Every key decision still landed on the CEO’s desk. He was in every meeting and every decision. His engineering firm had all the right pieces: number one in its market sector, buying up the competitors just below it, hiring, and people wanted to be there.

It also had too much depending on too few people. So the company did what most companies do. It sent managers to conferences for tips on running meetings, and it spent a lot of money on stuff that didn’t stick. Nobody inside could tell you what was making the growth work, which meant nobody could repeat it.

If that sounds like your week, you’re not the only one. Jeff Lovell and I have watched the same pattern at contractors, banks, manufacturers, and hospital systems. Over the last couple of years we started writing down what the companies that get past it actually do. We call it the Leadership Manifesto. It’s six lines, and each one came from a client who got it right. Jeff and I walked through all six on the Leaders Rising podcast.

1. Systems build leaders

Training is the spark. Jeff’s words on the episode: it’s helpful, it can light something, “but if it’s just an event, that’s not going to sustain itself over time.”

What sustains it is what happens in the weeks after: check-ins, feedback, coaching, and someone walking alongside the new manager while they try the thing for real. Both kinds of time count. A scheduled 60-minute session counts. So does grabbing lunch on a whim and having the developmental conversation there. The companies that grow their leaders plan for both.

2. Strategy builds a pipeline

Jeff has made this mistake himself. He hired great people, gave them real work to own, and hoped they’d get it. They often got results. They also got frustrated, because he didn’t give them enough clarity and there was no regular check-in.

Hope matters. It won’t grow a manager on its own. A pipeline starts with three plain questions: Who are we developing? When are we going to do it? What are we trying to get them to do? We answer them with GiANT Worldwide’s Intentional Multiplication plan. If you can’t answer them yet, you have hope and some good ideas, and you need a plan.

One of our clients says it more bluntly: there are no bad apples, just bad strategies and bad systems.

3. Culture gets built every day

Culture is what gets repeated, what gets celebrated, and what happens when things go wrong. Every culture has gaps. What you do in those moments is part of it.

When Jeff was a senior leader inside other organizations, he made a habit of this. Every meeting, every town hall, every time the group sat down together, they talked about at least one value, one goal, or one piece of the mission. It felt like repeating himself every time. That’s usually the sign it’s starting to work. If you’re sick of saying it, your people are probably just starting to absorb it.

4. Heroic effort can’t be the plan

Heroic effort is fine for a moment. Every company runs a sprint sometimes, and sometimes you need a hero to get a goal across the finish line. Jeff and I had just wrapped a 30-day sprint when we recorded this episode, and Jeff opened this part by admitting he was tired. No joke.

The trouble starts when heroics become the plan. If success depends on a few exhausted leaders, you’re one burnout away from a breakdown. Jeff spent his early career working with high school and college students, running a lot of games with duct tape, and he has a line from those years: your top performers shouldn’t be human duct tape.

The engineering firm’s way out ran through something it already did well: a steady rhythm of meetings. Those meetings had been project updates and task lists. Now each one carried a tool, a principle, or a value. Key leaders, and the mid-level leaders the firm was growing into managers, got coaching every month. The firm settled on ten tools it wanted everyone to know, talk about, and rely on.

The CEO would tell you now that some of it was on him, and on how willing he was to let go of things.

5. Your business won’t grow faster than your people

Most growing companies hit the same bottleneck: too few people know the things that make it work. The way through is handing things off, and handing off means developing the person who takes it, which takes longer than throwing the work at them and lasts a lot longer too.

Everything about how a team performs starts with its people. Are they growing? Are they healthy? Do they communicate well, and do they trust each other? That’s where GiANT’s Maximizing Team Performance Flywheel starts, and it’s where we start with clients.

Three questions for this week:

• What can only I do?
• What am I holding onto that I should hand off?
• Who do I need to develop so I can?

Jeff’s version is shorter. You raise the ceiling by raising your people.

6. Execution changes people

In 2025 I set a goal to read a book a week, on average. It felt audacious after a year when I could count on one hand the books I’d finished. The reading helped me think. What changed me were the notes and the conversations: the ones with Jeff, and one with a new friend, Pat, who I met through someone I went to college with. Our first call was the most enlightening 30 minutes, fed in part by the books, because they gave us something to wrestle with.

The books, the training programs, the conference notebooks collecting dust on your shelf: all of that is information. The change comes when you turn an idea into a behavior and practice it on purpose, again and again, inside the culture you’re trying to build.

Build one thing

At the end of the episode I asked Jeff for one bold step. His answer: “Build one system or just do one thing. Pick one meeting, one decision, one rhythm,” and do it in a way that brings other people into it, so you’re developing them as you go.

So pick one meeting you already hold. Put one tool or one value in it every time, and watch who starts using it without you in the room.

The engineering CEO’s version ran through meetings his firm was already running. And he began to stop working on weekends. His kayak had been up in the garage for years, stuffed in with a bunch of other things he was storing, because he’d never had time to use it. He dug it out and taught his son to kayak.

Jeff closed the episode with a hope for everyone listening: “I hope you can all have a kayak moment this summer.”