Grow Others

Why it matters

Your impact is limited by your team's capability.

This is the move that separates good technology leaders from great ones. Good leaders deliver results through their own effort. Great leaders build teams that deliver results without them.

As a CTO, you cannot personally solve every technical problem, coach every engineer, or make every architecture decision. Your leverage comes through the people beneath you. The quality of your leadership team is the ceiling on what the technology function can achieve. Raising that ceiling is your most important long-term contribution.

What it looks like in practice

Growing others means hiring well, coaching effectively, building leaders beneath you, and creating a culture where people develop. It means having the patience to let someone struggle through a challenge instead of jumping in and solving it yourself. It means investing time in people development even when there are fires to fight.

The most important person you develop is not your most junior engineer. It is your most senior leader. If you can build two or three strong leaders beneath you, your impact multiplies dramatically. They extend your reach, carry your thinking into rooms you are not in, and create capacity you did not have before.

Growing others shows up in how you run one-on-ones, how you respond when someone brings you a problem, how you give feedback after a failure, and how you think about the career development of your leadership team. It is not one conversation. It is the aggregate of a hundred small decisions about whether to solve or to develop.

How to develop this

Growing others also means being honest about performance. It means having the difficult conversations early instead of letting underperformance linger. It means setting clear expectations and holding people to them. Kindness without honesty is not kindness. It is avoidance.

Ask yourself: if you left your position tomorrow, how long would the function perform at the same level? If the answer is not very long, you have been leading through personal heroics instead of building team capability. The goal is to make yourself less essential, not more.

Coaching versus directing

The most common mistake technology leaders make when developing others is defaulting to directing when the situation calls for coaching. Directing means telling someone what to do and how to do it. It is appropriate when someone is new to a task, when time is critical, or when the stakes are too high for experimentation.

Coaching means asking questions, creating reflection, and letting someone work through a challenge themselves. It takes longer in the moment but develops capability in a way that directing never does. The discipline of coaching requires you to resist the urge to give the answer. When a senior leader brings you a problem, the first question is not what should we do but what have you tried and what do you think is the right move? The repeated experience of being trusted to work through difficult problems is what builds the judgment and confidence of your leadership team.

Honest performance conversations

Nothing limits the development of a team more than tolerance of underperformance. When a leader who is not performing is allowed to stay in their position without clear feedback and expectation-setting, the whole team notices. It signals that performance does not actually matter, that accountability is not real, and that relationships protect people more than results.

Honest performance conversations are not punitive. They are respectful, clear, and specific. Here is what I observe. Here is the impact of that on the team and the business. Here is what needs to change and by when. Here is how I will support you in making that change. This conversation, done well, is one of the most developmental things you can do for someone.

Avoiding it is the leadership failure. Early, clear, honest conversations about performance give people the information they need to grow. Silence or vague feedback robs them of that opportunity.

Building a development culture

The culture of your technology function around development is shaped by what you model. If you take your own development seriously, your team will. If you invest visible time and attention in the development of your senior leaders, it signals that development is a real priority, not a line item in the performance review template.

A development culture means that capability-building is not just something that happens in formal one-on-ones. It happens in the way you debrief after a difficult project, the way you respond when something goes wrong, the way you involve your team in decisions that would help them develop their thinking, and the way you create stretch opportunities deliberately rather than waiting for them to arise organically.

The technology function that develops people consistently is the one that retains them, attracts more, and compounds capability over time. That compounding is one of the most durable competitive advantages a technology organisation can build.