Leadership Development Isn't a Luxury Line Item. It's a Growth Strategy.
Most people running a company today never got real leadership development themselves. Here's why that's a solvable problem, not a permanent one.
Most people running a company have never had access to formal leadership development: the executive coaching, the structured training, the tools that help you actually understand how you and your team are wired to lead, rather than guessing based on vibes and whoever talked loudest in yesterday's meeting.
It's not because they didn't want it. In my experience, it's almost always because they assumed that level of investment was built for a different kind of company: bigger, better funded, further along, definitely not a fifty or a hundred and fifty person team still figuring out its own footing while also trying to make payroll.
I don't think that's true. And honestly, it's exactly who I'm most passionate about serving.
Where this comes from, for me
I started my career as a therapist, which taught me how to get people talking honestly and see what's actually going on beneath the surface of what they're telling you. Then I spent nearly thirty years running teams and leading executives myself, which taught me how hard it is to apply that kind of self-awareness to your own leadership in real time, while the business is also, you know, happening. That combination, the listening and the lived experience of actually leading, is what I bring into the room with clients now.
The data backs up what should already feel obvious
There's an HBR piece by Milton Corsey built almost entirely around a myth I hear from founders constantly: that leadership training is a luxury reserved for companies bigger than theirs. The data says otherwise, and the example in the article is a genuinely good one. A midsize health-tech company mapped its leadership capabilities against what the business actually needed, using tools Corsey calls an empowerment matrix and a capabilities matrix. The result, within six months, was a 30 percent productivity increase and a meaningfully lighter supervisory load. Not from adding headcount. Not from a hiring spree. From investing in how the leaders they already had actually led.
The companies that get the most out of leadership development, in other words, aren't the ones with the biggest training budgets. They're the ones that treat it like solving a real, current, dollars-and-cents problem, rather than something to circle back to once things calm down. Things, as you may have noticed, rarely calm down.
Leadership development starts earlier than most people think
One thing I'd add to that: the strongest leadership development doesn't start after someone's already struggling in the role. It starts at hiring, with a clear read on whether someone is actually suited to the role and the team they'd be joining, not just to the resume that looks good on paper. Predictive Index's Hire module is built for exactly that, using behavioral data so you're matching people to roles deliberately instead of hoping the interview process caught everything.
If you're hiring for an open role right now, I can give you seven days to try the Hire module out on it directly. And if you'd rather start with your own behavioral picture first, before applying any of this to your team, I'll send you a free PI Behavioral Assessment. It's a fast, no-pressure way to see what real leadership development, built around you specifically, could actually look like.
One honest question to sit with
If you've never had real leadership development built around you and your team specifically, not a generic course, not a one-off workshop, but something built for your actual company at its actual size, what would you want it to help you figure out first? Sit with that one for a minute. The answer usually points straight at where to start.
That question is where every engagement I run begins, and it's exactly why I built this practice around founders and CEOs at growth-stage companies. You don't need to be a Fortune 500 company to deserve real leadership development. You just need to decide it's worth investing in now, instead of waiting for a version of your company that has more time to spare. That version, in my experience, never quite arrives on its own.
Kristen Illes is the Principal of 3D Leadership Solutions, where she partners with founders and executive teams at growth-stage companies to build the leadership practices that let them scale.
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