Big idea #1: Developmental leadership

There's no shortage of leadership guidance in circulation. Most of it is soft, recyclable, and largely unhelpful. "Inspire your people." "Empower your teams." "Unlock potential." It reads well. Hard to disagree with. It also says very little.

Developmental leadership is different. At its simplest, it is leadership that catalyses the growth of others, not in the surface-level sense of giving feedback or running performance reviews, but in the most meaningful sense; helping people expand how they think, how they see themselves, and how they show up. A developmental leader leaves people closer to their fullest potential, as professionals, as humans, and as leaders in their own right.

That's the standard. Most leaders don't meet it.

Professor Robert Kegan introduced me to this idea several years ago. His work on adult development makes a simple but confronting point; most leaders don't grow nearly as much as they think they do. They accumulate experience, yes. New skills and titles, certainly. But the way they make meaning of the world - how they interpret complexity, pressure, ambiguity - often remains largely unchanged.

And that matters, because people don't just respond to what a leader does. They respond to how a leader shows up, especially when the stakes are high. When how they show up shifts, it has a knock-on effect. Conversations change. Questions deepen. The standard of thinking rises. A leader's own development becomes a quiet force positively shaping the development of those around them.

What developmental leadership looks like in practice

Developmental leadership shows up in small, unglamorous ways. The leader who doesn't rush to answer, but creates space and time to view situations from multiple vantage points. The one who takes time to understand how a team member is making sense of a situation, not just what they plan to do about it. The one who notices when a colleague is defaulting to what has worked before and gently challenges whether it still holds. The one who doesn't rescue a team member from difficulty, but helps them stay with it long enough to see it differently.

My time at McKinsey & Company was instructive. The Firm didn't talk about measuring "team engagement" or the usual platitudes. It talked about Followship. The idea that your effectiveness as a leader could be measured by the quality, growth, and trajectory of the people working for you. Not just what you delivered. Who you developed.

Dominic Barton, the former Global Managing Partner of McKinsey, pushed the bar higher. His view was that followship was still hierarchical, that is, you develop people who remain beneath you. The more demanding question he posed to leaders was “How are you developing future peers?”

That’s a big shift. You’re no longer measured by how well your team executes under your direction. You’re measured by evidence that the people you lead are becoming more capable of operating at your level, challenging you, replacing you, outgrowing you.

Years earlier in my career, I'd seen the same instinct in a very different setting. During my naval officer training, the captain of our ship, Commander Keith Blount, had a habit that stuck with me. Whenever he used a situation for us to learn something, he'd begin by framing it; "Now, when you are captain of your own warship..." Every lesson he delivered was on the basis that we would one day replace him. He wasn't teaching subordinates. He was developing successors. And the difference in how that felt - being spoken to as a future peer rather than a current apprentice - was significant.

But this isn’t how most leadership actually operates. That’s a problem.

It’s not where most of us want to live. It removes the quiet security of being the one people rely on.

Worse, most of the time it doesn’t look like leadership at all. It looks like navel-gazing. It feels self-indulgent when everyone else is focused on the next deliverable. Things take longer. There’s less immediacy. From the outside, it can look like you’re making the work harder than it needs to be.

Most systems are built to reward throughput, not growth. Leaders are measured on outcomes and the growth of the people around them isn’t one of them. Our incentives are clear; move fast, be decisive, don’t overcomplicate things. Spend too long exploring how someone is thinking and it starts to look like you’ve lost your edge.

And then there’s the part no one says out loud. If you do this well, if you genuinely develop people into future peers, some of them will surpass you. They’ll challenge you. They may replace you. For a lot of leaders, that’s not just uncomfortable. It’s existential.

So it’s entirely rational that most don’t go there.

Which raises the obvious question - why bother?

For many, the honest answer is “I’m not there yet.” If what matters right now is certainty, predictability, excelling in your current role, being relied on, or retaining oversight in how things get done, there are easier and more reliable ways to lead.

But if something about this idea feels more compelling, if the idea of growing leaders who don’t depend on you, who think for themselves, who expand what’s possible in the system, if that feels like a further shore that could be more personally rewarding versus the usual markers of success, then let’s see if we can figure this out.

How to become a developmental leader

You don't become a developmental leader by deciding to be more supportive. Or by running better one-on-ones. You become one by doing the development work yourself, by changing how you think and examining the lens through which you see the world.

That sounds abstract. It isn’t. It’s destabilising. And messy. And sometimes emotional.

The constraint isn't your intent. It's the assumptions you don't question. The patterns you repeat. Those don't shift through willpower. They shift through honest reflection, challenge, and an openness to different ways of making sense of what's in front of you.

Left to ourselves, most of us stay within the boundaries of our existing thinking. What's required is something - or someone - that helps you step outside that. It can come through trusted peers willing to challenge you, through developmental leaders already in your orbit, or through conversations where the focus shifts from solving the problem to understanding how you're approaching it. The common thread; sincere challenge, credible perspective, and a willingness to stay with the work longer than is comfortable.

For some, that comes through executive coaching. Done properly, it's not advice or a better playbook. It's a structured space to examine how you're thinking, where it's helping, and where it's limiting you. Someone who can investigate your lens without judgement - with care, capability, and ideally some humour - to help you catch yourself in your old patterns.

When this work takes hold, things change. Leaders ask better questions and rescue less. Teams think more independently. The people you develop start developing others. The shift begins internally, but its effects compound in the conversations you have, the leaders you produce, and the culture you leave behind.

The work is not just about becoming a fuller, wiser version of who you already are. It’s about expanding what’s available to you as a leader, how you see, how you decide, how you lead when the problems no longer fit your playbook.

That’s the greater leadership range that your people feel from you. And over time, that greater range becomes available to them as well.