Editorial articles surfaced in the My Path experience.
After reading Monday’s edition, you may be asking yourself: What, specifically, does “supporting your team’s professional development” look like in practice?
Results from our Professional Development Survey point to three distinct behaviors. All three are available to a leader in their first year. And none require institutional authority you haven’t yet built.
You’re newer to the role. Maybe a year in, maybe two. You’ve inherited a team, a set of expectations, and a quiet internal calculus that goes something like this: Get results first, build credibility second, and invest in your people’s development once you’ve earned the standing to do so.
At some point in the first few weeks, you’ll have a conversation that matters more than you’ll realize while you’re having it. It won’t look like much—not like a state-of-the-team address. Not a goals presentation with a slide deck. It will be something smaller: a genuine check-in that shows your team that you’re paying attention to the people doing the work, not just to the priorities they’re working toward.
Once you’ve spent real time observing your team and its new patterns, a harder question follows: Of everything you’re noticing now, what belongs to you to change right now, and what doesn’t?
A new academic year has a pull to it. You want to set priorities, communicate direction, and signal that you’re ready and energized. Calendars fill up fast in the first two weeks: kickoff meetings, welcome-backs, planning sessions. There’s real pressure to arrive with something to say.
When leaders recognize a hovering pattern, the impulse to overcorrect is tempting. To pull back entirely. To stop asking questions. To let the team run.
But that’s not the answer. And most hovering leaders sense it, which is part of why they don’t change.
Here is something hovering leaders almost universally share: they don’t think they’re hovering.
They think they’re thorough. Appropriately involved. Doing what the role requires. The gap between how the behavior is intended and how it lands is where the real work begins.
You’ve seen the meeting invite appear on the calendar—a working session you don’t technically need to attend. You join anyway.
A deliverable goes out under someone else’s name. You read it before it reaches its destination and make a few quiet revisions.
It’s worth being direct about what shifting out of an enabling pattern is not.
It isn’t withdrawing care. It isn’t pivoting to a hardline approach because you’ve decided you were too soft before. It isn’t treating the previous months of support as a mistake to be corrected.
When a leader enables an underperformer, the mental model is usually bilateral: There’s the leader, and then there’s the struggling employee. The dynamic feels private. Delicate. Something to be handled carefully, between the two of you.
But there’s a third party that’s been watching the whole time: your team.
