Making the leap from a team of individual contributors to leaders

Reader,

Books, podcasts, and studies on developing people are everywhere. They cover everything from productivity hacks to coaching models, from culture shifts to personal growth plans.

But they rarely start with the simplest—and maybe most important—question:

What are we developing people for?

If you’re involved in helping people grow—whether that’s a peer, your first team, or an entire organization—the aim of your development shapes everything that follows.

What’s the aim of your development?

Is it to help people:

Produce better outcomes?
Cause less friction?
Align with the mission?
Make decisions?
Improve their attitude?
Become leaders?
Something else entirely?

Some approaches focus heavily on productivity and efficiency. Others lean toward wellbeing and culture. Leadership development gets attention too—but often in a way that misses a bigger, deeper shift.

Here’s something interesting to think about.

Research says about two-thirds of Millennials step into leadership through internal promotion—moving from being an individual contributor to leading others.

That means the skills and habits that made them successful before aren’t necessarily the ones that will make them successful now.

So if your goal was to develop agency and leadership at every level of your organization—how would that change things?

Which approaches would you stop using?
Which ones would suddenly feel essential?
Where would you focus most?

Two roles, two mindsets.

Exceptional individual contributors often:

Focus on their own tasks and responsibilities
Make a direct, personal impact through what they produce
Make decisions only within their own area of expertise
Get measured on quality, speed, and accuracy

Leaders of teams, on the other hand:

Guide, enable, and align the work of others from a much higher perspective
Achieve results by generating collaboration
Make decisions balancing competing priorities, variables, and stakeholders
Are measured on team performance and long-term outcomes

There’s a bigger shift here:

Individual contributors exchange their time for results.

Leaders operate from a completely different paradigm—one where time and actions are amplified by an entire team, and the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

This means that becoming a leader requires an entirely different way to think. Otherwise, you're trapped in doing, and there’s no time to be effective in your new role.

The shift begins in the thinking.

Without rethinking how they approach work, new leaders often keep applying “individual contributor” logic. That’s when we see bottlenecks, micromanagement, overwhelm, and long hours without meaningful progress.

So maybe the question isn’t just, “What do we want people to do differently?”
Maybe it’s, “How do we want them to think differently?”

Because thinking shapes doing. When thinking expands, so does leadership capacity.

Where are the biggest opportunities in your organization?

Developing leadership and decision-making is how you scale.

It’s how people accomplish more while maintaining the balance and wellbeing they so deeply want.

I wonder—if you looked around your organization right now, where would you see the biggest opportunities to develop leadership thinking?