The 5 Leadership Competencies That Matter in a Growing Company

Five leadership competencies matter most in a growing company: empowerment, accountability, coaching, communication, and time. Each one is a skill and a mindset, and the biggest shift is moving the focus from the work to the person.

I learned that one slowly. In my first company I was the one doing the work, and I’ve since interviewed more than 1,200 founders, CEOs, and leaders of fast-growth companies on Growth Think Tank. The same gap shows up almost everywhere, so let me walk you through the five and how to build them.

Leadership Competencies Are Skills With a Mindset Underneath

Leadership competencies are the abilities a person needs to get results through other people. Most lists you’ll find online treat them as skills you can train in a workshop. That’s half the picture.

In other words, a competency is what you can count on someone to do when you’re not in the room.

Here’s how I explain it to the CEOs I coach.

“Empowering someone is a skill, but it’s also a mindset thing. In fact, I think all of these things have a mindset.”

You can teach your manager how to hand off a decision in one afternoon. Getting your manager to believe the team can actually make the decision? That’s the real work, and most training skips right past it.

If you want the practical skills a new manager climbs through, rung by rung, read our breakdown of the leadership skills new managers need. I’m going to stay on the competencies here, and on the mindset sitting under each one.

Why Do Your Best People Struggle When They Start to Lead?

Your best people struggle because the job that earned them the promotion is gone. I’ve had this conversation with hundreds of CEOs, and you’ve probably lived it yourself.

“Good people get promoted to manager because they understand the work. Not because they know how to develop people.”

Gallup has numbers on how often this goes sideways. When Gallup studied how companies choose managers, it found they pass over the person with real management talent 82 percent of the time. Gallup also puts at least 70 percent of the differences in engagement between business units down to the manager.

Managers are also running on empty right now. Gallup tracks this every year, and its newest global workplace report (2026) shows manager engagement worldwide sliding from 30 percent in 2023 to 22 percent in 2025, with weaker engagement among managers explaining most of the recent drop.

So the gap is predictable. Your top salesperson becomes your sales manager, keeps selling, and can’t figure out why the team isn’t growing. Sound familiar?

The 5 Leadership Competencies That Matter Most

Plenty of articles hand you 20 or 30 competencies. I’d rather you go deep on five, because these are the ones I watch make or break managers in companies with 30 or more employees.

Empowerment means letting people solve problems and make decisions, then staying close while they learn. The skill is handing over the decision. The mindset is trusting that someone else can get there, even when they take a different road than you would.

The trap sounds so reasonable in the moment: “I know better, I can do it faster, it won’t be to my standard, so I’ll just do it.” I’ve said every word of that sentence myself, and you probably have too. Each time your manager says it, the team learns to wait.

Here’s what happens when a manager holds back that urge.

“If you gave them the chance and they stumble and they find their way forward with your coaching (not your saving them), they begin to really understand that they can do more things. The confidence is increased, and that is exponential.”

What empowerment looks like in a normal week:

• ●Your manager asks, “What would you do?” before offering an answer.
• ●Decisions under an agreed limit get made without your manager in the room.
• ●When someone stumbles, your manager debriefs with them instead of taking the task back.

Accountability starts with clarity. A manager who’s good at it spells out what good looks like, the dates, the context behind the work, and a system for what happens next.

You’ve heard “set clear expectations” a hundred times. But are your managers actually writing them down, reviewing them every week, and tying them to a KPI? The trap is the vague ask (“Can you take a look at onboarding?”) followed by frustration when the result looks nothing like the picture in the manager’s head.

I’m picky about three words here. Responsibility gets assigned. Accountability gets measured, and ownership gets internalized: the person cares about the outcome even when nobody is checking.

A simple accountability rhythm for any manager:

• ●One page per direct report listing their top three outcomes, each with a date and a measure.
• ●A 15-minute weekly review of that page, covering progress, roadblocks, and next steps.
• ●A KPI for each outcome that can be counted, so the conversation stays on facts.

Coaching is offering a new perspective from outside the emotion of the challenge. A good coach asks questions, hands ownership back, and helps the person make commitments, so they think differently and change from the inside out.

Most managers picture a high school coach yelling plays from the sideline, so they tell people what to do. Telling gets this week’s task done. The person learns nothing they can use next week.

Here’s a coaching moment I use all the time. When someone won’t make a decision, I talk with them about the fears behind it and where those fears come from. I’ll ask, “What are you afraid will happen if you pick wrong?” and then I wait.

Fear is there for all of us. Courageous leaders decide and move forward anyway, and a good coach helps someone find that courage on their own.

Questions that keep a manager in coaching mode:

• ●What outcome do you want here?
• ●What’s getting in the way of deciding?
• ●What are you afraid will happen if you get it wrong?
• ●What will you do by Friday?

Communication as a leadership competency runs in three directions. A manager has to share the vision with the team, listen well, and have tough conversations with the team, with peers, and up the chain.

