Staff Development & Distributed Leadership

Most CEOs I work with have the same recurring conversation with themselves.

Someone on the team is ready for more. Someone else is quietly checked out. A function is being held together by one person who really shouldn't be holding it together. The recruiter is sending resumes. The org chart has been redrawn three times this year. And somehow, the team still feels stuck.

Here is what I have learned after a decade of working with CEOs of mission-driven organizations, both nonprofit and for-profit, in the $3M to $10M revenue range. The team development problem is almost never a people problem. It is a clarity problem dressed up as a people problem.

You do not need a new hire. You need a new lens.

Today I am going to give you three of them.

I learned this distinction from a sharp business coach named Shelby Larson, and it has reorganized how I think about every team I have ever advised.

Inside every organization, every function has two layers.

A heads role is the decision-making layer. The person in the heads role is accountable for an outcome that sits outside their direct control. They cannot personally make every customer buy. They cannot personally make every donation come in. They cannot personally make every product ship. But they are accountable for whether it happens. They make the calls about what changes, what scales, what gets paused, what gets killed.

A hands role is the execution layer. Hands roles still make plenty of decisions. They decide when to do something, whether the work is good enough, how to handle the specific case in front of them. But the hands role is the doing. The writing, the calling, the building, the shipping.

Most teams confuse these two layers constantly.

You will see a Director of Sales who is technically a heads role but spends 90% of her time in hands work because nobody else is doing it. You will see a hands-role contributor who has been quietly making heads decisions for two years because the heads-role person is checked out. You will see a CEO running heads on five functions and hands on three of them, which is the math problem that produces burnout faster than anything else I know.

Here is the move.

For each major function in your organization, name the heads role and the hands role separately. Then ask: who is actually playing each one today? Not who is supposed to. Who is.

And critically: one person can play heads in one area and hands in another. The CEO is probably not the heads role for the development office or the marketing department, but you are almost certainly hands-involved with major customers, major investors, major partners. That is the right configuration.

The CEO as a spokesperson, not a strategist for someone else's function.

When the heads and hands are named and aligned with the right people, development conversations get clearer almost overnight. Promotions stop being arbitrary. Coaching stops being vague. People know what they are growing toward.

Every organization runs on the same basic set of functions.

The labels change. The categories do not.

You have functions about where the organization is going. You have functions about how well it is running. You have functions about how revenue gets generated. You have functions about how the work actually gets delivered to customers, clients, members, or whoever you serve.

I divide all of those functions into two categories, and the distinction matters enormously for staff development.

Stabilizing functions make sure the organization stays the organization. They keep programs running the way they were designed to run. They keep resources allocated efficiently.

They keep the operating system intact. The people who thrive in heads roles inside stabilizing functions are wired for consistency, repeatability, and refinement. They love the question, "How do we keep doing this excellently?"

Destabilizing functions change the organization on purpose.

And I mean that in the best possible way. These functions are about figuring out what comes next. What product or program needs to change. What relationships need to be built now because they will matter in five years. What direction we need to head in even when the current direction is paying the bills.

The people who thrive in destabilizing heads roles look different. They need thinking time. They need exploration time. They need a lot of brain space, a lot of networking, a lot of room to ideate. Some of their most productive hours are spent doing things that look like they have nothing to do with work, because their brain has to be free enough to make new connections.

Here is the principle most organizations get wrong.

Any system that stays the same is experiencing entropy. It is losing energy. This is true in nature. It is true in biology. It is true in your organization. If your entire leadership team is wired for stabilization, your organization is on a slow path to becoming irrelevant. If your entire team is wired for destabilization, you are too chaotic for anyone to follow.

People feel like they do not know where they belong. They leave.

The truth is, sustainable scaled impact requires both.

Enough stability that everyone can join the ride. Enough destabilization that the ride is going somewhere worth going.

When you start developing your staff, this distinction tells you which people belong in which roles. A high performer in a stabilizing role might be miserable in a destabilizing one, not because they are not capable, but because the work demands a different kind of brain. The reverse is also true. Some of your most creative people will collapse under the weight of a role that requires them to enforce the same process every quarter.

Most organizations make advancement decisions in a closed room. The CEO and one or two senior leaders sit around and ask, "Who do we promote? Do we hire externally? Do we move Sarah from this function to that one?"

I want to flip that script.

What if the conversation about who advances, who shifts roles, who takes on a new heads accountability, was happening across the entire organization?

I am not talking about chaos. I am not talking about a free-for-all. I am talking about getting your team used to a different question. Not "what does my manager think of my work this quarter," but "where does this organization need to grow next, and where do I want to be standing when it does?"

My clients who run this play well use a framework I call the leadership blueprint. It is a visual map of every function in the organization. They put it in front of the whole team. They have ongoing conversations about it. Where do we want to go? If we think about our team like chess pieces on this board, where might people want to move over time? Where are our gaps? Who is ready for a heads role they have never held? Who wants to add a heads role on top of what they are already doing?

When you make the map visible, you give people something to develop toward instead of something to compete over.

There is a second reason to do this, and it matters even more.

The traditional model of advancement is hierarchical. People are in charge of people. Your manager decides whether you grow. The next level up decides whether your manager was right. And every layer of that decision-making is filtered through the relatively subjective opinions of one human about another human.

That model is bad for innovation, because people do not actually thrive when they feel like they have a master or a supervisor approving their next move. It is also bad for equity, because every layer of subjective human assessment is a layer where the systemic biases we all inherit can quietly do their work. Whether we like it or not. Whether we are aware of them or not.

The truth is, organizations that manage and measure outcomes rather than people are more durable against inheriting bias. The bias does not disappear, but you have another lens. You are able to measure outcomes with much more objectivity than you can measure a person.

When advancement is tied to a transparent map of functions and outcomes, and the whole team is part of the conversation about where the organization needs to grow, you get better innovation, better retention, and a much more equitable system. All three at once.

If you are a CEO who keeps reorganizing the team and still feels like staff development is the thing always slipping to next quarter, here is the order I would run it in.

First, sort your functions into stabilizing and destabilizing.

Look at where your leadership team is heavy and where it is thin. Most organizations I see are heavily over-indexed on stabilizing roles, which is why they feel stuck even when the team is talented.

Second, name the heads and hands roles for every function in your organization. Write them down. Look at who is actually playing each one today. Notice the mismatches without judgment.

Third, get the map in front of the whole organization. Have the conversation out loud. Make development a team sport instead of a closed-door decision.

Stop for a moment. Picture your leadership team six months from now. Everyone knows whether they are playing heads or hands in each part of their work. Everyone understands which functions stabilize the organization and which ones move it forward. And every member of your team is having ongoing conversations about where they want to grow, mapped against where the organization actually needs to evolve.

That is not a wish. That is what the system produces when you set it up this way.

You are where you are, it is what it is. The next move is whichever one of these three tips lands for you the hardest.

Start there.