The case for putting your leaders (especially your middle managers) at the center of your growth strategy

“I’m moving at 100 miles an hour,” a leader named Rowan told me in a coaching session. 

He was charged with delivering on ambitious goals for his company while supporting and growing each individual member of his team, keeping up with monthly/weekly/daily reporting to senior leadership, improving his department’s processes, and being called in to handle a barrage of daily challenges with clients. 

He’s one part business leader, one part team therapist, one part trainer, one part systems strategist, and one part firefighter. 

Rowan loves his role, but boy, is it a lot to fit into a day, nevermind coming home to spend meaningful time with his family. “I feel like I’m running a marathon every day,” he told me. 

He cares deeply about getting great results—for his organization, for his team, and for himself—that’s how he became a manager. He was an outstanding individual contributor, driven to make an impact, which earned him a spot as a leader. 

The thing is, being a manager is a totally different job. 

→ Instead of making a direct impact, now Rowan needs to get great results through other people. 

→ He needs to motivate a team of individuals who have unique needs, who are wired differently from him. 

→ He needs to not just solve problems, but teach his team to solve them for themselves, building the bench of future leaders in the company. 

→ He needs to create the conditions for people to do their best work. 

→ And he needs to manage a much larger set of responsibilities. 

Like so many leaders, Rowan was given the new title and expected to excel from day one—without any training in his new people leadership responsibilities. 

He’s been figuring out on the fly something that genuinely takes time, support, and intentional development to learn. After several years as a leader, he’s figured out a thing or two through trial and error, his own common sense, and emulating (or doing the opposite) of the example set by leaders around him. He’s also formed some bad habits and limited views about his role, his responsibilities, and his team’s potential. And he’s continually pushing himself beyond his human capacity, teetering on the edge of burnout. 

Despite how common Rowan’s circumstances are, they simply aren’t sustainable—for him as an individual, and for the organization that needs his talents. 

Yes, the world is changing—but people leadership isn’t going anywhere. 

Everyone has a theory right now about how to build a more resilient, high-performing organization. Many of those theories focus on systems, technology, or structure.

Amidst the current AI boom, organizations are betting big on AI adoption and technology that promise efficiency to output more with less. They see it as the silver bullet to strengthen their results. 

But the most important variable in an organization’s performance is being overlooked: its leaders. 

The Chief Strategy Officer at The Harris Poll, Libby Rodney, explains:

“We’re in the largest technology investment cycle in a generation, and the human side of work is being left behind. Toxic leadership isn’t a character flaw – it’s an investment failure. These are today’s managers who were never trained or held to a standard, and now we’ve asked them to lead through a transformation they weren’t equipped for before AI even arrived.”

Technology is hitting the workplace like a tsunami and its future remains unclear. 

But one thing is for sure: people leadership isn’t going anywhere.

If you want to strengthen your organization, you need to strengthen your leaders. 

My approach, after 15+ years of developing leaders as a certified professional coach and leadership consultant, focuses on the people that make up every organization. 

Investing in the humans leading the humans is the way forward. 

There will always be humans at work, and they will always need clarity on roles and goals in order to produce great results. 

They will always need to be engaged and have opportunities for growth. 

They will always need someone to support them in doing great work.

And this type of investment not only pays off, but compounds. 

Good people leaders fuel more effective teams, more effective teams get better results, and better results fuel the organization’s impact. 

To strengthen your leaders, focus on your middle managers, because that’s where it all happens.  

Managers are the beating heart of any organization. They are responsible for the actual humans who translate big-picture strategy into real results—the people who are truly carrying out the organization’s work.  

And yet they are among the most undertrained, overextended, and undersupported people in any organization.

Like Rowan, some are given a management role because of their technical skills or individual contributions. Others become managers because of tenure or because they asked to advance. And sometimes they get tapped on the shoulder not because they’re interested in leading a team, but because no one else wants to do it.

None of these reasons is ideal. The skills of individual execution are not the same as what it takes to support people. Career advancement is not the same as the genuine desire to lead others. And stepping up because you had to is no recipe for success. 

Most managers step into their roles without any meaningful support or training in people leadership. The risks of not supporting these leaders are too high. 

In the 2026 Toxic Boss Survey from The Harris Poll, 60% of American workers reported that their current boss exhibits harmful behaviors including: unfair preferential treatment, lack of recognition, blame-shifting, unnecessary micromanagement, taking credit for others’ ideas, unreasonable expectations, unprofessional conduct, and discrimination based on personal characteristics.

These harmful behaviors shift workers into protection mode—they hold back from collaboration, engagement, and a full commitment to the work. Or they leave. The old adage says “people don’t leave organizations, they leave managers,” and the research is there to back it up. But people leave organizations, too, when those organizations don’t value and address the impact that poor managers have on the team. And we all know how costly attrition is. 

And yet, in my experience working with thousands of leaders across levels and industries, managers don’t want to be toxic—they’re not evil villains, twisting their mustaches and trying to make their teams miserable. 

