The Growth Multiplier: How to Develop Your Team as a New Manager

You know that feeling when you’re being pulled in multiple directions at once? Clients want more work for less money. Senior management wants results yesterday. Your team is exhausted and telling you they can’t take on anything else. Sound familiar?

Many managers feel like this. You are constantly juggling high expectations with not enough resources. And I get it. When you’re that busy, learning how to develop your team as a new manager just doesn’t feel urgent. There’s always something more pressing.

But there’s something most of us miss when we’re in that mode.

The Math of Exponential Impact

Here’s an example. You spend one hour running a learning session with your team of ten people. You help them get better at handling a specific type of client situation. Each person gets just 1% better at their work. Just 1%.

Now look at the math. Each team member works about 2,000 hours per year. Across ten people, that’s 20,000 hours of total work. A 1% improvement across those 20,000 hours means you’ve just created 200 hours of additional capacity.

From one hour of your time.

And when someone actually learns a meaningful skill, they usually improve by way more than 1%. Most of us never stop to calculate that. We’re too busy stepping in to solve every problem ourselves.

Empowering Growth Beyond Yourself

Here’s how it tends to go. Your team doesn’t have certain skills yet. So when something complex comes up, you handle it. Problem solved.

Except next week, a similar situation shows up. They still don’t have those skills. So you step in again. Every time you do that, you’re making yourself more needed. They don’t grow because you keep stepping in. You keep stepping in because they haven’t grown yet.

Simon Sinek puts it well: as a leader, you’re looking after the people who look after the clients. Your job is to support them and help them get better. This involves communication, technical skills, or whatever they need most. This is a core part of effective management training.

I made this my top priority, and it’s paid off. Not just in how much the team gets done. It shows in how motivated and engaged they are.

Practical Foundations for Team Excellence

Here’s what that can look like for you. You could run weekly learning sessions where someone walks through something that didn’t go as planned. A difficult conversation. A decision they’d make differently now. The key is making it feel safe.

Praise them for being willing to share. Keep the focus on what everyone can take away from it. First attempts are supposed to be rough.

Then balance it out. Also look at something that went really well. What made the difference? Keep both conversations about the situation, never about the person. Appreciate both people equally for sharing. You’re showing your team that learning matters more than always getting it right. +1

Coaching for Long-Term Personal Growth

Consider having two separate conversations with your people. One for performance, and one for their leadership coaching. In the development one, you’re not talking about targets or results.

You’re asking things like: what do you want to get better at? What kind of work do you actually enjoy? How can I help you grow? If you protect that time like a client meeting, you send a clear message. It shows what you care about as a leader.

Notice what each person wants to get better at. Then find opportunities to give them work that stretches them a little. Work you could probably handle yourself, but that would help them grow. It might take them longer at first. That’s kind of the point.

And you don’t need to be the technical expert in the room. If your team knows more than you in certain areas, that’s fine. You can be the facilitator just as much as the expert. Someone shares a situation, the group talks through it together. You make sure the conversation stays useful and safe.

The time you put into this keeps paying back. In results, yes. But also in how much your team actually wants to show up. Watching someone handle something they couldn’t manage six months ago is one of the best feelings in this job.

I know your calendar is already full. Just try one learning session in the next two weeks. Something that went wrong, something that went right. See how your team responds. That’s usually enough to show if this is worth protecting time for.

Interested or curious? Let’s talk. Plan your free introduction here. Zero obligation.