Strong leadership has a direct impact on team retention and performance. Leader growth is a key part of building a great team. If leaders don’t grow, neither will the team.
During my years working in corporate leadership, I noticed something important. The best teams weren’t always the ones with the most money or the newest technology. They were the teams with leaders who continued to learn and improve.
As an executive coach working with leaders in healthcare, engineering, and manufacturing, I see this truth repeatedly: your team can only grow as much as you do.
What Happens When Leadership Development Stops
When leaders stop growing, bad things start happening to their teams. At first, it’s small things. A few people quit. Projects take longer. Team members seem bored in meetings. But if nothing changes, these small problems become big ones.
Here’s an important fact: managers are responsible for 70% of how engaged and motivated their employees feel at work. But here’s the problem: only 10% of people are naturally good at managing others. This means most leaders need training and development to be effective.
The question isn’t whether leadership development is important. The question is whether you can afford to skip it.
The best teams… were the ones with leaders who continued to learn and improve.
How Leader Growth Affects Team Success
When leaders grow, their teams benefit in several ways:
1. Leaders Create the Learning Culture
When you work on improving yourself to grow as a leader, you show your team that growth matters. Your team watches everything you do. They see how you handle criticism. They notice if you ask for help. They watch how you deal with your own mistakes.
I’ve worked with executives at big companies who thought their technical skills were enough. What they learned was that when they developed new leadership skills, especially emotional intelligence and communication, their whole team got better. Leader growth is a key element. When the leader is willing to learn, the team feels safe to learn too.
2. Growing Leaders Keep Good Employees
Losing employees is expensive. Replacing one good employee can cost between half to double their yearly salary. You have to recruit, train, and wait for them to get good at their job.
Here’s what I’ve learned: people don’t quit companies; they quit bad managers. More specifically, they quit managers who stopped growing and still manage the same way they did years ago.
Through executive coaching, I’ve helped leaders fix management issues that were causing people to quit. One Vice President in manufacturing kept losing team members every few months. We discovered he was micromanaging, watching over every little thing his team did. He did this because he was a perfectionist and thought his way was best. When he learned to trust his team and delegate better, people stopped quitting, and the team performed better than ever.
3. Leadership Skills Enable Team Performance
Your leadership skills aren’t separate from your team’s success; they make that success possible. Here are some critical skills directly connected to leader growth:
- Emotional Intelligence: This means understanding and managing your own emotions and recognizing emotions in others. Leaders with high emotional intelligence create safe environments where team members can take risks, share ideas, and work together well. Research shows that emotional intelligence accounts for 58% of job performance across all types of jobs.
- Delegation: Many leaders think delegation just means handing out tasks. But good delegation helps your team learn and grow while giving you time to focus on bigger things. When you get better at delegating because you grow as a leader, your team gets better at their jobs.
- Having Difficult Conversations: Many leaders avoid tough conversations. This is one of the biggest problems I see in coaching. When you avoid these conversations, performance problems worsen, conflicts grow, and standards drop. When you learn to have difficult conversations well, your team becomes more accountable and performs better.
The Success Trap
Working with executives across different industries, I’ve noticed a pattern I call the “competence trap.” Here’s how it works:
You got promoted because you were really good at your old job. But being a leader requires different skills. The strengths that helped you succeed before can actually hold you back if you don’t develop new ones with a growth mindset.
The technical expert struggles to delegate because they believe no one can do it as well as they can. The high achiever burns out their team by expecting too much. The friendly leader avoids necessary confrontations and lets poor performance continue.
These aren’t character flaws; they’re just skills you haven’t learned yet. But if you don’t address them and grow as a leader, they will limit both you and your team.
I experienced this myself in my corporate career. The exhaustion and burnout that eventually led me to become an executive coach weren’t signs of weakness; they were signals that I needed to grow. That transformation taught me something important: admitting what you don’t know is the first step toward becoming a better leader.
The Snowball Effect of Leadership Development
Here’s where leader growth becomes really powerful: the effects build on each other.
When you develop your emotional intelligence, your relationships with your team improve. Better relationships lead to better communication. Better communication helps you catch problems early. Catching problems early means faster solutions. Faster solutions lead to better performance. Better performance increases confidence. More confidence means taking on bigger challenges. And the cycle continues.
