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Modeling that growth is something real leaders do—not something they assign to others while standing still themselves.
Leadership development culture on a team is rarely built through policy, it’s built through observation. Your team members are watching what you prioritize, what you protect on your calendar, what you talk about with enthusiasm, and what you treat as an afterthought. And one of the things they’re watching most closely—often without consciously registering it—is what you do with your own growth.
When leaders actively invest in their own professional development, something measurable happens: There’s a 37% drop in the number of team members who are likely to seek work elsewhere. Not because the leader announced a new development initiative. Not because they rolled out a formal program. But simply because they modeled that growth is something real leaders do—not something they assign to others while standing still themselves.
The inverse is equally true, and worth sitting with honestly. If your team sees you treating your own development as optional—as something you’ll get to when things slow down, which they never do—they absorb that signal too. It tells them that professional growth is performative, not substantive. That it’s something the institution asks for on forms but doesn’t actually value in practice.
What “Start with You” Actually Requires
The first phase of the growth conversation model is called Start with You for a reason. Before you can have an authentic conversation with a team member about their development, you need to have some clarity about your own. Not because you need to have everything figured out, but because the quality of your presence in that conversation is shaped by whether you’re genuinely in a growth orientation yourself.
This isn’t about logging hours in trainings or accumulating credentials. It’s about being able to answer a few honest questions: What are you working on as a leader right now? What have you learned recently that changed how you think about your work? Where are you feeling the edges of your own capability?
If you can’t answer those questions readily, it’s worth asking why. And it’s worth asking what your team would say if you put the same questions to them—and whether they’d believe you would actually want to hear the answers.