A Formula for Leadership Development

Justin DuBose, Ph.D.
4 min readMar 28, 2024

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Leading people has always been challenging. Leadership in 2024, though, is uniquely challenging in new ways. We inhabit an increasingly digital and dispersed world and yet the need for effective, personal, human leadership seems to be greater than ever. Good leaders don’t have the luxury of possessing either great technical skills or people skills…they need both. This is more than just a gut feeling or something true from one man’s experience. Research shows this to be a real problem.

In their research on job openings from 2020–2021, America Succeeds, an educational non-profit, found that the 2 competencies in the highest demand in business job postings are leadership and communication. This suggests that the 2 biggest leadership voids in the business world are these soft, durable, uniquely human skills.

A 2022 study found that the vast majority (90%) of human resource leaders believe that leaders need to prioritize the human aspects of leadership to be effective. However, they also found that just 29% of team members perceive their leader as someone who demonstrates human leadership.

Another study from Harvard Business School concluded that 2 of the top 4 business challenges of 2024 are developing tech-savvy leaders and humanizing leadership. What tension leaders face! The competencies in highest demand are soft skills, yet less than 1/3 of team members report seeing those skills. Oh, and while you’re busy developing these important skills, young leader, don’t fall behind on keeping up with technology, too! How do you climb two mountains simultaneously?

In February 2021, I started Communicate To Care, an educational non-profit focused on providing expert-level coaching, training, and consulting to leaders and teams. In addition to my own 35+ years of combined leadership experience, I’ve met dozens of leaders who are experiencing these same problems. In my work supporting these amazing people in the challenges they face and helping them realize their full potential, I’ve developed my own formula for leadership development:

Leadership Development = Right Tools + Right Relationship

In today’s tech-saturated market, you’ve got to have the right tools. If you’re lucky, the tools you need already exist. But, here’s the problem: every context is different. Every team is unique. One leader has a team that needs help communicating with one another. Another leader has a young person with charisma and ambition, but who really needs a mentor.

One of my greatest joys in developing leaders has been sitting down and listening attentively to the frustrations of these leaders, and then carefully and thoughtfully developing a leadership tool for them. One client desperately needed some way to capture focused feedback from her team. So, I built a customized feedback tool for each team member based on their job description and what characteristics they needed to work on. I was so happy to help build the right tool for her. Just building this tool, however, didn’t move the needle for developing leaders within her team.

The next step was to train a young, new executive on how to use the tool effectively as he led the team. This young man had all the potential in the world, but simply lacked the experience to lead confidently and impactfully. Through our coaching relationship, I was able to help him use the right tools effectively and understand how to lead each team member uniquely based on who they are and the role they serve.

For yet another client, the relationship itself was what his leadership team needed. They had all the tools they need to succeed, but needed someone who cared about them to walk with them in these new and intense leadership experiences. Once they joined the right relationship (which they lacked) with the right tools (which they already had), they developed exponentially as individuals and as a team.

Too many leaders look for the “silver bullet.” “If we can get the right tool, then we’ll have everything we need”, many think. However, victory is not found in the accumulation of the right tools. Leadership development is not like sales…more quantity doesn’t translate to eventual success. Just like those studies referenced above — and many similar studies you can find — the human element is absolutely essential to developing leaders.

I’ve been on both ends of the leadership spectrum: being coached and being the coach. The greatest turning point in my life came when an older, wiser, mature, caring gentleman invested in me at a critical juncture in my life. I devoted an entire podcast episode to talking about my own leadership journey and the value of those who poured into me. Similarly, I’ve been able to walk with other leaders — who have all the potential in the world — and coach them through some major turning points of their own.

While you’ll find many opinions on what good leadership development looks like, this formula is uniquely mine and I’ve found it to produce wonderful results. In the words of the late, great Colin Powell (who wrote a marvelous book by the same title): It worked for me. I believe it will work for you, too.

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Justin DuBose, Ph.D.
Justin DuBose, Ph.D.

Written by Justin DuBose, Ph.D.

Blessed to be married to the perfect wife, Alanna, and dad to 5 uniquely amazing kids. Striving to live out my calling of serving others in different avenues.

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