I’ve seen this happen many times. A healthcare CEO I coached began by improving his stress management to prevent burnout. As he became more self-aware, he noticed similar patterns in his leadership team. He started development programs and showed it was okay to be vulnerable and learn. Within 18 months, the organization saw real improvements in employee satisfaction, retention, and overall performance—all because one leader committed to growth.
How to Grow as a Leader
Understanding that leadership development matters is one thing. Actually, doing it is another. Here’s how:
Start with Assessment
You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Behavioral assessment tools help you understand your leadership style, team dynamics, and blind spots. These tests reveal patterns you might not see on your own.
I use these assessments not to label people but to start conversations about development. They help leaders understand their natural tendencies, identify where growth would have the greatest impact, and create improvement plans.
You can’t improve what you don’t measure.
Focus on High-Impact Skills
Not all leadership skills are equally important. Some give you bigger returns. Based on my coaching experience, here are the skills that make the biggest difference:
- Emotional intelligence: The foundation for almost every other leadership skill
- Delegation: Multiplies your impact while developing your team
- Difficult conversation skills: Stops small problems from becoming big ones
- Performance management: Turns good teams into great teams
- Self-awareness: Helps you recognize and change bad patterns
Commit to Ongoing Leadership Development
Leader growth isn’t a one-time thing—it’s an ongoing practice. The leaders who improve the most are those who commit to consistent, small improvements over time.
This might mean:
- Working with an executive coach who can give you honest feedback
- Joining peer learning groups where you share challenges and solutions
- Making time for reflection and learning, even when you’re busy
- Actively asking for feedback and using it to guide your development
Apply What You Learn Right Away
The gap between learning and doing is where most development efforts fail. Reading a book about emotional intelligence won’t help if you don’t practice those skills in real situations.
This is why executive coaching works so well—it helps you apply what you learn. When you work with a coach who has been a leader themselves, they help you apply new skills to your real challenges, adjust as things unfold, and build habits that last.
The Risk of Waiting
Here’s the most important thing I can share: the cost of not developing as a leader builds up just as much as the benefits of growth.
Every day you lead with outdated skills, your team’s potential stays limited. Every month you avoid that difficult conversation, team performance gets a little worse. Every quarter, you struggle with delegation, burn yourself out, and prevent your team from learning.
I’ve worked with leaders who waited too long, who only got coaching when they already had serious problems with people quitting, burned-out teams, or major performance issues. While coaching helped every time, recovery took longer and was harder than if they had invested in development earlier.
Your Team Is Waiting
Your team wants you to grow. They want a leader who is self-aware enough to recognize their limitations, humble enough to ask for help, and committed enough to invest in getting better. They want a leader who shows that growth is possible at every level.
When you commit to your own leadership development, you don’t just improve yourself—you unlock potential throughout your entire organization. You create a culture where growth is expected, feedback is welcomed, and continuous improvement is the norm.
Moving Forward
If you’re reading this and realizing your own development has stalled, or if you’re dealing with problems with employee retention, team performance, or your own effectiveness, know that you’re not alone. Every leader I’ve coached, from middle managers to CEOs at companies like Port of Prince Rupert, Gold Corp, and PGH Wong Engineering, has faced moments where they needed to grow as a leader beyond their current abilities.
The question isn’t whether you need to develop, it’s whether you’re willing to invest in your leader growth development before waiting becomes too costly.
Strong leadership directly impacts team retention and performance. If leaders don’t grow, neither will the team. But the opposite is also true: when leaders commit to continuous leader growth, they create the conditions for their teams and their organizations to succeed.
Your next level of leadership effectiveness is waiting. Your team is ready for you to get there. The only question is: are you ready to do the work?
If you’re ready to break free from self-sabotaging patterns, develop the leadership skills that drive team performance, and unlock your full potential to grow as a leader, executive coaching provides personalized support and accountability to make that transformation real. Leaders who invest in their development don’t just survive—they thrive, and they bring their teams along with them.
Build the Team You’ve Always Wanted
If you’re tired of turnover, friction, or carrying too much weight yourself, it’s time to invest in the leadership habits that change everything. Are you ready to experience substantial leader growth? Start your coaching journey today. Let’s have a virtual coffee to discuss.
