How the best leaders develop people who thrive. And why that matters more than ever.

My first day.

It was a horrible morning. The kind of grey, wet Tuesday that makes everyone late and nobody apologetic about it.

I had been promoted back into my original branch at a previous employer, the office I'd started in, the team I'd heard great things about. My first day as a manager. No training. No plan beyond a gut instinct and a firm belief that if we applied the standards we'd all been trained to, properly and together, something good would happen.

Half the team were late. I sat there trying not to look as terrified as I felt.

When they finally settled, the last one arriving with a story nobody was going to believe: the bus they'd been on had attempted a low bridge, got stuck, and the entire top deck had ground to a halt somewhere between there and here, the tension broke before I'd said a word. We were already laughing.

I suggested we get a cup of tea.

And then I told them I'd heard great things. That I thought there was a lot we could do together. That I had some ideas about how, but I genuinely wanted to know if they were up for it, and what ideas they had, because I couldn't do it without them.

This was a good four years before I started my first business. I had no management training to speak of. What I had was a clear set of standards, a genuine belief in the people in that room, and the instinct to invite rather than impose.

They looked at each other. A little surprised. A little amused.

The most senior person in the room, the one whose reaction would set the tone for everyone else, said: 'I'm really interested in knowing. I don't know what I would do to make things great. I like that you think there is a way. What do you think?'

So I told them. It was quite simple. We were going to apply every standard we had been trained in and rewarded on. All of them. Properly. Together.

Performance wise, that office was number 28 out of roughly a hundred branches. Within three months it was number six.

The behaviours, the teamwork, the energy, the ownership, came alongside the standards. I didn't manufacture them. They emerged, because people knew what good looked like and felt part of building it.

Watch the video below for an overview, or read on for the full story.

What I've seen since.

I've written in previous posts about the pattern I keep seeing in founder-led businesses. This is where it is evident most clearly: in the people.

The knowledge that makes a business exceptional almost always lives in people's heads. The founders who built it. The senior leaders who grew up inside it. The people who'd been there long enough to have absorbed, without realising it, a way of doing things that looks effortless from the outside and is almost impossible to explain.

I sat with two founders not long ago. Experienced, successful, having built a global business over two decades. I asked them a simple question: What is your vision?

They each told me a story. Different stories. They looked at each other.

I asked where it was written down.

They laughed.

It wasn't. Of course it wasn't. It had never needed to be, when it was just the two of them, working closely, finishing each other's sentences. But the business had grown. The people who needed to carry that vision forward were already in the building. And they didn't yet know what they were carrying.

What followed was one of the most energising processes I've been part of. Getting that knowledge out of their heads and into a structure the whole business could use. Vision. Values. Operating standards. And at the heart of Pillar Three, the talent and culture pillar, a culture framework that makes behavioural expectations explicit at every level. Not vague aspirations, but a clear picture of what good actually looks like, from the newest recruit to the most senior leader. Referenced in hiring, onboarding, appraisals, promotions, and every development conversation in between.

This is new to almost every business I work with. Not the idea of values, most have those. But the explicit, levelled structure that makes behaviour something the business owns consistently, regardless of which manager happens to be in the room.

The results, when they eventually sold the business, were significantly beyond anything they had anticipated.

But the number I remember most isn't the sale price. It's this: new people joining after the framework was in place became fully effective months faster than had ever previously been the case. Not because they were better people. Because the environment was finally built to make them effective.

Why this matters more right now than it ever has.

There is a conversation happening in almost every leadership team at the moment. It goes something like this: with AI taking over foundational tasks, do we need as many people? And if we're hiring fewer, does talent development still matter as much?

I think this is the wrong question entirely. But before I explain why, I want to be clear about something: I am not a technology expert. I find most everyday technology clunky, unintuitive, and frankly frustrating to navigate. CRMs that don't flow. Systems that fight you at every step. Platforms that seem designed for the person who built them rather than the person using them.

And yet AI, which is arguably the most sophisticated technology most of us have ever encountered, feels completely different. Conversational. Accessible. Almost natural.

I'm not sure I can fully explain why. But I think it's because it works with the thinking you bring, rather than making you work around it.

Which brings me to the point.

Every business uses delivery mechanisms. A CRM. A process. A system. A person. Each one is a way of making something happen, a customer experience, an employee experience, a standard applied consistently. The technology changes. The question underneath it never does: what is it that you actually want to happen here? What do you want your customers to feel? Your people to experience? What standards do you want applied, and what behaviours do you want in your business?

If you can answer those questions clearly, any delivery mechanism, including AI, becomes a powerful tool in your hands. If you can't, it doesn't matter how sophisticated the technology is. You will just use it to deliver confusion more efficiently than before!

And I say that knowing that even when a business has that clarity, translating it into technology isn't always straightforward. Getting providers to reflect what you actually want to happen is not a simple thing. That part requires good partners and persistence. But the clarity itself, that is the part you can own.

This is what I believe: AI amplifies the quality of the thinking you bring to it. The people who will use it well are precisely those with genuine judgement, genuine values, and the clarity to know what good looks like before they reach for the technology.

Those people are not fully formed. They have to be developed. Deliberately, consistently, and with real intent, not left to chance, and not left to whichever manager happens to be naturally gifted at developing people.

In my view, the businesses that will navigate the next few years well are not the ones focused primarily on replacing people with AI. They are the ones with people capable of working alongside it intelligently. And those people are the product of deliberate, well-structured development, not luck, not proximity to a good manager, not the accident of joining when the founders were still close enough to pass it on informally.

How you actually do it.

It starts with being clear, genuinely, specifically clear, about what you want to happen. What you want every person who encounters your business to experience. What standards you want applied. What behaviours you want to see at every level.

I learned the depth of that when I went through the process of trying to build technology. The discipline of defining the user experience, what happens at each step, what it should feel like, what it should achieve, turned out to be something I already understood. Because it was exactly what my business partner Caroline and I had done, all those years ago, sitting at her kitchen table before we opened our first business. Writing down how things should work. Defining our standards. Creating, without knowing it had any other name, our operating framework.

We were defining the experience we wanted to deliver before we had a single member of staff to deliver it. That, it turns out, is where everything begins.

Not with the technology. Not with the hiring. Not with the training programme. With the clarity of what you are trying to build, and what you want every person inside it, and every person touched by it, to experience at every step.

When that clarity exists, everything else has a home. The right people can be hired against it. New joiners can be developed within it. Managers have something to work from rather than relying on instinct alone. And every tool, every system, every process, every technology, can be configured to support it rather than replace it.

Where to start.

The Growth Benchmark is where that clarity begins. Your whole leadership team, working through it together, seeing the same picture at the same time. Understanding where you are aligned and where you are not.

And the Growth Framework® is the how. The connected operating system that takes that clarity and builds it into every part of your business, your people, your processes, your standards, your culture, so that what you intend to deliver is what actually gets delivered. Consistently. By everyone. Not just the ones who happened to be in the room when you were.

The Benchmark is free. And it's the right place to begin.