Professional services leaders are navigating heightened complexity. New services, rising competition, and emerging technologies are reshaping how growth agendas are set and delivered. From the boardroom, the direction of travel is clear – grow efficiently, protect margins, and retain top talent.
But growth does not move forward on strategy alone. It moves through plans, people, and projects every day.
In our recent research report, Inside the Leadership Growth Agenda, we surveyed 400 senior leaders across professional services firms in the US and UK to understand what is shaping growth strategies today. That research surfaced four internal blind spots with the potential to hold firms back: revenue planning, resource visibility, talent retention, and technology enablement.
To see how those blind spots play out in practice, we turned to the people closest to delivery.
In partnership with the Resource Management Institute (RMI), we surveyed professionals from RMI’s global database to understand the priorities, challenges, and investments shaping the future of service delivery in professional services firms. The findings were published in the research report, Uncovering the Hidden Drivers of Services Growth.
Respondents spanned accounting, advisory, IT services, consulting, engineering, and marketing agencies, with 76% working in resource management or resource leadership roles.
This companion piece brings forward the resource leader perspective – revealing where growth strategy and operational reality align – and where they don't.
What the resource leader data reveals
1. Shared ambition, different vantage points
When viewed side by side, the senior leader research and the resource leader survey tell a similar story about growth ambition – but from different vantage points.
In the senior leader research, technology sits at the top of the growth agenda. 58% of leaders cited technology as their number one priority for the year ahead, followed closely by operational efficiency (41%).
When resource managers and resource management leaders were asked the same question, their focus shifted toward the outcomes growth depends on:
- Client service excellence (59%)
- Margin improvement (55%)
- Operational efficiency (55%)
This aligns closely with the leadership focus on growing well, not just growing fast. The difference appears to be one of emphasis. Senior leaders may be looking first to technology as the engine of growth and efficiency, while resource leaders seem to be looking more closely at the delivery conditions that make growth and efficiency possible.
That distinction becomes clearer when resource leaders were asked what is most likely to hold growth back. Alongside client pressure on cost or delivery (38%) and market uncertainty (34%), many also highlighted internal operational barriers that shape day-to-day delivery, including:
- Inefficient operational planning (46%)
- Poor cross-team alignment (32%)
- Leadership bandwidth (25%)
- Lack of real-time data (20%)
- Legacy systems (15%)
This is where the perspective subtly shifts.
Senior leaders described blind spots in forecasting, visibility, and technology as strategic risks. Resource leaders describe the same challenges as practical constraints that influence execution every day – from misaligned teams and limited leadership capacity, to fragmented data and aging systems.
This suggests the gap may not be one of disagreement, but perspective.
As Greg Hensley, Director at the Resource Management Institute, explains:
“What this research makes clear is that leaders and resource managers aren’t misaligned – they’re describing the same challenges from different altitudes. When an organization applies a resource management process framework and practices, such as RMI’s JiTR®, those perspectives finally connect. The strategic blind spots that leaders worry about, and the operational friction resource managers feel every day become part of one integrated planning discipline.”
2. The full cost of limited visibility
🔎 Focus: resource data, insight, forecasting, capacity
In the senior leader research, visibility emerged as a core blind spot shaping growth risk. While 86% of leaders believe their people are fully utilized, only 69% say leadership has clear visibility into team-level capacity.
The resource leader perspective shows how this gap plays out in day-to-day planning.
Only 33% of resource managers and resource management leaders said leadership has clear and consistent visibility into capacity and availability across the firm. For most, insight is fragmented – shaped by disconnected systems, manual processes, and data that is difficult to trust in real time.
When asked what would most improve decision-making tomorrow, resource leaders consistently pointed to three missing foundations:
- Client demand pipeline (67%)
- Live forecasting and scenario modeling (63%)
- Capacity and availability of resources (45%)
This reinforces the senior leader concern around foresight, but adds operational context. Leaders want to plan confidently into the future. Resource leaders are often still stitching together the present – pulling information from multiple tools just to understand where demand and capacity really sit.
The impact is felt in reactive scheduling, missed utilization targets, and workload imbalances that surface too late to correct. Without a shared, real-time view of demand and capacity, growth strategies become harder to execute with consistency.
What leaders experience as a strategic blind spot, resource managers experience as daily friction – missed signals, late interventions, and planning based on partial information.
3. Overworked and underused - the talent paradox
The resource manager survey reveals a paradox at the heart of firm performance: talent is under pressure, yet not fully used.
When asked about their firm’s biggest challenge in retaining top performers, resource managers and resource management leaders most frequently pointed to burnout and workload pressure, alongside concerns around fairness, development opportunities, and misalignment between skills and work. Symptoms of how work is planned and distributed every day.
This is reinforced by how resource leaders assess the use of talent across their firms:
- Only 20% believe their internal talent is being used to its full potential
- 60% say talent is only partially utilized
- 20% describe talent as poorly utilized
At the same time, delivery performance is suffering. Resource managers report that 67% of firms missed billable utilization targets in the past 12 months, and cite this being driven primarily by inaccurate project or revenue forecasting (47%) and resourcing and capacity constraints (17%).