Most managers are good people with good intentions trying to do a very complex, demanding, lonely, and stressful job. They are coming from the right place, but their execution falters because they haven’t had the opportunity to build and refine their people leadership skills. 

With the right tools to make their workloads more manageable, their team support more effective, and their results more impactful, though, managers can become the fuel for an organization’s success. 

The case: how leadership development coaching for individuals benefits the entire organization

The most interesting part of the Toxic Boss Survey, to me, is that the respondents offered a solution: 64% of American workers say “I believe better leadership training would significantly reduce toxic behaviors in my workplace.”

They asked for more practical training support for their managers. The report shows that their managers agree. And the #1 thing on their collective wishlist? One-on-one coaching.

Investing in leadership coaching for your managers is a game changer—for the leaders themselves, for their direct reports, and for company results. 

The benefits are compounding: you get a higher level contribution from your leaders while strengthening your culture, retaining and unlocking talent on your team, and building your bench of future leaders. The momentum and impact are an upward spiral that leads to better business results.

In a perfect world, people would earn a manager role because they are good at their work but, even more importantly, great with people. They would care about people. They would believe in them, want to motivate and grow them. They would want to cultivate the kind of work environment that helps people bring their best self forward, contribute their skills, and collaborate with others to make an impact. That would actually sound like a fun and juicy challenge to them! They would receive training on how to do it as an emerging leader, where they would have opportunities to build their toolbox by managing a project team or intern. And they would have support in the form of training and coaching as they formally stepped into their people leadership role.

It hardly ever happens like that because our work environments are complex and constantly changing. 

But we can do that last part: we can give people the training and coaching support they need to be thoughtful and effective leaders right now. We can give them a space to reflect and grow so that they can make intentional and purposeful leadership moves—rather than reactive or insecure ones.

Whether a leader is new or 25 years into the role, one on one coaching helps them to show up more confidently and effectively. It helps them to form a clear foundation in their unique leadership character, and build their range of skills to meet the right moment with the right tool. And it helps them to get the best out of their people to deliver great results for the company. 

How to develop a leader well: strengthen their leadership character and their leadership skillset

After 15+ years of developing leaders across levels and industries, I’ve focused my approach on building two areas simultaneously:

First, a leader’s character. 

This starts with self-awareness, defining their unique leadership style, and the core values they bring to their leadership practice. Leaders grow their understanding of how their leadership presence impacts their team. Leadership character also involves self-management—cultivating practices like emotional regulation, stress management, and the resilience to bounce back from setbacks and maintain a positive approach. When moving at 100 miles per hour, most leaders don’t have the opportunity to plant their feet firmly in these foundational aspects of leadership. Coaching gives them dedicated time and space to shape their intentional leadership character.

Second, a leader’s toolbox. 

Instead of leaning on the default tools that they’re most comfortable with, leaders need a practical and varied set of skills to build and rebuild trust, hold people accountable, provide clear and actionable feedback, delegate, influence, and guide difficult conversations. These are learnable skills, not personality traits or an element of common sense that you either have or don’t, and leaders need expert guidance to expand their perspectives and be exposed to simple but powerful frameworks that help them practice and perfect these skills—so they’ll be ready to confidently use the right tool in the right moment.

Attending a once-a-year 60-minute webinar is not the answer. There are no quick fixes. Real change takes time, practice, and integration. It has to be sustained.  

That’s why, in any coaching engagement, we define personalized leadership development goals so we can build skills over the course of our work together, while also breaking down in-the-moment leadership challenges that come up week to week. 

Giving leaders space to gain perspective on an in-the-moment leadership challenge, try out a new approach, reflect on what happened with their coach, and try again leads to real, practical change. 

Leaders like Rowan may not feel like they have time for slowing down, but coaching actually makes their work easier and more streamlined—right now and moving forward.

That’s what coaching supports.  

In 2026, strengthening your leaders is the smartest strategy

The world your leaders are navigating has never moved faster or asked more of them.

They’re feeling it. Your managers are confronting shifting dynamics, rapid technological change, the pressure to do more with less, and an increasingly complex landscape of human needs at work—often without the development and support to match what's being asked of them. 

When companies feel that pressure, the instinct is often to look for structural solutions. And there’s no shortage of ideas right now of solutions to strengthen organizations, from operationalizing AI to flattening structures and streamlining processes.

But the variable that strengthens everything else isn’t structural: it’s human. 

It’s the quality of leadership within your organization, and especially within the middle of your organization. 

Developing those leaders well—so they have the self-knowledge to manage themselves, the skills to develop others, and the support to keep growing—strengthens the whole operation. 

And at Penney Leadership, developing those leaders is my specialty. 

Through individual and group coaching, training, and facilitation, I grow leaders who know themselves deeply, lead with skill and intention, and fuel more impactful work. 

To explore partnering with Penney Leadership to bring leadership coaching into your company or organization, please visit the Corporate Leadership Coaching page. 

To explore leadership development experiences that advance employee engagement, build your bench, and strengthen your organization, please visit the Workshops & Training page.