The team that doesn’t need you
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My Chief Marketing Officer leaned across the table during a hiring debrief and said: 'You need to meet her.'
She was talking about Monica. Monica had applied to help build and grow the women's health community at Drop Bio Health. In the final interview, I asked her the question I ask everyone: 'Let's say you're successful here and stay two, three, five years. What's your next play after this?'
She didn't have an answer. Most people don't. That's fine. The question isn't a test. It's a signal. It tells the person sitting across from you something about how you think about the people who join you.
Monica joined. Her capability became clear quickly. She moved into leading design and UX for the business. She has a unique ability to understand complex opportunities, translate them into meaningful experiences, use evidence and creativity together and argue for a better way forward when she believed in it.
Near the end of my CEO tenure, our team had the chance to work with New Zealand's leading health insurer. The work was significant. We split up: I took part of the team in one direction; Monica led the rest to work with a separate section of the organisation.
I remember the feeling clearly. It wasn't pride. It was trust. Complete, unquestioned trust.
She didn't need me in the room.
The business didn't need me in the room.
That's what good development builds.
The cost of doing this poorly
Most CEOs of small to mid-size businesses instinctively know that developing their people is the right thing to do.
Fewer decisions coming upward.
The business running faster.
Less time spent being the answer to questions that don't need you.
The instinct is sound. But when I ask those same CEOs how they structure development for their people, the conversation goes quiet.
They know they should be doing it, but they haven’t been taught how to think about it. And the HR person, if there is one, typically knows how to run a process, not how to build a development philosophy.
So, what happens?
The annual review cycle, if there is one, ticks over. Some goals get written down. A training budget gets loosely allocated. Nobody's quite sure what it's for.
The cost isn't that people feel underdeveloped. The cost is that your best people make decisions below their capability, bring problems to you that they could solve themselves, and eventually leave quietly, and for somewhere that takes their growth seriously.
The cost is also you. The CEO who becomes a bottleneck not by choice but by default.
Always needed, always consulted, never redundant.
There's a version of leadership where that feels good. I'd encourage you to be suspicious of it.
The commitment that must come first
Before any framework, there's a decision to be made and it's not a small one.
The conventional approach to development is basic.
We'll invest in you for this role by training you on what you need to do the job you're in.
Not wrong. But it's not enough.
The commitment I'm describing is this: We're invested in where your career goes, including beyond us.
We're not just here to get the best out of you for as long as you're here. We're here to make you successful in your next play, whatever that turns out to be.
That sounds risky. You invest in someone and they leave.
Experience tells me the opposite is true.
When people believe you're genuinely invested in their future they stay longer, contribute more, take better decisions, and represent you with a level of care and excellence in rooms you'll never be in.
They ask better questions.
They seek more risk-adjusted agency.
They behave like owners.
That's what you're building toward. And it starts with the philosophical commitment, made clearly, before any process is designed.
A framework your HR lead can run
What follows isn't a heavyweight programme. It's a set of principles. Light to implement, meaningful in practice, and designed so the CEO can brief an HR or talent person to own and execute it.
It works for new hires. It works equally for the people already on your team who have never been asked what they're building toward.
1. Start with the question
The conversation begins before the contract is signed.
In every final interview, I ask: 'Let's say you're successful here and stay two, three, five years. What's your next play after this?'
Most candidates find this hard to answer. That's expected. The question isn't designed to get a polished response. It's designed to plant a seed. To signal that this business thinks about where you're going, not just what you can do for us right now.
For candidates who accept the role, the question gets revisited in their second week of employment. It’s less a formal session and more a conversation.
It focuses on getting answers to two meaningful questions:
What are you building toward?
What would make this role a meaningful chapter in that story?
For people already in the business who have never been asked, start now.
These questions work at any point in someone's tenure. In some ways it lands harder when a person has been somewhere for a year or two and has never once been asked about their ambition.
The HR lead's role here is to create a simple record of what each person says. Not a form, a document. One or two paragraphs that capture the direction, the ambition, and the kinds of opportunity that would serve it.
2. Name the ambition (and share it)
Once you understand what someone is building toward, that insight can't sit with you alone.
Deliberately brief your executive team. Here's what this person is working toward. Here's what kind of opportunity would serve that ambition. Keep an eye out.
This matters because the CEO won't see every opportunity from where they sit. But the CMO might. The CFO might. The operations lead might. The person managing a partner relationship almost certainly will.
When the wider leadership team knows what to look for, development becomes something the business creates together instead of something managed from the top and forgotten by Tuesday.
The HR lead maintains a simple one-page summary per team member (including the executive team) that covers their stated ambition and the kinds of opportunity worth flagging.
It gets reviewed in leadership team meetings once per quarter as a lens to the organisation’s resilience. When a new project, partnership, or room opens up, who on this list is ready for it?
3. Make the investment concrete
The question of how much to invest in development tends to get framed as a budget question.
It's a clarity question.
A working placeholder of 5–15K per person per year usually covers the external investment for conferences, programmes and courses that get someone out of the building, broaden their thinking, and signal that the business is serious about its commitment.
