Strengthen: Stop Fixing Your Weakest Leader

For years I made the same mistake most leadership programmes make. I spent all my energy on the weakest person in the room.

It felt like the responsible thing to do. A struggling leader is visible, the cost of their underperformance is easy to point to, and fixing them feels like the obvious use of a development budget. So that is where the coaching went, where the extra attention went, where the difficult conversations happened. Meanwhile the leaders who were already performing well were largely left alone, on the reasonable but mistaken assumption that they did not need the investment. I have since come to think that assumption is backwards, and it is the thinking behind the third pillar of the RISE Framework.

Strengthen and Leverage What Works is the S in RISE, and it is built on a pattern I have now seen repeated across more than eighty five organisations. The return on developing an already strong leader further, giving them more scope, more visibility, more responsibility for spreading what they do well, is consistently higher than the return on trying to move a struggling leader from poor to adequate. Deficit thinking treats an organisation like a set of problems to be solved. Strength thinking treats it like a set of assets to be multiplied.

This does not mean ignoring genuine underperformance, and I want to be direct about that, because leaders sometimes hear this pillar and assume it gives them permission to avoid hard conversations. It does not. What it means is that the majority of your development effort, the time, the coaching budget, the succession planning, should follow evidence of what is already working, not follow the loudest problem in the building.

I worked with a financial services group that had been spending most of its leadership development budget on a small group of underperforming branch managers, with modest and slow results. We reallocated a significant portion of that spend toward the branch managers already outperforming their targets, giving them a mandate to mentor two others each and to document what they were actually doing differently. Within two quarters, the practices that spread from that group had lifted performance across a wider set of branches than the original remediation programme had managed in two years.

Operationally, leveraging strength looks less like a training calendar and more like a deliberate transfer of attention. It means asking, in a leadership meeting, not only "who is struggling and why" but "who is quietly doing this well, and how do we get more of the organisation doing it the way they do." That second question gets asked far less often than the first, and in my experience it is the more valuable of the two.

This pillar sits third in the RISE sequence because it depends on the first two. You cannot strengthen what works if you have not first agreed, through a raised vision, what "working" actually means, and you cannot spread a strength through a team that has not aligned around wanting to adopt it. Strengthen is where the framework stops being aspirational and starts being an active reallocation of where your best energy goes.

"Deficit thinking treats an organisation like a set of problems to be solved. Strength thinking treats it like a set of assets to be multiplied."