What is 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.

Professor Robert Kegan introduced me to the idea of developmental leadership several years ago and it’s different. It has always felt like a worthy frontier to explore, both in my own leadership and in my work with clients.

Kegan’s work on adult development made 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 sense 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.

Developmental leadership starts there. It’s leadership that catalyses the growth of others. Not in the superficial sense of giving feedback, teaching new skills, or running performance reviews, but in the most meaningful sense; helping people expand how they think, how they respond, and ultimately who they are capable of becoming.

Put simply, a developmental leader leaves people closer to who they are capable of being; as professionals, as humans, and as leaders in their own right.

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

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 the time to understand how someone is making sense of a situation, not just what they plan to do about it. The one who notices when a team member is defaulting to what has worked before and gently challenges whether it still holds. The one who doesn’t rescue someone from a difficult situation, but helps them stay with it long enough to see it differently. The one who asks better questions, not to confuse, but to expand how someone is thinking.

Over time, growth happens. Team members don’t just get better at doing the work. They become more capable of holding complexity, seeing what others miss, and responding with greater range. The work becomes less about solving the immediate problem and more about changing how problems are approached in the first place.

My time at McKinsey & Company was instructive. If you want to see a version of this done seriously, it’s worth looking at how one of the world’s most demanding leadership environments approached it.

The firm didn’t talk about “team engagement” or any of 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.

It was a high bar.

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 on the evidence that the people you lead are becoming more capable of operating at your level, challenging you, replacing you, outgrowing you.

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, not on how the people around them are evolving. 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 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 reading another book. Or by running better one-on-ones. You become one by doing the development work yourself, by changing how you think and by examining the lens through which you see the world.

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

Because the constraint is not your intent. It’s the assumptions you don’t question. The patterns you repeat. The situations where you (for good reason) default to what has worked for you in the past. Those patterns 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.

That kind of work is difficult to do alone.

Left to ourselves, most of us stay within the edges of our existing thinking. No frame breaks. We circle familiar conclusions, reinforce what we already believe, and move on. What’s required is something, or someone, that helps you step outside that. A way of seeing yourself more clearly and being stretched beyond your current frame.

It can come through trusted peers who are willing to challenge you. Through developmental leaders who are already in your orbit. Through conversations where the focus shifts from solving the problem to understanding how you’re approaching it. The common thread is not the format, but the presence of honest 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. It’s someone who can investigate your lens without judgement, with care and capability, and ideally with some humour. Someone to create space, but support you in not hiding in it.

However it happens, the shift is the same.

The work is not just about becoming a fuller 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 existing playbook.

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