What are your leaders actually rewarded for developing?

What are your leaders actually rewarded for developing?

I ask because the answer decides more about your organization's future than almost any other question your board or executive team ever addresses, and most organizations have never asked it consciously. They have written the strategic plan. They have named the succession commitment. They have opened the leadership development budget. And then, quietly, they have built an incentive structure that punishes the leader who does what all of that literature says they should be doing.

I noticed the mechanism because I came out of a culture where the opposite was true. In the military, a leader's evaluation report assesses whether they have developed the person behind them. That is not a courtesy. It is a professional obligation with direct consequences for promotion, school selection, and the next assignment.

The reason the obligation exists is structural: the rotation cycle guarantees you will be replaced every two to four years, and the mission has to continue. A leader who has not built a successor has failed the mission. The failure is theirs and it follows them.

In much of corporate America and in significant parts of the nonprofit sector, the same activities are treated as their opposite. An executive who has made herself irreplaceable has accumulated the leverage the market rewards: compensation, board attention, credibility as the person the organization cannot function without.

A manager who has developed his direct reports to the point that any of them could replace him has, by the operating logic of many organizations, weakened his own position. There is no evaluation report assessing him on the readiness of his bench. There is only the performance review scoring him on outputs he personally delivered.

This is not a moral difference between the two cultures. It is a structural one. Executives are responding rationally to the incentives their organizations have built. In an organization that rewards irreplaceability, the rational executive accumulates irreplaceability. In an organization that rewards output, the rational manager optimizes for output he can be credited with personally. Neither is being obstinate. Both are responding to what their organization has actually chosen to measure.

What this produces at scale is a set of practices I have come to call whiteboard deep. Leadership development named on the strategic plan and absent from the calendar. Succession expectations declared in the annual report and unassigned in the operating rhythm. The retention of institutional knowledge treated as a lucky outcome rather than a designed one.

When a senior leader eventually leaves an organization that has run for a decade on these incentives, they take with them everything they never had a professional reason to teach anyone else, and the organization discovers, too late, what the receiving structure it never built would have cost to build.

The military retiree who arrives in the civilian executive suite sees this immediately and often cannot name what she is seeing. She was trained inside a system where developing the person behind her was the measure of her. She arrives in a system where the same activity is treated as either altruism or self-sabotage, and the confusion this produces breaks in both directions.

Sometimes she pushes for bench-building and is read as threatening. Sometimes she stops pushing and adopts the incentives around her, at which point the organization has lost the very habit it hired her to bring.

The question is not whether your organization values leadership development. Every organization I have advised says it does. The question is whether the value is real. Real means it appears in the performance review. Real means the executive who neglected succession loses standing when that neglect is discovered. Real means the manager who has produced three people ready to run his function is more valuable to the organization than the manager who has made himself the only person who can.

So I will ask again.

What are your leaders actually rewarded for developing?

If your organization's honest answer is “themselves and the work in front of them,” that is the answer.