Together, these findings expose a structural imbalance. Some people are carrying too much of the load, while usable capacity elsewhere remains unseen.
This is where the resource leader perspective deepens the senior leader view.
In the senior leader research, burnout and fairness emerged as central risks to retention, with 26% of UK leaders citing unfair workload distribution and 40% of US leaders pointing to poor management and lack of autonomy as key drivers of attrition. Resource leaders show how those risks take shape operationally – through forecasting gaps, fragmented skills data, and limited visibility into who is doing what, and for how long.
Crucially, much of the insight needed to prevent this still lives in the heads of individual resource managers – who know which teams are stretched, which skills are scarce, and where pressure is building. But without a centralized, real-time view of skills, workload, and demand, that knowledge cannot scale across the firm.
This creates hidden attrition risk. Burnout is not flagged early. Misalignment between skills and work persists. And opportunities to rebalance workload are missed until performance or retention suffers.
From the resource leader perspective, sustainable growth depends on making talent visibility a shared capability, not a personal one. Balancing utilization, protecting high performers, and deploying skills effectively at scale requires more than experience and intuition. It requires a single, connected view of people, projects, and demand.
4. Where AI is – and isn’t – being prioritized
The resource leader survey provides insight into how resource managers and resource management leaders perceive their firm’s current AI priorities.
When asked which areas their firm is prioritizing for the use of artificial intelligence, few respondents pointed to workforce planning and delivery functions:
- Project and resource planning / scheduling – 15%
- Capacity planning – 9%
- Workforce optimization – 19%
These findings are notable when viewed alongside other themes in the survey. Resource leaders consistently highlighted the need for better visibility into demand and capacity, improved forecasting and scenario modeling, and stronger insight into how internal talent is being deployed. Yet, from their perspective, AI is not yet a primary focus in these same operational areas.
This is where the comparison with the senior leader research becomes particularly interesting.
In the leadership survey, 58% of leaders cited AI as their number one priority for the year ahead, and nearly two in five large firms (39%) said they plan to invest in AI for scheduling and capacity modeling. This suggests that workforce planning and delivery are beginning to feature more prominently in AI strategies at the boardroom level.
Together, the two perspectives suggest a shift that is still emerging.
The findings point to an emerging trend: AI is rising on the strategic agenda, and use cases focused on workforce and resource optimization are likely to become a growing area of focus.
5. What resource leaders say would improve their firm tomorrow
If the earlier findings show where growth is being slowed, the open-text responses from the resource leader survey point clearly toward what could unlock it.
When asked what single new insight or capability would most improve their firm tomorrow, resource managers and resource management leaders returned to the same themes again and again: better data, better tools, and better alignment across the business.
Their priorities centered on:
- Cleaner, more reliable data from sales, delivery, and workforce systems
- Improved forecasting and scenario modeling to anticipate demand and risk
- More robust and advanced resource management and PSA tools
- Skills-based resource management linked to what the firm actually sells
Many described a desire to move away from fragmented tools and manual workarounds toward a single, connected view of the business:
“Move out of Excel and invest in real-time cloud data tools.”
“A single, integrated dashboard that combines backlog, forecast, project milestones, staffing allocations, and upcoming leave – updated in real time and accessible by Delivery, Sales, and Leadership.”
“Better software for scheduling and forecasting resources.”
Others pointed to the need for clearer processes and accountability alongside technology:
“Provide clear processes that are consistent across the firm.”
“Hold line leaders and project managers accountable for efficient use of resources.”
“Clear strategic goal alignment across leadership with clear communication to the firm.”
Greg Hensley sees the same structural issue across firms:
“Firms consistently struggle with fragmented visibility and unreliable forecasting. These issues are not solved by technology alone. They are solved when standardized resource management processes create the structure, data quality, and accountability that modern PSA and AI tools depend on.”
The message running through these responses is consistent. Visibility and forecasting challenges are not simply about upgrading tools. They reflect how planning is structured, how data is owned, and how accountability is shared.
Taken together, resource leaders are not just identifying friction. They are articulating what needs to change: data they can trust, tools that connect, and a disciplined planning approach that links leadership ambition with operational execution.
What the resource leader perspective makes clear
The resource leader perspective grounds the growth agenda in day-to-day reality.
They see the friction that strategy alone cannot: where limited visibility slows decisions, where talent is unevenly deployed, and where systems and processes fail to support planning. But they also see the solutions. Their responses point clearly toward what would enable progress – trusted data, connected tools, and stronger alignment across teams.
From the resource leader point of view:
What drives growth
- Client service excellence
- Margin improvement and operational efficiency
- Better use of people and skills
- Resource visibility, accurate forecasting, and connected data
- AI technology embedded in workforce and resource optimization
What drags growth
- Inefficient operational planning
- Poor cross-team alignment
- Lack of real-time resource insight
- Fragmented, legacy systems, and manual work
- Burnout and uneven workload distribution
This is not just a list of challenges. It is a practical diagnosis of where growth is won or lost inside firms. In answering what’s driving and dragging growth, the resource leader perspective brings focus to the systems and processes that make growth possible in practice.
In short, resource leaders should not only be tasked with delivering the growth agenda – their perspective should help define it.
