Developing | Influencing

How does it show up in your behavior?

In practice this shows up as:

• They spot potential early. Often in people the organisation has overlooked, and often before there is much evidence.
• They notice small progress. A junior colleague handling a meeting slightly better than last month registers with them, and they will say so.
• Investment without an obvious return. They give time to people who cannot help them, and are genuinely puzzled by the question of why.
• They ask developmental questions. “Where do you want to be in two years?” arrives naturally in ordinary conversation.
• They create stretch. They hand people work slightly beyond current capability, deliberately, and stay close while it happens.
• They are sought out. People bring them problems they would not raise with their own manager.
• Patience with the underperformer. They will keep working with someone long after others have written them off, sometimes rightly, sometimes not.
• They keep track. They remember where someone was two years ago and can describe the distance travelled.

What strengths come with having this talent as a top talent?

• They build capability that outlasts them. The teams they leave behind are stronger than the ones they inherited, permanently.
• Retention and loyalty. People stay for managers with this talent, often turning down better offers. This is among the most commercially valuable effects of any single talent.
• They find hidden capacity. Talent that would have gone unrecognised gets identified and used, a direct saving in hiring costs and a direct gain in performance.
• Feedback actually lands. Because their investment in the person is evident, they can say hard things and be heard rather than resisted.
• Patience through the difficult middle. Most development involves a stretch where performance dips. They hold their nerve through it where others withdraw support.
• They create psychological safety. People take risks and admit mistakes around them, which is where most real learning happens.
• Institutional memory for people. They know who has grown, who is ready, and who is stuck, a succession planning asset that no system replicates.

How do you apply the strengths of this talent?

1. Make development part of the formal role, not extra
   • Take direct people leadership, mentoring programmes, onboarding design and capability building. Do not run this as unrecognised work on top of a day job.
   • Own succession planning and talent review. Your read on who is ready will be better than the process’s.
2. Be specific and evidenced
   • Name the exact behaviour that improved, not the general impression. “You handled the pushback from finance without conceding” develops; “you’re doing great” does not.
   • Keep a record of progress per person. It makes reviews concrete and gives you something to show them when they cannot see their own movement.
3. Use stretch deliberately
   • Assign work one level above current capability and stay close. This is the mechanism by which the talent actually operates.
   • Say out loud that it is a stretch and that support is available. Otherwise it reads as being set up to fail.
4. Attach development to results
   • Frame growth in terms of what the business gets: capability, coverage, succession, reduced attrition. This protects the work when priorities tighten.
   • Track the outcome, not just the effort, who moved up, who took on more, who stayed.
5. Set a limit on the investment
   • Decide in advance how long you will invest in someone before reassessing, and hold it. This is the discipline this talent most reliably lacks.
   • Distinguish between someone who cannot yet and someone who will not. The first is your work; the second is a performance issue.

What challenges and blind spots come with having this as a top talent?

• They over-invest in people who will not change. The single most costly blind spot. Potential seen becomes potential believed in, and evidence to the contrary gets discounted for months or years.
• They tolerate underperformance. Growth is always framed as still in progress, so the corrective conversation keeps being deferred. The rest of the team notices long before the manager does.
• They can be slow to exit someone. The decision arrives late, which is worse for the individual as well as the organisation.
• They develop rather than deliver. Coaching a person through a task takes far longer than doing it. Under deadline pressure this is the wrong choice, and they make it anyway.
• They project their own ambition. Not everyone wants to grow. Some people want to do their job well and go home, and this is treated as a problem to be solved rather than a legitimate position.
• Their own development gets neglected. Attention flows outward. They frequently under-invest in their own progression and are surprised to be passed over.
• Loss when people leave. Their investment is personal, so a departure lands harder than it should, sometimes as betrayal.
• They can create dependency. Support given too readily prevents the person from developing the capability to work without it.

What other talents does this typically combine with?

1. Developing + Empathic
   • The natural coach. Empathic reads what is going on for the person right now; Developing knows where they are heading. Together they produce someone people trust with the things they tell nobody else. Excellent for leadership, coaching and HR. The cost is emotional load, they carry their team’s difficulties personally, and this combination is a genuine burnout risk without deliberate boundaries.
2. Developing + Individualizing
   • Precision development. Individualizing identifies exactly how this person differs, what motivates them, where their strengths sit, how they need to be managed, and Developing supplies the drive to act on it. This is the most effective combination for building high-performing teams, because each person gets a genuinely different approach. Watch for inconsistency in how the team is treated being read as favouritism.
3. Developing + Positive
   • Encouragement in continuous supply. This person makes growth feel achievable and keeps people going through the difficult middle. Very strong for onboarding, early-career management and team recovery after a setback. The risk is that difficult feedback gets softened until the message disappears, the person feels supported and does not change.
4. Developing + Just
   • Development applied consistently and fairly. Everyone gets the same investment and the same standard, which makes this person widely trusted and unusually good at spotting the quiet performer nobody is sponsoring. The tension is that development is inherently unequal, some people need far more, and Just resists that allocation.
5. Developing + Competitive (tension pairing)
   • One talent wants to be the best; the other wants to make others better. Resolved well, this is an outstanding manager who competes through the performance of their team and takes real pride in being beaten by someone they trained. Resolved badly it oscillates, genuine investment followed by discomfort as the person they developed begins to close the gap. The resolution is choosing the right scoreboard: their team’s results, not their own.

In which positions do we typically see this behaviour, and why does it benefit?

Developing talent thrives wherever the growth of other people is part of the result, and where the time horizon is long enough for that growth to show.

Typical roles

• People management at any level, the core application. The talent is directly load-bearing.
• HR, talent development, learning and organisational development, where capability building is the formal mandate.
• Coaching, mentoring, teaching and academic supervision, the profession is the talent.
• Professional services partnership tracks, law, consulting, accounting, agencies, where the model depends on building juniors into seniors.
• Sales management, the difference between a strong team and a weak one is almost entirely coaching, and this is the talent that supplies it.
• Founders and leaders in scale-up phase, where the constraint shifts from doing the work to building the people who do it.
• Apprenticeship-based crafts and technical mentoring, where skill transfers person to person rather than through documentation.
• Volunteer, community and non-profit leadership, where growth and contribution are the currency rather than compensation.

Why it benefits

• Builds capability that stays with the organisation after the individual leaves.
• Reduces attrition and hiring cost, often by more than any retention programme.
• Surfaces internal talent that would otherwise have gone unnoticed and unused.
• Makes hard feedback effective, because the recipient trusts the intent behind it.
• Creates succession depth, which is what allows an organisation to promote and reorganise without external hiring.

Where it struggles

Short-horizon, transactional or high-churn environments where there is no time for growth to appear, seasonal operations, project work with rotating contractors, roles with no repeat contact. Also difficult in pure individual-contributor positions with no people component, where the talent has no outlet and the person is likely to create informal mentoring work that is neither recognised nor rewarded. Placed there, they are frequently the person quietly holding the team together with no credit for it, and the first to be surprised when it is not reflected in their review.