How Great Development Creates More Leaders + Free Development Template

One of the biggest wins of my career has nothing to do with a campaign, a launch, or a number I hit. It's the number of people who used to report to me who are leaders in their own right today. Watching that happen, again and again, is what convinced me that developing people isn't a nice-to-have part of leadership. It's the job.

Part of why I went into leadership in the first place was to be better than a lot of what I'd seen. I wanted to multiply servant-based leadership, the idea that a leader's job is to serve the people they lead, not the other way around, through example and through development. Robert Greenleaf, who coined the term in 1970, put it simply: a servant-leader is servant first, and the choice to lead follows from a genuine desire to serve. Every person I've helped grow into a leader is, to me, that philosophy in action.

Here's the thesis I hold myself to: if you aren't making more great leaders, you're not doing it right.

Very Few Leaders Are Actually Taught to Do This

Here's the uncomfortable truth: almost nobody teaches leaders how to develop people. You get promoted for being good at the work, or good at managing the work, and development gets bolted on as an assumption rather than a skill anyone actually trains you in. Gallup's own research on manager development backs this up: managers who receive real training in coaching and people development see up to 18% higher engagement on their teams. The skill clearly moves the needle. Most leaders just never get taught it.

That gap gets filled the wrong way. Many leaders quietly rely on their people to drive their own development, treating career growth as something that happens to an employee rather than something a leader actively builds. Yes, people absolutely need to be their own strongest champion. Nobody should wait around for someone else to care more about their career than they do. But if that self-advocacy isn't matched by support from someone with actual power in the organization, it stalls. Every time. Let that person in power be you.

That means actively facilitating development conversations with the people who report to you. It will feel uncomfortable at first, especially the first few times. It's a different kind of conversation than a status update or a performance review. But if you actually care about the people on your team, you'll push through that discomfort, because the alternative is watching good people leave for somewhere that will.

A Four-Step Framework for Development Conversations

Over the years, I've settled into a simple four-step framework for these conversations. It's held up across every team I've led, and I think it'll hold up for you too.

1. Frame the conversation. This matters most the first time you sit down with a new team member, since it's likely a different kind of conversation than they're used to having with a manager. I usually open with some version of this line: "The goal of development is for me to understand where you want to go in your professional journey, and then for us to find intentional actions we can take together to help get you there through our work together."

That sentence is doing two things. First, it makes clear that I'm not setting the destination. I can help someone see possibilities they hadn't considered, but their professional path is theirs, not something a company gets to decide for them. Second, it frames the whole exercise as finding overlap between their role today and the path they actually want. If someone's real destination is starting their own hat business, and I've had that exact conversation before, my job is to find the moves within their current role that get them closer to that, not to pretend the destination has to live inside the org chart.

2. Decide and document the destination(s). Some people walk in with a clear picture of where they want to go. Others need help even seeing what's possible. Either way, your job here is to stay curious about the why behind the destination, not just the destination itself. Is it responsibility, money, power, control, safety, something else entirely? Understanding the motivation tells you which towns you'll actually need to pass through to get there.

Two patterns show up constantly at this stage. The first is a title- or person-based destination: "I want to be VP of Marketing," or "I want Jane's job." These answers often skip right past the underlying motivation, so keep asking questions until you understand what about that role is actually the draw.

The second pattern is people who don't have a clear destination in mind: "I'm not sure where I want to go," or "I'm happy with what I'm doing." Every team needs both rock stars and superstars, a distinction Kim Scott draws in Radical Candor, superstars are on a steep growth trajectory chasing the next rung, while rock stars have found real mastery and fulfillment where they are and aren't necessarily chasing a title change.

"I'm happy with what I'm doing" might just mean you're managing a rock star, and that's a good thing, not a problem to fix. But it's still worth staying curious, since people don't always know what's possible, may feel embarrassed to name real ambition, or may only be thinking within their current team, function, or even company. It's genuinely okay to acknowledge, in that conversation, that a destination might one day sit outside the organization.

One thing that helps with both patterns is separating short-term and long-term destinations. I describe long-term not as a final destination, but as the highest peak visible from where someone's standing right now. There may be a taller peak behind it once they summit that one, but from today's vantage point, Manager of a given function might be as far as they can see, and that's fine. Short-term is the nearer discussion: what's the next destination between here and there, reachable in the next couple of years. Write both down.

3. Define up to three actions. With destinations written down and the motivation behind them understood, your job as a leader shifts to getting creative. Come up with a small number of actions, no more than three, that could move your team member toward their next destination. To land a new role, people fundamentally need to be aware that they want that kind of role and trust that they'd succeed in it. I have found that building awareness and trust comes down to intentional work across three core development areas: perceptions, skills, and behaviors.

• A perceptions action might be a conversation with the decision-makers for that future role, so they understand what the day-to-day actually looks like and know it's a real destination for this person.

• A skills action might be current work, a new project, training, or added responsibility on something that lets them practice what the next role actually requires.

• A behaviors action may be flexing your communication style for your audience, like speaking in headlines to executives but unpacking key details with engineers.

Write each action down, and be specific about whether it's tied to the short-term destination, the long-term one, or both. Like SMART goals, these actions should be specific, measurable, and time-bound. Why only three? Development shouldn't become a second job stacked on top of someone's actual job. There's real work involved in executing a development plan, but I've found a lot of natural overlap with existing goals when the actions are chosen well. Keep it simple, or it stops happening.

4. Make it cyclical. Writing the plan down creates alignment between you and your team member. If they aren't genuinely bought in, you're just going through the motions. Execution isn't only on them, it's on you as the leader too. Share the plan with the relevant decision-makers. Facilitate introductions where power dynamics are in play. Do what you said you'd do in the plan. If your half of the plan has no actions in it, something isn't working.

Finally, revisit the plan regularly. I recommend at least once a quarter. Destinations change, and development plans shouldn't be carved in stone. Coming back to it intentionally, and actually carving out the time, tells your team member this is a real priority for you, not a one-time exercise. You're not there to check whether they did their homework. You're there to see if there's more you can do, whether something's getting in the way, or whether the destination itself has shifted.

The Payoff Is Bigger Than More Leaders

Do this well and something compounds. Some of the people you develop will go on to become leaders themselves, multiplying this exact approach for someone else down the line. That's the whole effect I was chasing when I got into leadership in the first place, and it's real.

But not everyone wants to move into leadership, and that's not a lesser outcome. The framework works the same way for someone whose destination is mastering their current craft as it does for someone chasing a title. Either way, the payoff shows up as a highly engaged team member who feels valued and knows you're on their path with them, not just tracking their output. That's not a consolation prize. A team full of people who feel genuinely invested in is worth just as much as a pipeline of future leaders, and more often than not, you get both.

Free Development Plan Template

To make this easier to actually run, I put together a free one-page development plan template, an example of the kind I've used across my leadership roles. It's built to stay simple, one page and nothing more, so it never becomes its own project on top of the work. And it's not just for leaders. If you're a team member who needs to manage up your own development, it works just as well as a way to bring the conversation to your leader. Either way, the standard stays the same: if you aren't making more great leaders, you're not doing it right.