Think about the strongest performer on your team. When was the last time you deliberately invested in their growth and development?
If it's been a hot minute, that's understandable. Our attention naturally gravitates toward the people who need us most: the employee who's struggling, the new hire who's still finding their feet, or the people navigating conflict, missing deadlines, and falling short of expectations. Those are the situations that feel urgent, and they deserve our attention.
Our highest performers are usually bright, dependable, consistent, and able to solve problems before they ever reach our desks. They deliver what we need when we need it, and they rarely ask for help. And that's exactly where the opportunity begins.
I've become convinced that one of leadership's greatest missed opportunities is failing to keep developing our strongest people. Every leader understands the cost of poor performance: missed deadlines, quality issues, customer complaints, conflict, and a hundred other visible problems that demand our attention every day.
The cost of under-investing in a high performer is much harder to see because it doesn't show up as an urgent crisis. If it does appear on your radar, it'll probably look like unrealized potential: future executives who plateau before anyone notices; high-performing individual contributors who continue troubleshooting instead of learning how to multiply their impact through others; teams that miss the opportunity to learn from people who could have become exceptional mentors, peer coaches, and role models; and organizations that continue benefiting from what these people already know how to do while investing very little in what they might become capable of next.
Most organizations invest significant time and money in courses, conferences, mentoring programs, leadership programs, executive coaching, stretch assignments, and succession planning. The intention is clearly there. But the challenge is knowing where to invest next.
When someone is struggling, the path usually feels obvious. You can see the gap, identify the missing skill, and work together to close it. High performers are different. They're already succeeding, producing excellent work, and they've earned trust. So, it's no surprise that many leaders find themselves wondering, "What exactly would I coach them on?"
I've heard versions of that question many times. "She's forgotten more about finance than I'll ever know." "He's the smartest engineer in the company." "What could I possibly teach someone who's already better than I am?" Those are common, honest questions that reveal one of the biggest misconceptions about leadership development.
There's often another concern sitting just beneath those questions. You may worry that developmental feedback could demotivate someone, especially a high performer who's already succeeding.
In my experience observing hundreds of one-on-one conversations between leaders and their employees over fifteen years, thoughtful developmental feedback is usually received as a meaningful investment in someone's growth. For many high performers, the message isn't, "I'm not good enough." It's, "My leader sees even more potential in me, and is willing to invest in helping me reach it."
Early in our careers, development is largely about building capability. We learn technical skills, improve our communication, strengthen our presentations, become better at delegation, and learn how to navigate conflict. Progress is easy to recognize because we're continually adding new tools to our toolkit.
As we become more experienced, development changes. The work becomes far more reflective. Instead of asking, "What do I need to learn?", the conversation shifts toward questions like:
What strengths have contributed to my success?
How do those strengths affect the people around me?
Where might those strengths be overused?
What assumptions have become so familiar that I no longer notice them?
How will the next level of leadership ask something different of me?
Those are leadership conversations. Some of the greatest leadership growth I've seen has come from helping someone see a familiar strength through a completely different lens.
One CEO I worked with realized his decisiveness had gradually begun shutting down healthy debate on the executive team. He wasn't trying to dominate discussions. He was simply moving quickly because that's what had always made him successful. Once he saw the pattern, he began inviting opposing viewpoints before making important decisions. His team became far more engaged, and the quality of their decisions improved.
Another leader discovered she was solving too many problems herself. She genuinely believed she was helping her team. Instead, she was unintentionally preventing them from developing their own judgment. As she experimented with stepping back, her team stepped into greater accountability and performance.
A dependable director prided herself on being indispensable, until she came to realize that she had become the biggest barrier to developing her people. Her greatest contribution was no longer doing more. It was creating opportunities for others to grow. (And bonus, she had more capacity for the strategic work she wanted to do.)
None of these leaders needed fixing. Their strengths simply needed to evolve.
Leadership potential isn't a fixed quantity. Some people are already performing at a remarkably high level, and they still have enormous capacity to grow. They may become your future executives, trusted advisors, exceptional mentors, or the people who elevate the performance of everyone around them, simply because of how they show up.
Current performance tells only part of the story. The more interesting question is how much untapped potential still sits beyond what you're seeing today.
We may know our strongest people still have room to grow, but we aren't sure what to talk about in a one-on-one beyond project updates and performance. If that feels familiar, here are six coaching conversations worth having.
Shift the conversation from performance to perspective. Instead of asking, "How's the project going?", ask, "What are you noticing about yourself as a leader that surprised you recently?" or "Where do you think your strengths have the biggest impact on other people?" High performers rarely need help doing the work. They often benefit from understanding the impact they have while doing it.
Challenge how they think, not simply what they do. Invite them into conversations where there isn't an obvious answer. Ask them to weigh competing priorities, explore trade-offs, or think several years ahead. Stretching judgment often creates more growth than assigning another project.
Help them shift from individual excellence to multiplying others. Ask questions like, "Who else could do this?" or "How could this project become a development opportunity for someone on your team?" Future leaders create results through other people, not just through their own expertise.
Coach the impact they have on others. Ask, "What behaviours do you think your colleagues have started copying from you?" or "If everyone on the team approached work exactly the way you do, what would improve, and what challenges might emerge?" Those questions often reveal blind spots that performance reviews never touch.
Create room for experimentation. High performers often feel enormous pressure to keep getting everything right. Talk openly about where it's safe to test ideas, challenge assumptions, and learn through experience. Continued growth requires space to experiment, not just expectations to deliver.
6. Give honest, forward-looking feedback. High performers hear "great job" all the time. What they hear much less often is, "Here's what the next level of leadership will ask of you." Helping someone understand what tomorrow requires can reignite their development in ways praise never will.
If you begin having conversations like these, something important happens: your strongest people continue evolving, your future leaders begin emerging earlier, and your culture becomes stronger because excellence begins multiplying instead of simply performing. And that's an extraordinary return on investment.
Thinking about the recent FIFA World Cup, it strikes me that we don’t ever question why the best players in the world still have coaches. We understand that excellence doesn't maintain itself. It requires continual challenge, fresh perspective, honest feedback, and deliberate development. We see the same pattern in Olympic sport, elite music, aviation, medicine, and business. Brené Brown has spoken openly about the coaches and mentors who've helped her continue growing throughout her career.
Organizations have the same opportunity. Every year, they invest enormous effort closing performance gaps. Far fewer invest the same energy expanding excellence. One protects today's results, and the other builds tomorrow's leaders.
Your next exceptional executive may already be sitting right there on your team. Maybe the next culture influencer is already solving problems just three desks away. Or an extraordinary potential mentor may be excited about an opportunity to help others stretch and grow, too.
The question is no longer whether those people have more potential; it’s: how will you deliberately help them discover it?
YOUR COACHING CHALLENGE
Before your next one-on-one with your strongest performer, resist the temptation to spend the hour reviewing projects and priorities. Spend the conversation exploring who they're becoming instead.
Ask them:
what they're learning about themselves as a leader
which of their strengths they'll eventually need to redefine
where they suspect their biggest blind spot might be
what future leadership responsibilities will require them to do differently than what made them successful today
Then notice what happens. You may discover you've spent years managing someone's performance, when their greatest opportunity was developing their leadership.
If you're curious about unlocking the next level of leadership potential in your strongest people, I'd love to explore the opportunities with you. Reach out for a free Executive Coaching conversation with me at www.leslierohonczy.com.