When I first hired Maria (not her real name, but she knows who she is and I hope she is reading this with a good cup of coffee), she was a sharp, methodical finance professional who had never run a program, managed a board relationship, or spoken publicly about mission work. She was excellent at what she did and entirely unclear about what she might become.
Four years later she was running her own organization as Executive Director. I want to tell you exactly what happened between those two moments, because I think most leaders approach talent development backwards.
What I Did Not Do
I did not hand her a leadership development curriculum. I did not send her to a three-day conference where she would return with a binder full of frameworks and a temporary sense of inspiration. I did not sit her down and map out a five-year career path, which she would have found charming and mostly irrelevant.
All of those things have their place. None of them are where leadership development actually happens. Leadership development happens in the doing, which means the leader's job is to find the right things for people to do before they are quite ready to do them.
What I Did Do
I started by watching. For the first several months I paid attention to when Maria showed up differently. Where her energy changed. What problems she was drawn to beyond her own function. What conversations she was having that were technically outside her job description but clearly inside her zone of genuine interest.
What I noticed: she was deeply curious about the operational side of program delivery. She kept asking questions about how we tracked outcomes. She had built informal credibility with program staff entirely on her own, which is the kind of thing that cannot be manufactured.
So I gave her a project. Not a finance project. An operational improvement initiative that required her to work across the organization, build relationships outside her team, and present recommendations to leadership. I told her I would be available but I would not be running it. Those two sentences turned out to be the most important ones.
She struggled early. She came to me with questions I could have answered in about ninety seconds. I mostly reflected them back. What do you think? Who would know? What have you already tried? She found this mildly aggravating, which I took as a sign it was working.
The project succeeded. More importantly, she learned something about herself that no performance review could have told her: she was capable of things she had not yet tried.
The Pattern That Followed
Over the next three years I kept expanding the circle of her responsibility. Board presentations. External stakeholder relationships. Budget conversations at the executive level. Each time, I gave her real accountability, not a shadow role where I was the invisible safety net catching everything before it landed. I let her carry the weight and supported her in carrying it well.
I also made deliberate introductions. I brought her into rooms she would not have had access to on her own and then stayed quiet, which is harder than it sounds. I connected her to peers at other organizations. I made sure the people who needed to know her name knew it before she ever needed them to.
The Right Way to Think About This
When Maria received the Executive Director offer from another organization, I was genuinely proud and told her so at length. Some leaders feel threatened when talented people leave to lead somewhere else. I think they have the accounting wrong.
The goal is not to retain people permanently. The goal is to develop people so well that they are capable of more than they knew when they arrived. If they stay and grow, that is a win. If they leave and lead elsewhere, that is also a win, just for a slightly larger audience.
The organization she went on to build, the people she is now developing, the mission she is serving: all of that traces back to the investment made in her. That is the legacy that outlasts any single role. It is the one I care most about.
