Building Leadership Paths That Keep Your Team Growing

One of the biggest motivators for people at work isn’t money. It’s progress. Your team wants to know they have a future in your business, whether that’s moving into management or becoming the best at their craft.

In this episode, we share how to create a leadership development path that works for everyone on your team.

Leadership is about growth, responsibility, and being recognized for your contributions. With the right system, you can spot potential leaders early, develop them gradually, and keep your best people engaged for the long haul.

We cover:

• Why leadership paths are essential for retention, motivation, and morale
• How to identify natural leaders and develop them step by step
• What to do for high performers who don’t want a management role
• The role of mentoring, training, and recognition in leadership growth
• How to test if someone is really ready for more responsibility
• Why investing in your team pays off, even if they eventually leave

If you want a team that’s motivated to grow alongside your business, this conversation will give you the framework to create leadership paths that keep everyone engaged.

Want to create leadership paths that keep your best people engaged and growing? Book a free strategy call with us. We’ll help you design the systems and structure that build leaders at every level of your business.

“People don’t just leave jobs. They leave when they can’t see a future.” – Anna Angelova

Transcript for “How to Create a Leadership Development Path in Your Business”

The transcript below was automatically generated. Please ignore any errors or inconsistencies in the text.

Anna Angelova   0:05
Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to a brand new episode of More Than Just Task Management, your favorite daily podcast where we help you build a thriving business. I’m Anna Angelova, business coach and consultant and a co-host of this daily podcast. And as usual, I have Joris Minosan here with me.
There is. Happy Friday.

Jores Minasvand   0:27
Hi Anna, happy Friday. Oh, what is the topic for today?

Anna Angelova   0:34
Today we are talking about developing a leadership track inside your business. How do you do this? And as your business grows, it gets really, really important to have this in place.
Because one of the things that actually makes us happiest is seeing progress. As human beings, one of the things that makes us happiest is seeing progress. And people within your company, they need to know that they can progress. They need to know that they can.
Like they have a future within your team, within your company, where life will be better and better and better, that there is a path for them to develop their careers, to get into leadership positions if they want to and if they need to. So it’s it’s really.
Something that again, as your business grows, as you get from just you to a-team and then you start even growing your team, having a leadership development track where you help your team, your employees grow.
Becomes a must. It’s something that for a thriving business is something that you really, really want to have. And when we’re talking about leadership development track today, actually I want to make one thing clear. A leadership development track doesn’t mean that it’s it’s for people to go.
From a single contributor to a manager to an executive, right? It’s not. It’s not necessarily this. Yes, it includes this kind of path where someone can go from a single contributor to managing people and then from there to being some kind of an executive in your team and who knows, might even.
Be the next in line to become the CEO of your company and take it to the next level. Yes, this is included and this is the traditional. When we think about leadership development, this is the traditional path. However, we’ve mentioned this before, like one of the things that the best managers do is.
Enabling and empowering and rewarding team members and employees who are great at what they do and who don’t necessarily want to become managers and they don’t necessarily want to climb a corporate ladder. And when we talk about leadership development track.
Your program, your leadership development track, should include ways to develop people, even if they don’t want to move to managerial positions. Because ultimately, when you think about it, we are all leaders in one way or another.
And even if you, let’s say you are like you have a restaurant, let’s say you have a restaurant for example, and you have an amazing waiter. People love him and and he’s so good at what he does. It can smile.
So the attitude, everything is amazing. And now this waiter doesn’t really want to move to become a manager or something, shift manager or something like this. Doesn’t really want to climb a ladder. This is what he loves, being the waiter.
Chatting with people, serving like this is this is his passion. This is where he feels the happiest and this is where his gifts are. So a way to develop.
This person as a leader might be like for him personally to get training to improve his skills, to double down on what he’s great at, and then some ways that he might be able to contribute further is of course.
Training the new waiters, mentoring new waiters, right? So when we think about leadership development track, it doesn’t include just a path from single contributor to manager to executive and CEO, let’s say. It also includes helping people grow personally as leaders because.
Only.
And in enabling your employees to mentor others, to coach each other even. So I know I’ve talked a lot and I’m curious actually, Joris, what are your thoughts? And especially with all the experience you have, you’ve empowered and developed a lot of.
People to step up. So thinking about the structured way to do this, like how how do we do this in a structured way? Why it matters? What are some key points that you want to share with us today?