The trap is what I call “tiptoeing.” Managers step around the real issue, the problem grows in the dark, and the conversation they finally have is twice as hard.

Weak communication shows up fast. Avoided conversations make things worse, nobody understands the vision, and the team starts to label the manager as someone who doesn’t listen. If that’s the gap on your team, start with our guide on how to have tough conversations.

The fifth competency is how a leader uses their time. A manager who has made the shift spends their hours developing people and doing higher-value work, and hands off the tasks others can own.

The trap is staying busy in the work, because that’s where a new manager feels valuable. I know that feeling in my gut. My ticket business did a million dollars in sales its very first year, and my days still ran on color-coded lists and spreadsheets, with me as more firefighter than CEO.

Here’s a quick test for you. Pull up last week’s calendar with your manager and ask how many hours went to developing someone else, and how many went to work a team member could have owned.

The Competencies Shift From Doing the Work to Developing Leaders

Leadership competencies change as someone moves up. What made a person great at stage one can hold them back at stage two.

The hardest move is the first one, from doing to leading. Here’s how I put it.

“The ability to move to focus on the person rather than the work is a very important skill as these people make the shift from doing work to leading.”

At Core Elevation, these five competencies sit inside a fuller model we call the 5 Levels of Leadership. For the next step up, our guide to developing leaders at every level covers how a company builds leaders who build others.

Your Job is to Create More MVPs

The clearest picture of this shift came from Chris Ratterman, founder and CEO of Shady Rays. When we started working together, Chris believed his job was to be the most valuable player on the team.

Over time, he saw that a leader’s job is different. Here’s how he said it to me.

“I used to think my job was to be the most valuable player, the MVP of the team, but I realize, as a leader, my job is to create more most valuable players.”

To me, that’s the essence of leadership development. Leaders create leaders, and every one of the five competencies points in that direction. Chris gets the credit for that shift, because he’s the one who made it.

Should You Build on Strengths or Fix Weaknesses?

Build on strengths, and fix the weaknesses that are essential to the job. Gallup’s research on using strengths at work finds people who get to use their strengths are six times more likely to be engaged in their jobs.

That’s a strong case for leaning into what a manager does well. The catch? A leader can’t skip one of the five and hope nobody notices.

“If you have a weakness in an area and you don’t address that weakness, then it will be exposed.”

What an ignored weakness costs a growing company:

• ●Weak communication leads to avoided conversations that make problems worse.
• ●A vision nobody understands means people pull in different directions.
• ●A manager labeled as someone who doesn’t listen loses the team’s trust.
• ●Managers who never shift to the person keep the company dependent on a few people doing the work.

So use strengths as the engine, and bring every essential weakness up to good enough. A great communicator who never empowers anyone still ends up as the bottleneck.

How to Build Leadership Competencies in Your Managers

You build leadership competencies the same way you build anything else in a company: name it, measure it, practice it, and review it. These seven steps work whether you’re a founder, a CEO, or an HR leader with a handful of managers.

Maybe you’re telling yourself there’s no time to coach every manager. I hear you. But you’re already spending that time, every week, cleaning up work nobody owned.

Step 1: Score Each Manager on the Five

Start with an honest look at where each manager stands today. Sit down with each one and score all five competencies together, from 1 (rarely) to 5 (consistently).

Step 2: Find the Mindset Under the Gap

What if the low score isn’t a skill problem at all? What if it’s the belief underneath? Ask your manager what they think would happen if they let go, and listen for some version of “it won’t get done right.”

Step 3: Hand Over Real Decisions

Pick one decision each of your managers owns today and move it to someone on their team. You agree on the limits up front, then you let the stumble happen.

Step 4: Put Accountability in Writing

Give every manager the one-page rhythm from the accountability section. You review it with them weekly until it becomes how they run their team.

Step 5: Coach the Stumble Instead of Saving It

When a team member gets stuck, your manager’s first move is a question. You coach your managers the same way, so they feel what good coaching is like from the other chair.

Step 6: Protect Time for Developing People

Block time on each manager’s calendar for one-on-ones and development conversations. Treat that time like you’d treat a customer meeting, because the payoff shows up in every customer meeting after it.

Step 7: Build Someone Who Can Backfill You

The last step is the one that frees you up. Ask each of your managers to name the person who could step into their role, then build a plan with them to get that person ready.

For a fuller program, our guide to manager development shows how to run this across a whole management team.

Frequently Asked Questions

Founders and HR leaders keep bringing me these questions about leadership competencies.

Leaders Create Leaders

I opened with one idea: the biggest shift for any manager is moving the focus from the work to the person. Chris said it better than I can when he said his job was to create more most valuable players.

So take 15 minutes this week with a pen and a blank page. Pick one manager, score them on the five, and circle the gap that matters most.

Then ask yourself a few questions.

What does that manager believe that keeps the gap in place? Is it their belief, or did they learn it from you? What would change on that team if they made the shift?

Lead with courage.