Leadership Success Pattern #7
Successful leaders continuously pursue business growth and optimisation. At times, by leading larger business transformations, and continuously by developing their people to develop the business.
They know not to treat development as an employee offer or a backfilling exercise, but as an agenda linked to future business needs. They create continued development through task exposure, rotation, mentoring, and clear learning expectations. They know expertise and change readiness are built through experience long before a capability gap becomes urgent. Also, they lean in and actively lead their people through change when bigger transformations are on the agenda.
We have identified eight research-verified leadership success patterns, and this article dives into the seventh of these success pattern. The patterns are also incorporated into CLAI – the Contextual Leadership AI Co-Thinker.
Leaders use CLAI to turn people development into a business development agenda and for sparring on handling change reactions, leading change, and creating breakthroughs in transformations.
Should I Throw People in the Deep End? Yes, If It Develops the Business
One leader I worked with saw the wave coming before it hit.
In one of the cases in The Contextual Leader, the leader, Vibeke, knew that within the next years, everyone in her office would become part of a global service desk setup. She did not wait, instead, she told her people, “We need to start moving from individual doers to team learners.” They rotated customer responsibility across teams, met weekly to align and optimise. It was inconvenient at first. People were busy. Some resisted. But over time, they became better at covering for each other, standardising work, and adjusting together. When the shared service setup was introduced, they had already become team learners.
Too many leaders treat development as an offer to employees. If people are satisfied with their roles, and the team can perform today’s work, they feel they have done enough. In a more stable environment, that may look acceptable. In a knowledge economy shaped by stronger competition, faster customer shifts, and AI-driven disruption, it is not enough. Competence development cannot be reduced to backfilling after someone resigns or training people when a new system arrives. It must be part of the leader’s longer-term business development initiatives.
The reason is simple. Expertise is a performance driver, and expertise has two components: skills and experience. Skills can be taught. Experience must be built through exposure to real tasks, real decisions, and real consequences. Leaders who provide courses but keep the important work concentrated in a few experienced hands may create informed employees, but not sufficiently capable ones.
This is where many organisations become vulnerable.
A tenured expert often prefers to do the critical work themselves. In the short term, that can look efficient. The quality is high. The speed is good. The risk feels low. But the longer-term effects are often the opposite: younger colleagues do not develop, fresh thinking is limited, key-person dependency increases, talent leaves, and the business becomes less adaptable. The organisation may look strong in current operations while quietly becoming fragile.
The answer is not careless exposure by throwing people in the deep end without support. Productive stretch is not the same as unmanaged overload.
Leaders need to assess the individual’s learning capacity and create the right level of challenge and support. People usually move through a recognisable learning journey: first, understanding why the new capability matters, then investing effort, then assuming accountability for working in the new way, and only later driving strong performance. Some people welcome stretch quickly. Others need more clarity, structure, or reassurance. That is a personality nuance leaders should respect. It is not a reason to exempt anyone from development. The principle should remain the same: meet people where they are but ensure that everyone has a development area linked to an expected conversion into business performance.
This is why people development cannot, and should not, be separated from business development.
A leader should continuously ask: What expertise will this area need next, not only now? How are customers changing? What weak signals do we experience? Where do we need stronger scanning of external moves, better judgment, more frontline empowerment, or greater ability to cover for one another? Those questions should shape task allocation, rotation, mentoring, and result in explicit learning commitments.
This is about creating the right stretch from the business aspirations while building the people’s flexibility to shift ways of working. And it is why experienced specialists also need to develop – to drive business outcomes. Their next expertise may not be technical mastery. It may be teaching, mentoring, involving less experienced colleagues, and staying open to better ways of working. Not because they feel the need, but because of the potential business outcome.
The test of leadership is therefore not whether your people can do today’s work.
It is whether your team is becoming more capable than the business requires today. Because if development only begins when the business is already under pressure, you are not ahead of the curve. You are catching up. That is difficult. It overloads people and challenges performance. Vibeke knew that and acted on it. Do you?
This article is part of a series addressing Eight Leadership Success Patterns identified in the research behind the book The Contextual Leader.
The patterns are further confirmed in the work with the Contextual Leadership AI Co-Thinker, CLAI, which is built on the research behind the book and a range of subsequent studies. This article addresses success pattern seven.
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