Over the 26 years I have spent in leadership advisory, I have watched a series of major investment market inflection points reshape the competition for talent. Each time the pattern was broadly familiar: new capital flows, new strategies, and intensified demand for specialist leadership capability.

When I began working more closely with single family offices, I expected to see much the same dynamics play out. In some respects, they did. Structural shifts such as direct investment strategies, co-investments, secondaries, and continuation vehicles were reshaping how capital was deployed and how organisations were built.

But running alongside these visible changes was something I had not anticipated: Repeatedly, talented and highly experienced individuals were finding themselves challenged in ways that did not follow the usual logic of leadership failure. These were people with strong track records, operating in well-resourced environments, yet their experiences often followed a strikingly similar pattern.

What struck me most was not the complexity of the environment. It was the silence around it.

Throughout my career placing senior leaders, there has always been an existing body of thinking that helps contextualise what one observes in the market. In the world of single-family offices, however, the central relationship that determines whether executives thrive or exit - the relationship between the principal and the senior executive they appoint - is almost entirely undocumented.

Idiosyncrasy is often cited as the reason not to examine it more closely. I came to believe that it was precisely the reason to do so.

This research is designed to be practically useful: for principals seeking to understand why executive relationships sometimes fail; for executives navigating the dynamics of a family office from the inside; and for those considering entry who want a clearer sense of whether the environment is right for them.

The patterns that emerge are real and recurrent. What principals and executives choose to do with that visibility is, ultimately, the only question that matters

Adam Saunders, Managing Partner, Amrop UK

Single Family Offices are changing. Deloitte's Global Family Office Report estimates a 67% increase* in SFO assets under management since 2019. Generational wealth transfer is accelerating, with aggregate intergenerational transfers exceeding £1.4 trillion projected over the next decade in the UK alone. Investment mandates are shifting decisively toward direct investments, co-invests and private capital. And governance structures are evolving — partly by choice, partly by regulatory necessity — as family offices attract increasing scrutiny across multiple jurisdictions.

Not every SFO will feel this simultaneously. The sector remains one of the most idiosyncratic in finance, shaped by each family's history, the origin of their wealth, and the beliefs carried across generations. But the direction of travel is consistent: more sophisticated operations require more sophisticated people.

We have seen this pattern before. The professionalisation of hedge funds in the 1990s and the institutionalisation of private equity in the 2000s each followed a recognisable arc: rapid growth created demand for sophisticated talent; that talent brought institutional expectations; those expectations collided with the cultures that had made the firms successful. The organisations that navigated it cleanly built durable advantages. Those that didn't lost people, performance and time.

SFOs are entering that same cycle now — with one important difference: the capital in a single-family office is personal. The stakes of getting the relationship wrong are not just organisational; they are familial, generational, and in many cases irreversible.

The risk is asymmetric in a way that is easy to underestimate. An office that gets talent right during professionalisation builds compounding advantages: institutional memory, deepening principal trust, and an operating culture that attracts further high-quality hires. An office that gets it wrong faces repeated searches, eroding continuity, and a principal who becomes progressively more reluctant to extend the trust that makes the relationship work. After one or two difficult exits, many principals become more controlling and less willing to delegate the authority sophisticated executives require to function.

For executives considering entry into the SFO space, the professionalisation wave presents genuine opportunity — but only for those who understand what they are entering. The institutional skills that make someone attractive to an SFO are not the same as the relational and psychological capabilities that make them successful within one. The gap between those two things is what this research is designed to illuminate.

*Deloitte Private, Defining the Family Office Landscape, 2024

1. The invisible operating system of an SFO – its trust mechanics, its fluid authority, its unspoken psychological contract – is not a design flaw. It is the natural consequence of a structure in which personal capital and professional management share the same space. The problem is not that the system exists. The problem is that it exists without being acknowledged, examined or made legible to the people it governs. Executives enter it without a map. Principals operate within it without realising how much of it is personal interpretation rather than institutional logic. The result, across every interview in this research, was the same: avoidable failure, treated as inevitable.
2. The diagnostic failure in hiring compounds this. Selecting an executive on the basis of skills and experience - and trusting intuition and reference to do the relational work - is not negligent by the standards of most industries. In SFO environments, it is structurally insufficient. The misalignments that cause the most expensive and damaging exits are almost never visible in a good interview. They accumulate silently, inside the gap between what each side assumed and what the other actually intended. By the time that gap becomes apparent, the trust required to close it has often already shifted.
3. And what the six behaviours reveal is perhaps the most uncomfortable finding of all: that the executives who succeed in these environments are not simply those who are talented. They are those who have developed – through experience or disposition – a set of costly adaptations to a system that was not designed with their success in mind. The adaptations work. But requiring them, without naming them, and without assessing for them, is a significant and largely hidden tax on both sides of the relationship.