Jores Minasvand   5:18
Thanks Anna. Great points. I I believe the the first step is to identify. Like you mentioned, there are people who want to become leaders. There are people who are natural born leaders. We do it without even knowing it.
And there are people that don’t want to do that. So I think the key, the first step is to identify the person, see if they are actually taking initiative and even you don’t have to assign them to manage 50 people to to begin with first as I mentioned.
In one of our previous calls, you get them to manage their own tasks, you get to manage their own deliverables and then you monitor them and you slowly step back and you let them self manage. And if you see them manage themselves well, you eventually start.
Putting other responsibilities as to, for example, managing other people onto their plate and then you keep monitor, you enable, you teach, you guide and then like I said, if they don’t have that natural ability, it will come up within the first 2-3 months there are people.
People that are absolutely not born to be managers or there are people who don’t even understand management and there are people who understand management being I’m the manager, you’re the subordinate, you do what I tell you that doesn’t work so.
Identify the right people, guide them, monitor them and enable them. And enablement is by trial and just keep adding to their plate until you know they either buckle or they manage.
So and then mean while you’re doing that, you keep, you know, guiding them. And some people don’t even want your guidance. Some people even in the from the beginning, it’s like, who are you to tell me what to do? I know what I’m doing and you realize that these are not the right people.
There are people who want the title just for the title and I’ve seen these a lot. They they don’t even care about the compensation, they just want the title. These are not good managers. Managers are people who enable others growth by by enable enablement. Again, one of the the interesting.
Ideas that I got introduced to late 90s by so literally it says you enable one person, you grow to two people, you that person enables one more person, you become, you become three people and imagine.
You multiply this right? So I think the the the path is identify. You need to have this. I don’t know if it’s a skill or something you’re born with the skill to identify the right natural born leader.
And then you enable them.

Anna Angelova   8:23
And in addition to what you’re saying, so ultimately when you’re developing your leadership track, so how you identify, so you want to know how you identify people who are natural leaders or or have to have the capabilities to to to become leaders. So how do you identify them so you know that?
They can go to that path of being managers, executives, so on and then have a path for the others like the ones who again, as I said, they might love what they do but don’t really want to become managers. So have a path for them and then when you think about your program.
What’s important as well is how often you have these things and recent studies show that especially with the the newer generations like my generation, like millennials and then Gen. Z and then Alpha and the new generation.
Coming up that it looks like that we love more like more regular recognition where ultimately instead of waiting five years to get promoted, there are some kind of intermediate steps like making, making.
The ladder or or the improvement the track a little bit more like easier and and more often like these things happen more often with with easier steps. And one thing you mentioned Joris and I wanted I wanted to also add is that.
Key, key, key thing. So I’ve heard this from Darren Hardy, who said he learned this from oh, I forgot who exactly he said he learned this, but it was from another one of those experts, new development gurus there. I think they’re one of the best experts.
Experts. So the idea was.
We we’ve all heard that out of every 1010 dollars you get, give $1.00 back, right? Take the 10%, giving 10% back to look for others for causes that you support.
So what we he was told and recommended and something he started doing is investing in himself. So investing in yourself, allocate 10% to invest in yourself. And what he was saying is actually.
It goes even a little bit further that it’s like if you’re making $100,000 right now, it doesn’t mean you allocate $10,000 for for your personal development. What it means is that actually if you want to make this year, you want to make 250,000, you actually need to invest 25,000 in your.
Um.
Personal development, not 25,000, I’m 10% of 250. Yeah, yeah, yeah, 25,000, yeah, 25,000 to to in your personal development. So you can get to the 250K, right. So ultimately again as you grow.
So as your business grows, at some point your development, personal development, let’s call it personal development budget might be a million a year. And yes, you can probably find certain.
Masterminds where you might need to invest quarter of a million for for the year to to be able to join this, but then you still you still end up with 3/4 left and this is where again as you grow as your team like you were saying Joris with empowering your team, enabling them growth by enablement.
Part of this growth by enablement is actually investing in your people, investing in their training, investing in their leadership development. And this is where, again, this is something I’ve also.
Heard from Darren Hardy, which complete I completely support, is that I believe what he shared was that what he does for his team is that it’s like 80%. The company covers 80%, but the person still needs to get 20% in, so they still need to pay 20%.
If they want to go through some kind of a training and of course after that it’s about this training is supposed to help with the for a job, right? So how did it help? Like what did they learn? What are they implementing and how they improving what they’re doing? So there’s some kind of accountability there, but the.
Why I love this idea of like 8020 for example, it’s like where the company you ultimately invest 80% of the cost. You pay for 80% of the cost, but the person still pays 20% is because when we are given things.
We take them for granted and when we pay, this is when we start associating this with value. And unfortunately, unfortunately, this is how our minds work. A lot of times, a lot of times we don’t like when we hear free, we think, oh, it’s it’s cheap, it’s it’s not worth it.
Why? Why? Why spend time on this when I didn’t pay a cent for it? But when I invest like $1000 into something, I’ll be like, hmm, I’d better go and get this thing done because like I invested $1000 into this thing, so.
Really, really important. The leadership development track is, yes, it’s all identifying, knowing how to identify people who can climb the ladder, knowing how to identify people who should stay where they are, but expanding their current role and growing their current role. And it’s also about.
Growing your people, like investing in them, continually investing with them and enabling them to learn more, to grow, to get better at what they’re doing. And I know some of some people out there are afraid that, oh, what if I invest and they leave, right? I can. You might have seen this on LinkedIn.
What? What if I invest in them and they leave? But then what if they you don’t invest and they stay because what happens then? So again, ultimately it’s all about it’s your business, right? It’s your business, it’s your decision, but it’s so much benefit.
From first of all having a leadership development track in your business so your people can see their progress. They know that oh, I I’m progressing and even if I don’t want to become a manager, there is a way for me to learn, to get better, to contribute to the company, which a lot of us, we would get paid less.
This. But if we know that there is a future for us, if we know that there’s something that we are contributing to, like for a lot of us, like there, there’s so many.
Resources out there. Research has been done so many times where I think one of the salary in terms of like how important it is, is 5th place or something like this.
It’s not top three even, and it’s not the first thing we think about when it comes to work. Yes, it’s important, of course, but ultimately.
Giving your team, your people something to look forward to, progress that they can make. This is something that’s invaluable and it will pay dividends for you and your business for decades to come. So highly, highly recommend if you don’t have this.
For your company, do it, implement something like this, develop it. And the best thing though is that like if you already have a team but you don’t have this kind of leadership development track, the best thing is that you can involve them, you can co-create it with them.
We should make it even more successful. So like I I know I’m really passionate about leadership, I’m passionate about personal development and all these kind of things. And I really hope that as you’re listening to our conversation today, you all you you get to do this and as usual if there is.
Anywhere you feel stuck, reach out, reach out. I will add the link to our.
Strategy call. So you can book a strategy call with us and we can talk about this like let’s say with the leadership development track, where you are, what you have and if you feel stuck, what your next step should be. So reach out and go get do it, go get this implemented and see the way that your company will transform.

