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Developing people

How to grow leaders on your team, not just strong performers

Empowering people is not enough on its own. If the decisions you delegate come back poorly considered, you will be pulled straight back into the weeds.

At this altitude I would ask you to stop seeing your team as an execution engine. They are the leaders who come after you, and the quality of their judgment sets the ceiling on how high you can operate.

Empowerment is not enough on its own

If the decisions you delegate come back poorly considered, you will be pulled straight back into the weeds, and both of you will conclude that delegation does not work here. The missing step is that nobody said what good judgment looks like.

So state it. Anticipating risk. Planning for more than one scenario. Seeing the consequences two functions over. Knowing which decisions are reversible and which are not. Those are teachable, and they are invisible until someone names them.

Coach in real time

Ask them to walk you through their reasoning before you offer yours. That single reordering does most of the work, because it makes their thinking visible while it can still be shaped, rather than after the outcome has settled the argument.

Gallup's work is sobering here. Only about 2 in 10 managers instinctively know how to coach, and 47 percent of employees say they receive feedback a few times a year or less. Coaching is a discipline of listening, asking and following up. It is learnable, and almost nobody is born with it.

The feedback that will not arrive unrequested

The traffic runs both ways, and the upward direction gets harder the higher you go. You now influence the careers of the people who report to you, and they want to stay on your good side. That means the feedback you most need is the feedback least likely to reach you.

After my own 360 review I did something that mattered as much as the apology. I asked three direct reports for their help and gave them explicit permission to call me out in the moment, whenever the nonverbal signs of frustration I had been blind to started to show. I was handing them a small but real measure of authority over my own growth. It was humbling, and it was the beginning of genuine change.

If you need the business case

McKinsey's 2026 research found that organizations investing equally in people development and operational performance are four times more likely to sustain top-tier financial results, grow revenue twice as fast, and carry half the earnings volatility of their peers. The same research found 47 percent of executives naming limited career progression as the single biggest barrier to building a high-performance culture, ahead of incentives, disengagement and performance-management systems.

Said another way, developing your people is the half of your mandate that compounds.

How you know you have it

You can name each direct report's next role and the one gap between them and it. You give the credit away. And someone is promoted out of your team without the team wobbling, which is the only proof anyone above you actually trusts.