Pilot participants were assessed using the Verity Leadership Assessment℠, our proprietary psychometric assessment designed specifically for professional services leadership.
Following the assessment, each pilot participant had a 1:1 debrief conversation with a Kinavic Executive Advisor to review their data and turn it into actionable insights each PPMD could use to leverage their strengths and address barriers to performance.
For example, lower scores related to Trust & Collaboration and Service Orientation (two of the five competencies of high-performing Partners) could be addressed by pairing a Partner with a Sponsor to help them build trust with their colleagues and quickly help them understand and navigate the new firm culture.
In conjunction with individual assessment, we also used data from exemplars (top-performing PPMDs) to build a success profile of what drives Partner-level success at the firm.
Knowing the common personality traits and tendencies of exemplars, the firm could apply the new success profile to better predict the success of future direct admit hires.
In addition to the personalized insights uncovered through psychometric data, 1:1 debriefs provided cultural and environmental insights into opportunities to better position PPMDs for success across the program.
Those insights, paired with each pilot participant’s psychometric data, informed ongoing performance coaching by a Kinavic Executive Advisor—our team of seasoned Partners and CXOs with 150+ years of combined leadership experience.
What We Uncovered: Why New Partners Struggled to Gain Traction Quickly
Our findings revealed several key obstacles affecting Direct Admit performance:
Immediate Fit Challenges
Many new PPMDs—especially diverse and non-industry hires—struggled to navigate the firm’s culture and internal dynamics. Skills like internal influence, consensus-building, and indirect feedback weren’t familiar or intuitive.
Integration Gaps
Participants lacked a structured onboarding experience. Inconsistent support, conflicting advice, and an absence of a “homeroom” account and team left many feeling lost early in their tenure.
Unclear Expectations
The assumption that senior hires would “hit the ground running” didn’t prove to be the case. Many felt unclear about what success looked like and how to achieve it—resulting in hesitation and slower time to traction.
Kinavic’s Recommendations: 6 Proven Strategies to Improve Direct Admit Partner Performance
To address these issues, we proposed a set of practical, scalable recommendations that our client could apply to predict and accelerate the performance of all direct admits—and even to internally promoted leaders:
- Early Assessment: Leverage assessments to identify strengths and potential personal barriers. Develop an integrated plan for success and obtain key stakeholder commitment.
- Active Sponsorship and Support: Assign influential and accountable sponsors to guide new hires by providing strategic introductions, continuous feedback, and a supportive environment to promptly address questions and concerns.
- Role Definition and Planning: Clearly communicate role expectations, priorities, and performance metrics. New PPMDs and sponsors should co-develop and commit to a Traction Plan, or a roadmap for success.
- Account Alignment: Ensure new hires are connected to specific accounts and practice teams for comprehensive training and immersion in a designated “homeroom” account or practice team(s) to accelerate hands-on understanding of their roles.
- Role-Focused Enablement: Deliver Firm, practice area, and role-specific enablement to provide a strong foundation for near and long-term success. Create cohorts to facilitate integration.
- Enhanced Execution Support: Maintain a consistent and measurable approach to launch new leaders effectively within their roles, monitoring for early (+/-) performance signals. Provide a regular cadence of personalized performance coaching to assess progress and adapt strategies accordingly.
Key Takeaways for Consulting Firms Hiring New Partners
Market dynamics and this consulting firm’s strategy suggest that improving selection, accelerating performance, and reducing turnover among nontraditional direct admits are critical to the firm’s growth and evolution.
Acting early (or even preemptively) to apply the recommended actions to help current and future externally sourced talent will pay for itself through better performance, faster.
Whether your firm is hiring direct admits, promoting internally, or redeploying talent into new roles, one thing is clear:
There’s no benefit to waiting for people to figure it out on their own.
Some might, but most won’t. And in high-stakes roles like Partners, Principals, and Managing Directors, the cost of failure is too significant to leave to chance.
Kinavic’s performance acceleration framework helps firms reduce time to traction and ensure their most significant talent investments meet performance expectations more quickly.
Interested in learning how Kinavic can help your Partners perform better, faster? Contact us today to start a conversation.
Angela Navarro
Angela has dedicated her entire career to accelerating performance – of leaders, clients, and firms. She has a true passion for maximizing the potential of executive talent to drive measurable improvements, including greater return on human capital investments, sustainable practice growth, and increased diversity.
