As a leader, your days are packed: priorities to hit, fires to put out, decisions to make. So professional development gets pushed to the next quarter, when things are quieter and there’s more time to focus on it.
Except things rarely get quieter.
Then someone leaves, a new role opens, the organization needs a capability it doesn’t have. And suddenly, the development that was deferred becomes an organizational problem.
Developing the people on your team isn’t an extra responsibility that happens when the real work is done. It is part of the real work. The question for leaders isn’t just, “What did my team accomplish this year?” It’s also, “Who is more capable because they worked with me?”
And for organizations, there’s an equally vital question: “Are we empowering our leaders to develop their people?”
The development gap
The gap between what organizations say about development and what employees experience is significant. McKinsey’s 2026 HR Monitor found that 24% of employees reported no training participation at all, while more than half said they received feedback only once a year or not at all.
If leaders aren’t actively developing people in the flow of work, organizations are leaving one of their most powerful development mechanisms underused. And organizations can only tap into that development when they equip individual leaders with what they need to develop their teams.
Make developing people part of the leadership job
Organizations often promote people into leadership and then expect them to figure out how to develop others on their own. But developing people is a leadership capability, and like any capability, it needs to be taught, practiced, reinforced, and expected.
The goal isn’t to teach leaders how to delegate more work. It’s to help them become better at making the people around them more capable.
Organizations can support that by:
Setting the expectation. Make developing people an explicit part of what good leadership looks like.
Teaching leaders how to do it. Give leaders practical tools for coaching, feedback, identifying growth opportunities, and having meaningful career conversations.
Creating opportunities to practice. Build development into one-on-ones, goal-setting, performance conversations, and everyday work rather than relying on ad hoc workshops.
Holding leaders accountable. Ask not only what their teams delivered, but who grew, what capabilities they built, and who is becoming ready for more.
When developing people becomes part of how leadership is measured and practiced, it stops being something that gets postponed.
Give leaders the tools and opportunities to build the bench
Organizations shouldn’t simply give leaders a library of development resources. They should give leaders the skills, expectations, and opportunities to make development part of how work gets done.
McKinsey’s People and Organization research finds that turnover is significantly less likely when employees have opportunities for internal mobility. It also points to experiences such as apprenticeships and temporary assignments, alongside clear career paths and skills-based learning, as ways organizations can help people grow into new roles.
Leadership teams can make that easier by:
Mapping future capabilities. Identify what the organization will need next year, then connect those needs to the people being developed today.
Creating meaningful stretch opportunities. Use new projects, cross-functional work, presentations, or temporary roles as intentional development opportunities.
Creating visibility across the organization. Help leaders see opportunities elsewhere so they can advocate for their people rather than inadvertently holding onto their strongest performers.
Building development into leadership rhythms. Make conversations about each person’s next capability as routine as conversations about current performance.
Measuring the outcome. Look at internal movement, readiness for critical roles, and evidence of capability growth alongside traditional leadership metrics.
The goal is a stronger bench: more people who are capable of taking on more, moving into new roles, and contributing at a higher level.
Make your leadership offsite a development mechanism
Your leadership offsite is an ideal time to bring talent development into your strategic planning, just as important as other business priorities.
A thoughtfully designed leadership offsite creates space for conversations that day-to-day work rarely allows. With the right structure and facilitation, a team can move beyond talking about development as a priority and leave with a shared understanding of the capabilities it needs to build, the people it needs to grow, and the actions leaders will take.
Use your planning conversations to ask:
What capabilities will we need next year? Look beyond headcount. What will people need to be able to do?
Where is our bench thin? Which roles or capabilities would create risk if someone left tomorrow?
Who are we actively growing? Identify people who could take on more, and what they need to experience or learn.
What will each leader do differently? Turn “develop our people” into concrete commitments: growth conversations, stretch assignments, cross-functional exposure, mentoring, or more frequent feedback.
The best outcome of an offsite is a plan for what the organization will accomplish, plus a clear picture of who will be ready to help accomplish it. Your next leadership offsite is an opportunity to make those conversations part of the plan, not something that gets pushed to a quieter quarter.
Measure leadership by who is better because of you
A leader’s legacy isn’t only the results they personally delivered or the problems they solved. It’s also the people who became more capable, confident, and ready for what’s next because that leader invested in them.
Whether you’re looking to plan a leadership retreat that brings professional growth into your strategic plan or seeking powerful development for individual leaders, we’d love to help. Schedule a strategy conversation to start exploring.
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