Are You Accidentally Creating Distance With the Leaders You’re Trying to Develop?
A quick, practical framework Founder/CEOs and Execs can use to grow their senior team without formal training - and without creating unintended distance.
If you’re a Founder/CEO or senior exec at a growth-stage company, you’ve probably felt this tension. You know your business can’t grow unless your senior team grows. But you’re busy, you’re not a trainer, and part of you wonders if you’re even qualified to coach a C-suite peer.
It’s pretty common. Lots of leaders quietly feel responsible for their team’s growth and guilty that they’re not doing more. Sometimes, to avoid “kicking the can,” on needed development opportunities they send them off to a leadership program, hand development off to HR or play kick the can til the next off-site. Meanwhile, these execs who admire their bosses so much would love to learn from them - but instead they get the silent treatment or a formal process that feels cold.
Recently, a CEO I work with wanted to build more “courage to lead” - to have more ease making bolder calls and delivering tougher messages with less internal “agita”. He already had the insight and motivation, and was building skills through coaching. But he had no safe place to practice and no accountability for follow-through outside of our sessions. Once we created deliberate opportunities - a high-stakes board presentation, a structured debrief, and some internal feedback loops with his team - his growth accelerated. That shift didn’t just grow his courage; it deepened his relationship with me, his board and his team because they saw him stretching in real time.
A Quick Lens on Growth
So what got him the clarity he needed to level up? I’d like to say that it was the finesse of his executive coach but that’s only part of the story. The good news is you don’t have to be a skilled coach to help your team grow. You just need a simple way to look at what’s really holding them back. One of my favorites is David Peterson’s Development Pipeline. It gives you and your executive a neutral framework to talk about growth without making it a performance review.
Think of growth like a pipeline with five valves. If one valve is partly closed, the flow slows down no matter how open the others are:
Insight - Do they know what to work on?
Motivation - Are they willing to put in the effort?
Capabilities - Do they have the knowledge and skills?
Real-World Practice - Do they have opportunities to apply it?
Accountability - Are there ways to track progress and create recognition or consequences?
Before you default to another leadership course or stretch assignment, ask yourself which of these valves is actually constraining growth. I’ve included a link below to a simple tool that can help you think it through. Coming up with a hypothesis about where their blockage occurs will lower your own impostor feelings and show your exec you’re there to support, not judge. Then invite them to talk.
How to Use It in Real Time
Part of the brilliance of the model lies in its simplicity. In your next one-on-one, honor the work your exec is doing and tell them you want to have a different kind of conversation today. Then spend 15 minutes walking through these questions together:
“What do you think you most need to develop to be more effective right now?”
“Why does this matter to you personally? What’s at stake?”
“Do you already have some tools or skills here? What would help you build them?”
“Where could you try this new behavior in the next few weeks?”
“How will we both know you’re making progress? What feedback loop can we set up?”
If you really want to build trust, treat it as a joint exploration. You can invite them to ask you the same questions. That way it becomes co-development instead of evaluation, and it actually brings you closer. Once the questions are answered, invite your leader to make some commitments around taking action and, to the extent, they need your support, make those commitments back. Calendar. Follow up. Celebrate.
Want the tool?
If you’d like to try the Development Pipeline with your own team, I’ve included the same one-page diagnostic worksheet I use in my coaching sessions. It only takes a few minutes to fill out.
Rate each of the five elements from 1 (very low) to 5 (very high) and jot down examples or evidence. The lowest score usually shows you where a small shift can unlock the most growth.Bring it with you into the 1:1 and share your insights once you’ve heard theirs.
Here’s the PDF.
Why This Matters
Looking at your people through this lens does three things:
Focus: You spend your limited time on the real bottleneck.
Ownership: They see what’s holding them back and take responsibility for their own growth.
Connection: By framing it as a partnership, you deepen the relationship with your top team instead of creating distance.
And you don’t have to be their trainer - you just have to be the leader who clears the bottlenecks and invites them into the conversation.
If you’d like to talk about this work for yourself or for a member of your team, hit me up.
Credits: Development Pipeline model © David B. Peterson. Adapted with permission from Peterson, D.B. (2006). People are complex and the world is messy: A behavior-based approach to executive coaching. In D.R. Stober & A.M. Grant (Eds.), Evidence-Based Coaching Handbook (Wiley).