You Are Not Done Until They Can Fly

Mallam writes from Lafia

 The greatest leaders are those who raised people worthy of surpassing them, argues Linus Okorie

There is a particular kind of insecurity that wears the mask of strength. It lives in leaders who cannot celebrate a subordinate’s success without feeling diminished by it. It lives in the manager who quietly reassigns the most promising talent away from high-visibility work, or who gives vague feedback where they should give clear direction, because deep down, they fear being surpassed. It is one of the most common failures in organizational leadership. And it stalls individual careers and arrests the growth of institutions.

A leader whose primary concern is being the smartest person in the room is not leading. They are occupying space. Leadership is not measured by how much a person accomplishes. It is measured by how many people that person has made capable of accomplishing things they could not do before. Your greatest leadership legacy is in people.

General Electric, PayPal, and McKinsey understood this deeply enough that the world is still living with the results of their investment in people. When Jack Welch became chairman and CEO of General Electric in 1981, their market value was $14 billion. But when he retired, it had grown to over $400 billion. But the more lasting legacy was not the balance sheet. It was the people.

Welch knew that leadership is beyond vision, strategy, and operations. It is the development of your team into people who no longer need you. John C. Maxwell accurately describes it when he said, the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers. Welch built a system around this conviction.

GE’s 4,000 managers were required to review their people annually, identifying the top performers not just for bonuses but for deliberate stretching. Welch invested resources into Crotonville, GE’s leadership development centre, where leaders at every level spent weeks each year not just learning techniques but being reshaped in how they thought about leadership itself. He turned the centre into a crucible.

The people who went through the crucible went on to champion several of American businesses. These include but not limited to Jeff Immelt who ran GE Medical Systems, and became the CEO of GE. Robert Nardelli led Home Depot. James McNerney led 3M and then Boeing. David Zaslav served as the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery.

What Welch understood, and what most leaders resist, is that developing strong people beneath you does not weaken your position. It is the strongest trees that produce the most seeds.

PayPal’s leadership turned their founding team into a group of extraordinarily talented people who formed the most generative alumni network in the history of technology. They faced an extraordinarily difficult situation together, and the pressure bonded them.

PayPal faced serious competition with eBay and chaos with the dot-com bust. The people who survived this ordeal emerged with skills, confidence, shared resilience, and with deep trust in one another. That combination turned out more valuable than any formal training programme in the world.

Those group of people went on to build companies that include YouTube, LinkedIn, Palantir, SpaceX, Yelp, and scores of others. David Sacks, one of the former employees (alumni), acknowledged that their leaders genuinely invested in them. No wonder PayPal produced billion-dollar companies at a per-capita rate estimated to be 350 times that of Google.

McKinsey & Company has more current Fortune 500 CEOs among its alumni than any other firm, at least 18 at last count, with over 700 alumni currently holding C-suite roles at companies with annual revenues above $300 million. Among them are Sundar Pichai of Alphabet, Tony Xu of DoorDash, Ryan McInerney of Visa. Across more than 120 countries, approximately 34,000 McKinsey alumni work at over 15,000 organizations.

The mechanism behind this is cultural. McKinsey does not treat resignation as loss. It celebrates it. Consultants are actively encouraged to think about where they are going next, because McKinsey’s model understands something that their alumni are the legacy.

When a McKinsey alumnus becomes a Fortune 500 CEO, they do not sever their relationship with the firm. They often become clients. The network self-reinforces, and the firm’s investment in developing them pays compound returns for decades. This is what it looks like when an organization genuinely internalizes the idea that raising people up is the highest form of strategic investment.

What did the leaders inside these organizations share? Definitely not temperament because Welch was famously combative, the PayPal founders notoriously difficult, while McKinsey’s leadership were legendarily understated. What they shared was the way they saw their people. They saw them as futures, not as functions they play today.

The leaders who build other leaders are those who have resolved, in their own psychology, the question of scarcity. They do not believe that someone else’s brilliance diminishes their own. They believe that their brilliance is most fully expressed in the brilliance they catalyse in others. The gardener is not threatened by the flower. The gardener’s purpose is the flower.

As leaders, reflect back to your people a vision of who they can become, not just who they currently are. When people know they are being seen as future leaders, not just current contributors, it changes how they see themselves. Self-concept precedes behaviour.

Build the understanding that the relationships forged here will outlast any single career decision. PayPal alumni funded each other for decades. McKinsey alumni hire each other across continents. Trust, accumulated in a high-stakes environment, becomes a form of wealth that no salary can replicate.

Here is what is most extraordinary about the GE, PayPal, and McKinsey stories: none of them knew how far the effects would travel. Welch was simply building a better GE. The PayPal founders were just trying not to go bankrupt. McKinsey were only serving its clients and developing its consultants. They were simply committed, each in their own way, to making the people around them better, and posterity received the overflow.

The hidden logic of leader development is that when you genuinely invest in the growth of another person, the return rarely stays inside your organisation. It flows into industries, into communities, in ways you will likely never fully see or measure.

Succession planning is too small a word for what this is. Succession planning looks six months or six years ahead. What we are describing looks sixty years ahead. It asks not merely who will sit in this chair when I am gone, but who will build chairs I cannot yet envision.

And it begins with a decision that every leader must make quietly, before any programme or system can help them. To decide that the measure of a leader is not how indispensable they became, but how unnecessary because the people they developed can carry the work further than they ever could alone.

The greatest leaders are those who raised people worthy of surpassing them, and who had the wisdom, and the generosity, to take joy in it.

Okorie MFR is a Leadership Consultant