Mirror & Map · Edition 9 · Published 8 April 2026

The Centre of Gravity: Where Roles Live and What That Signals

Where roles sit often reveals where power really lives.

When a critical role becomes vacant, and the default answer is to fill it from headquarters, that’s worth pausing to consider. Location is not a neutral decision. Where senior roles live tells the rest of the organisation something about where the organisation thinks leadership actually happens.

Headquarters has a gravitational pull that operates below the level of deliberate decision-making. When organisations grow, roles accumulate at the centre. When leaders change, replacements default to the same location as their predecessors. When new functions are created, they’re placed where the existing leadership already sits.

None of this is malicious. Most of it is habit. But the cumulative effect is an organisation in which the regions execute, and the centre decides, regardless of where growth is actually happening or where the relevant expertise lives.

The signal this sends is not subtle. Regions read the location of senior roles as an indicator of where the organisation thinks real leadership resides.

What I’ve seen in practice

At GE, one of the most effective structural decisions I observed was the deliberate placement of regional leadership roles in-market rather than in the global headquarters. Not all roles, and not without design, but enough to establish that the regions were strategic hubs rather than execution arms.

The effect on engagement and retention was measurable. High-potential leaders in APAC and Sub-Saharan Africa stayed longer and developed faster when they could see a genuine career path that didn’t require relocating to a headquarters they had no connection to. The pipeline deepened because the opportunity was visible.

Organisations that concentrate senior roles at the centre tend to lose their best regional talent to competitors who have made different choices about where leadership lives.

The succession problem

Over-centralisation creates a succession problem that compounds over time. If advancement requires relocation to headquarters, you systematically select against people who are rooted in their markets, who deeply understand local context, and who have built the relationships that make regional leadership effective.

The leaders who relocate are often not the most effective regional leaders. They are the most mobile. Those are different things.

The pattern is consistent: organisations that distribute senior roles across markets tend to develop broader leadership pipelines than those that concentrate leadership at the centre. People develop by leading in context, not by observing from adjacent offices.

The decision-making dimension

Where roles live affects more than succession. It affects decision speed. A senior leader embedded in a market makes different decisions, faster than the same leader operating from a headquarters time zone with secondhand access to local conditions.

The argument against regional placement is usually that integration suffers. Global coherence requires proximity to the centre. This is sometimes true. It’s also often a proxy for the centre being uncomfortable with decisions made somewhere it can’t easily observe.

The real question is whether the organisation has the governance architecture to maintain coherence without requiring physical proximity to the centre. In most well-designed operating models, it does. In organisations where coherence depends on physical proximity, that’s a governance problem worth addressing separately rather than solving through centralisation.

The board question

When a critical role opens, the location decision is usually made quickly and without much deliberation. It defaults to wherever the previous incumbent sat, or wherever feels most convenient for the people doing the hiring.

A more useful question: where does this role need to be located to have the most impact on the organisation’s actual priorities? If the growth is in Southeast Asia and the role sits in London, that mismatch will eventually show up in decision quality, in the speed of local response, and in the organisation’s ability to retain the people who understand that market.

Auditing where senior roles currently sit relative to where growth and complexity are concentrated is a straightforward exercise. The results are usually informative.