The £84 Billion Blind Spot in Your Agency
You promote your top biller to manager. It’s the logical next step. A reward for performance. A path to retention.
It’s also an act of organisational culture strategy sabotage.
Let’s be brutally honest. The “Top Biller = Next Manager” pipeline is the biggest lie the professional services industry tells itself. It’s a lazy, gut-feel decision framework that ignores a catastrophic truth: the skills that make someone a world-class biller have almost zero correlation with the skills required to be a great leader.
And we have the data to prove it.
The Chartered Management Institute (CMI) found that a staggering 82% of UK managers are “accidental”, meaning they’ve never received any formal management training. We are taking revenue-generators off the desk, stripping them of the tools they know how to use, and giving them the single most important job in the organisation: leading other human beings.
The result? A quiet crisis costing UK businesses £84 billion annually in lost productivity. This isn’t a soft HR problem. It’s a direct threat to your P&L.
“Your superstar does not have to be your captain, and they do not necessarily make the best manager. These can be different things.” – Fraser Duncumb, Wotter
Your Promotion Pipeline is a Liability
In the high-pressure environment of a recruitment or tech services agency, this isn’t just a flaw; it’s a fault line running straight through your business model. Every time you promote an untrained top performer, you create a dual-risk scenario:
- You lose your best individual contributor. Their time is now fractured, split between their old job and a new one they are completely unqualified for. Their own performance dips.
- You risk the entire team. An untrained manager, lacking the tools to lead, creates disengagement, anxiety, and frustration. They can’t diagnose problems, motivate effectively, or create psychological safety.
The outcome is inevitable: attrition. And that attrition has a clear price tag. Studies show that replacing a single employee costs UK businesses anywhere from £11,000 to over £30,000 when you factor in recruitment, training, and lost output. Recruitment company, Carrington West, have avoided this problem, leading to an organisation that has outperformed the recruitment industry benchmarks in employee performance and retention every year for nearly 10 years. This is how they do it.
You’re not rewarding a top performer. You’re paying them to dismantle the team they were once the star of.
“The accidental manager model is not giving anyone the outcomes that they want.” – Fraser Duncumb, Wotter
Kill the Model. Build a Strategy.
The solution isn’t another generic management training course. That’s a sticking plaster on a severed artery. The only real solution is to kill the accidental manager model entirely.
This requires a radical rethinking of what “progression” actually means.
Decouple Salary from Management
We operate under a false assumption that the only way to earn more is to climb the management ladder. As Fraser notes, this is fundamentally broken logic: “We have a fundamental assumption, which I believe is wrong… that you cannot be paid more than your manager.”
A truly effective organisational culture strategy creates parallel paths for progression. One for leadership, and one for deep technical mastery. Your best software engineer or your most connected recruiter is an irreplaceable asset. Their value lies in their craft, not their ability to manage a P&L. Forcing them into management to justify a salary increase is a strategic failure.
Replace Gut-Feel with Data Granularity
The reason we default to promoting top billers is that it’s easy. The data – “Top of the leaderboard” – is visible. We mistake performance data for leadership potential.
“When people are the biggest asset within the organisation, the biggest cost on the P&L, we still think it’s okay to rely on gut feel.” – Fraser Duncumb, Wotter
A robust organisational culture strategy replaces this gut feel with continuous listening. It provides the data granularity to understand who has the raw ingredients of a great leader – empathy, organisational skills, respect from their peers – long before a promotion is ever on the table. It allows you to identify and nurture potential, rather than rewarding past performance in an unrelated field.
This is how you stop gambling with your most valuable assets. You don’t guess who the next leader is. You build a system that tells you. You stop leaving billions on the table and start designing a culture that protects revenue, retains top talent (in the right roles), and builds a truly high-performance organisation from the ground up.
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