Early in my career — I’m talking call center, putting myself through college — I had a VP take an interest in me. He wasn’t my direct boss. He was my boss’s boss, but he saw something and made it his business to invest in it, nudging my director to do the same, showing up in the background of my growth without ever making it feel managed.
I don’t remember the exact moment he said it. I just remember it landing like something I’d always known but never had words for.
“If you ever want to move up, you damn well better make sure you’ve groomed someone to take your position.”
I’ve built my entire leadership philosophy around that one sentence.
I took that advice and stretched it further than he probably intended. I didn’t apply it just to my own career planning. I applied it to every single person who ever reported to me.
I treated every employee like they might need to take my job someday, not as a succession plan but as an operating philosophy. If someone was a level one, I wasn’t thinking about how to get them to level two. I was thinking about what it would take to get them to level five, and building the plan backwards from there.
That reframe changes everything about how you lead.
Thinking one level ahead
You’re reactive. Patching gaps, solving today’s problem. The conversations you have are about tasks, not trajectories.
Thinking five levels ahead
You’re having different conversations, giving different feedback, opening different doors. You stop handing tasks and start developing expertise.
A colleague and I used to do five-minute debriefs after every meeting we ran together, not just when something went wrong, every single time. What landed? What would have been stronger? What would we do differently with the same room next week? That kind of low-stakes, in-the-moment feedback is how people actually improve. Most leaders save feedback for the missteps, the obvious errors that need correcting. The leaders who develop exceptional people do it constantly, quietly, without making a production of it.
And then there’s the ego part, because we have to talk about it.
Some leaders hold back on developing their people because they’re afraid of being outshone. If the team performs brilliantly, does that mean the leader isn’t needed? If someone smarter sits below you on the org chart, does that make your seniority look hollow?
Brace yourself for a metaphor: think of your team like a board of directors. Five people, five distinct areas of deep expertise, five things they know better than you do. Your job isn’t to be the authority on all five. Your job is to pull those five people into the same room, point them in the right direction, and trust them to be exceptional at what they do. Together you’re something none of you could be alone. That is the whole game.
The best team I ever built was smarter than me. That was the goal, not the risk.
Leadership built on being the only one with answers is just a slow version of dictatorship. It will cap your team before it caps you, and by the time you notice, the ceiling is already built.
That VP invested in a call-center kid who kept finding ways to make things better. He taught the people around her to invest in her too, and then stepped back and watched what happened.
I think about that every time I’m building a plan to grow someone five levels.