Jores Minasvand   17:19
Very well, put Anna at your passion shows in in in when when you talk and what what you deliver. Amazing wanting to close one of the best tests that you can do for someone that you’re enabling.
Give them one of your tasks, so bring them into a meeting where you would be conducting the meeting, you would be getting the result out of the meeting and then you were getting the conclusion. You make the decision and the second time make the meeting and then don’t show up.
Let the person know that you’re superly busy. You’re confident that the person can take take the the task and see how they act. What decision do they make? Do they crumble? Do they make the wrong decision? And eventually you can get.
Get them to. It’s like throwing somebody in the deep end and say learn to swim, but not quite that harsh. Like and a lot of times the people that are actually born to be leaders, they will make the decision. The ones that that are not, they will flop.
They will. They may end up running the meeting, but at the end they won’t be able to make a decision and he will come back to you again. I think that’s the best thing to do and this is part of internal succession as your as we talked about for you to disconnect. This will be part of it. Give them one of your tasks.
Doesn’t have to be a like high level decision on finances, but it could be a a meeting that that they make the decision, they take it over. You’ll get, you’ll be surprised.

Anna Angelova   19:04
This was a great point. Absolutely. You want to have to develop the program. In general, you want to have this kind of, like I said, tests where even before someone completely moves to the next step, you make sure that yes, they’re ready and if.
If not, then how? How do you help them prepare for this? So love it. Thanks. Thanks for sharing, Joris. And I know it’s Friday and we’ve talked a lot. And again, this is one of my favorite topics and I can talk all day long about this one, but I’m saying this is enough for today.

Jores Minasvand   19:33
Alright.

Anna Angelova   19:42
Tomorrow we are back with a recap of the past five days. So if you missed any of the episodes, tomorrow we’ll share our biggest takeaways from each of the five days and this gives you a chance to hear what we talked about and if anything’s interesting for you to.
Go back and listen to that episode. So thank you for listening. Thank you for being part of more than just task management journey and for making the world a better place by being a business owner. We really, really appreciate you and we’ll see you back tomorrow, bright and early the episodes.
Go live 5:00 AM a little bit shortly after 5:00 AM Eastern Time here in Canada, US. So make sure you subscribe if you haven’t and we’ll be back tomorrow.
No.
Thank you, Anna. See you tomorrow. See you tomorrow. Bye, Jaris.

Jores Minasvand   20:30
Thank you, Anna. See you tomorrow.