INSIGHTS

This is the metric almost everyone tracks but few act on.

Most companies obsess over the front door of leadership development.

Sending managers to training programs. Investing in executive coaching. Rolling out competency frameworks and career progression frameworks.

But while you're focused on developing leaders, you're missing what's happening at the back door.

Your best people are leaving. And your newly promoted leaders are burning out.

Here's what 20+ years in corporate HR have taught me: your leadership retention rate tells you more about your leadership development effectiveness than any engagement survey ever will.

You can promote 10 high performers into management roles, but if 30% of their team members leave within the first year... you don't have just a retention problem. You have a leadership competency problem.

And if those new managers themselves are burnt out, disengaged, or asking to step back down? You've got an even bigger problem.

Leadership turnover isn't just lost producti...

Stop. Before you say yes to that management promotion, read this.

Most people move into management for two reasons:
1. The money
2. They think it's the only way to grow their career

Both will make you miserable if they're your primary motivation.

Here's what nobody tells you about the psychology of leading people vs. doing the work yourself:
→ As an individual contributor, your self-value comes from completion. You finish a project, solve a problem, and you feel that hit of dopamine. Your value is in your wins.
→ As a people leader, your wins are the team's wins. Your job is no longer to be the smartest person in the room, it's to make everyone else smarter. Your value is in helping others grow.

That's a fundamentally different psychological contract, and not everyone is wired for it.

Now, I'll be honest, the pay gap between individual contributor and management salary bands is real. The career ladder is also shorter for individual contributors. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

But here's wha...

Are you a people leader or aspiring to be one? Whether you're in a 9-5 role or building your own business, here's something I've observed in 20+ years of developing leaders across tech, biotech, and Fortune 500 companies:

True leadership is where fantasy meets reality.

The fantasy? That your title gives you authority and you need to be the hero with all the answers.

The reality? People follow leaders who've earned their respect through consistent actions, not those who demand it through hierarchy. And great leaders multiply their impact by developing others who can lead without them.

Most first-time managers get stuck in the fantasy. They think leadership means having the solution to every problem. They exhaust themselves trying to prove they deserve the promotion.

You know what actually works? Shifting from being the hero to building heroes.

Here's the test: Ask your managers (or yourself) how many problems they solved this week versus how many problems their team solved. The ratio tells yo...