What leaders get wrong about growing their people.

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Hey Spark Family,

I once asked a leader how he invested in his team’s development.

He had a good answer. He sent people to conferences. He approved training requests. He made sure everyone had a learning budget and encouraged them to use it. He was proud of that, and honestly, he should have been. A lot of leaders don’t even get that far.

Then I talked to his team.

They described a leader they respected. Someone fair, supportive, and genuinely invested in their success. But when I asked whether they felt like they were growing, the answers got quieter.

One person told me she was doing the same things she had been doing two years earlier. Another said he wasn’t sure where he was going inside the organization. Someone else admitted she had stopped bringing her bigger ideas forward because there never seemed to be room for them.

That stayed with me.

Because this leader was investing in development. His team was not experiencing growth.

And those are not the same thing.

The Research Is Clear

McKinsey’s State of Organizations 2026 report asked more than 10,000 senior executives across 15 countries and 16 industries what gets in the way of building a high-performance culture.

The top answer was not compensation. It was not management style. It was not even culture in the broad, vague way we often use that word.

➡ 47% of executives said limited career progression opportunities are the biggest barrier to building a high-performance culture.

Gallup’s 2025 research found something just as important from the employee side:

➡ One in four U.S. employees say they lack opportunities for career advancement.

That matters because people do not just want access to learning.

They want evidence that they are moving forward.

Leaders who believe they are developing people because they approve training requests are often solving a different problem than the one their teams actually have.

The gap is not always access.

The gap is momentum.

What I'm Seeing In The Field

The leaders who struggle with this are rarely neglectful. Most of them care deeply about their people. They want them to grow. They want them to feel supported. They would be genuinely upset to learn that someone on their team felt stuck, unseen, or quietly left behind.

But caring about someone’s growth and actively creating the conditions for it are two different things.

And in the pace of real leadership, this is so easy to miss.

A strong performer keeps doing excellent work in a role that fits her perfectly. There is no urgent problem to solve, so nothing changes. A year passes. Then another. She is still excellent, and now she is also wondering if this is all there is.

Someone wants more responsibility, but there is no open role and no obvious next step on the org chart. The leader does not bring it up because he does not have a clean answer yet. The person stops bringing it up too.

A leader has regular one-on-ones with her team. They cover status updates, current priorities, upcoming projects, and the occasional challenge. Development comes up at the end, when there is time.

There is rarely time.

None of this is malicious. It is what happens when growth is something we care about in theory, but do not design into the actual rhythm of work.

And the employee experience can start to feel very different than the leader’s intent.

The leader thinks, “I would absolutely support their growth.”

The employee thinks, “I don’t think anyone is really thinking about my future here.”

That gap matters.

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What We Teach Leaders Inside Spark Brilliance

When I ask a leader to tell me about their team’s development, I am listening for one thing: do they know what each person is growing toward right now?

Not someday. Not eventually. Not “she wants to be promoted” or “he wants more visibility.”

What specific capability are they building in the next six months? What stretch are they navigating? What are they learning now that they did not know six months ago?

If the answer is vague, that is usually the real gap.

Not the training budget.

The conversation.

The leaders who get this right make growth part of the rhythm, not an occasional topic saved for performance review season. They know what each person is working toward, and they create stretch inside the work that already exists.

They also say out loud what they see.

This is the part leaders underestimate.

Most people do not actually know what their leader believes they are capable of. They may know if they are doing a good job. They may know their performance rating. They may know their current responsibilities.

But that is not the same as hearing:

“I think you are ready for more than you are currently doing, and here is what I see in you.”

That is not a performance review comment. That is a growth conversation.

And it can change how someone sees their own future.

🌟 Your Challenge This Week

Before your week gets moving, bring this to your team specifically.

For each person you lead, ask yourself:

• What are they actively growing toward in the next six months?
• What stretch opportunity could help them build that capability inside the work that already exists?
• Who has stopped bringing up growth, not because they are satisfied, but because they stopped expecting the conversation to happen?

And the one worth sitting with longest:

Have you told each person on your team what you actually see in them and what you believe they are capable of?

The leaders who retain great people are not always the ones who can offer the next role right away. They are the ones who make people feel seen, believed in, and genuinely moving forward.

That costs nothing but intention.

And it changes everything.

With gratitude,
​Jackie

P.S. – P.S. If you realized reading this that you have not had a real growth conversation with someone on your team in a while, that awareness matters. It is not too late to have it, and it will mean more than you probably expect it to.✨

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