When you're budgeting for the year, put it in. Having a number makes it a commitment rather than a conversation that never quite happens.
But the more significant investment isn't financial. It's opportunity.
Development also means every stretch assignment, every room that person gets access to, every moment they're asked to lead something they haven't led before.
It costs nothing except the willingness to give someone the chance, and the confidence that they're ready for it.
The HR lead's job is to hold both.
Track the financial investment. But more importantly, track the opportunities: what did this person get access to in the last quarter that they didn't have before?
That's the question that separates a development plan that develops people from one that just exists.
4. Close the loop, quarterly, in three questions
The failure mode in most development programmes isn't design. It's follow-through. A plan gets created, filed, and quietly forgotten. The person it was built for has no way to signal whether it's working. The HR person has no data to act on and the CEO hears nothing until someone hands in their notice.
Every quarter, each team member receives three questions by text or email, whichever they prefer.
Short. Takes two minutes to answer. The responses go to their direct leader, the HR lead and CEO.
Do you feel like the business knows what you're working toward?
Have you had an opportunity in the last quarter that connected to your development?
Do you feel more capable, more confident, or closer to your next play than you did 90 days ago?
That's it. No scoring matrix. No competency framework. Three questions that check awareness, action, and impact in that order.
The HR lead reviews the responses.
Where the answer to question one is no, the ambition conversation needs to happen or be refreshed.
Where the answer to question two is no for two consecutive quarters, the leadership team hasn't been doing its job of creating opportunity.
Where the answer to question three is consistently no, the plan needs to change.
The CEO sees the responses not to manage the process, but to stay connected to it.
Development is a leadership commitment, not an HR function. The quarterly read is a ten-minute temperature check that keeps it that way.
What you're building toward
Let’s be clear about an inconvenient truth.
You could fall out of love with your business.
You might become unwell.
Circumstances could change in ways you can't predict. Any CEO, founder, or business owner who is honest with themselves knows that at some point, they won't be there.
Almost all of them share a similar underlying desire to leave the business better than they found it. To have the impact continue. To know that what they built can stand without them.
That doesn't happen by accident. It happens because someone, at some point in the business's history, took development seriously.
They know HR obligations often fall flat so they make it a leadership commitment.
The business that can run without you isn't a threat to your authority, it's the highest expression of it.
Every time you invest in someone's next play, you're building the next generation of leadership. You're creating the conditions for wealth and impact to continue long after you've moved on.
That's not a legacy built at the end.
It's built in the middle, in the decisions made every day about who gets the room and who gets the chance.
Back to Monica
Today, Monica continues to do extraordinary work. The capability that was present in that final interview, the ability to understand opportunities, capture insight, design meaningful experiences, argue for a better way, didn't just serve the business while she was there. It continued to grow, and it now serves others.
I didn't develop her. She developed herself. But we created the conditions for it.
We took her ambition seriously.
We gave her rooms she hadn't been in before.
We trusted her before she had formally earned it.
That's the whole game.
The question worth sitting with: Who in your business is waiting for you to ask about their next play and what would change if you did?
From The Partnership Playbook Podcast
Here are this week’s podcast episodes for your walk, commute or workout.
LEADERSHIP MOMENTS
EP 179 - 10 min: Clarity starts and ends with the CEO. CEOs hold enormous complexity in their heads, but organisations only act on what they clearly understand. In this episode you’ll learn why clarity degrades as messages travel through layers of leadership and the ‘phone call test’ every CEO should apply to company communication. Listen on Apple Podcasts | Spotify
EP 177 - 10 min: The new reality for GTM leaders: No one has been here before. What should a GTM leader do when the market is changing faster than any playbook? AI, geopolitics, and shifting market dynamics are creating a moment in business history where no leader has a perfect roadmap — but that doesn’t mean standing still is the answer. Listen on Apple Podcasts | Spotify
CEO INTERVIEW
EP 178 - 48 min: How to build a referral based business with CEO Matt Remuzzi. Learn how Matt Remuzzi built a 1,200 client accounting business using referrals and partnerships. Matt shares actionable insights on mastering your numbers and leveraging partnerships for predictable growth. Listen on Apple Podcasts | Spotify
When you're ready, there are three ways I can help you:
1. CEO Coaching: For CEO’s who want to lead with clarity and grow their business without sacrificing what matters most. A tailored 12-session experience with three interconnected elements: scaling you as a leader, elevating how you lead others, and creating conditions for sustainable business growth.
2. The Partnership Lab: A 6-week experience for founders, CEOs, and GTM leaders who are done with slow growth and stalled conversations. Learn to rapidly qualify and prioritise high-value partners, Install a system that turns conversations into contracts and capture outsized returns from partnerships that scale. Apply to join the next cohort today!
3. Leadership Events: From Cochlear and Lifeblood to military leaders, I have shared inspiring stories and practical frameworks and insights that shift how leaders leverage partnerships for growth. Book me to speak at your next conference, offsite, or leadership event.
Looking for something different? Send me an email.
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