There is a question worth asking about any leader, one considerably harder to answer than the more conventional measures of their success, and considerably more revealing once it can actually be answered: what happened to the people who worked closely with them, after they were no longer working closely with them at all. Did those people become more capable, more confident, more genuinely themselves, carrying something forward that they would not have developed otherwise? Or did they simply move on, largely unchanged, the working relationship having produced output without producing growth?
I have come to think this question, more than revenue figures or titles held or any of the more conventional evidence typically offered as proof of leadership, is the truest available measure of genuine influence, precisely because it can only be answered later, after the leader's direct involvement has ended, which makes it considerably harder to manufacture or perform in the moment.
Why This Measure Is Harder to Observe Than Others
Most measures of leadership are visible relatively quickly. A decision produces an outcome within months. A strategy either works or it does not, within a timeframe short enough to be evaluated while the leader is still in the role that produced it. The effect a leader has on the actual growth of the people around them operates on a considerably longer and less visible timeline, often becoming apparent only years later, in a person's confidence in a completely different role, in a habit of thinking that traces back to a conversation the person themselves may have half-forgotten, in a capability that quietly compounds long after the leader who helped develop it has moved on to something else entirely.
This delay is precisely what makes the measure so difficult to observe in real time, and precisely why it so rarely factors into how leadership is evaluated while it is actually happening. A leader can be developing people significantly, in ways that will matter enormously years later, while receiving almost no immediate credit for it, since the evidence has not yet had time to surface.
What Leaving People Better Actually Looks Like
Leaving someone genuinely better rarely looks like a single, dramatic act of mentorship. It looks like a leader who consistently extends a colleague slightly more responsibility than that colleague felt fully ready for, trusting them to grow into it rather than waiting until readiness felt certain. It looks like feedback delivered honestly enough to actually be useful, even when a gentler, less useful version would have been more comfortable to give. It looks like a leader who is genuinely more interested in what someone is becoming than in what they can currently produce, an interest that shapes countless small decisions over time, none individually dramatic, that together determine whether a person leaves an organization considerably more capable than when they arrived, or largely unchanged.
This kind of development requires a leader to accept a particular tradeoff, one that is easy to state and genuinely difficult to honor consistently: that developing someone's genuine capability sometimes costs the leader something in the near term, a task completed less efficiently while someone learns to do it themselves, a decision made more slowly because someone else was given the chance to make it. Leaders unwilling to accept this near-term cost tend to produce people who remain capable only of executing what they have already been shown, rather than people who have genuinely grown beyond what they arrived already knowing.
Why This Measure Resists Being Performed
Unlike more visible measures of leadership, which can be managed and presented favorably while they are still unfolding, the genuine growth of another person is considerably harder to fake, since its evidence only becomes clear well after the leader has any remaining influence over how it is perceived. A leader can claim, in the moment, to be developing the people around them, and this claim may or may not be accurate, but the actual answer only becomes available later, once those people have moved on and their subsequent trajectory can be observed independently of anything the original leader might still wish to claim credit for.
This delayed, independent verification is what makes the measure so trustworthy, precisely because it cannot be managed the way more immediate metrics can. A leader genuinely interested in developing people has to do the actual work of development without the reassurance that this development will be visibly credited to them anytime soon, if it is ever credited to them clearly at all.
Why This Requires a Particular Kind of Selflessness
Investing seriously in someone else's growth, in the way this measure actually requires, asks a leader to prioritize an outcome that will, more often than not, benefit someone else's future far more visibly than it benefits the leader's own immediate reputation. The person who was developed carries that development with them into whatever comes next, often into roles and relationships the original leader will never witness, while the leader who did the developing is left with, at best, a quiet, private knowledge that they contributed to something they will rarely see fully realized.
This asymmetry, considerable investment on the leader's part, delayed and often invisible return, is precisely why genuine development of other people is rarer than most organizations would prefer, and precisely why the leaders who sustain it anyway deserve a particular kind of respect, since they are pursuing an outcome whose primary beneficiary will very often not be themselves.
A Legacy Carried by Other People
The leaders who genuinely leave people better than they found them build something that does not remain contained within the organization they led, or within the specific years they led it. It travels forward, carried inside the people who were developed, showing up in decisions and capabilities that have nothing directly to do with the original leader anymore, in contexts that leader will likely never see. This is, I think, the most durable form of influence available to anyone in a position of leadership, considerably more durable than any achievement that remains attached to the leader's own name, since it continues operating long after that name has been forgotten by nearly everyone except the people who were quietly, genuinely changed by having known them.
