And Another Thing...The organizations building plinths worth standing on

For years, I said a sentence I thought was harmless. "I can screw things up by myself."

I said it when someone on my team offered to take something off my plate. I said it after spending real time and due diligence hiring capable, qualified people, and then turning around and doing all the work myself anyway. Everything I touched carried my name, my likeness, my reputation. Letting go felt like a risk I couldn't afford.

It took me longer than I'd like to admit to hear what that sentence was actually saying. It told the people I had carefully chosen that I didn't trust them with the work I hired them to do. And when they did get something wrong, the honest answer usually wasn't that they had failed. It was that I hadn't taught them.

I learned this lesson twice. Once when I opened my own firm, and again when I moved from Norfolk City Council to the Virginia General Assembly. Both times, the work outgrew what one person could carry. Both times, my staff had to tell me to hand things over. What finally broke the habit was something I read about delegation: that when you refuse to delegate, you rob your team of the chance to learn. That one hit me like a ton of bricks.

I share this because this week's conversation is about organizations, and an organization is simply a group of leaders making that same decision at scale.

Every organization says it invests in its people. Fewer can tell you what that investment looks like in March, when the onboarding binder is on a shelf, and the leadership retreat is a pleasant memory. Most professional character development happens in a burst. A workshop. A keynote. An offsite with good coffee and better intentions. Then the calendar fills back up, and the organization quietly goes back to hoping people will figure out the standard on their own.

That's not an investment. That's an event.

Sustained professional character development means naming the standard out loud, teaching before judging, delegating real work, and continuing to develop people long after onboarding ends. The organizations building plinths worth standing on do all four, and it's quieter and harder than it sounds. They say the standard to the person, early, and more than once, instead of leaving it to the hallway or the exit interview. When someone falls short, their first question is whether anyone ever showed them what good looks like. Their leaders hand over real work, not just the tasks nobody wants, because that's where ownership and judgment are formed. And they keep going after onboarding ends, because professional character is built the way a plinth is built: layer by layer, and tested by the weight it carries over time, not by how it looked the day it was poured.

A one-time investment in your people is an expense. A sustained one is infrastructure.

The economics make the case plainly. Gallup puts the cost of replacing an employee who walks out the door at 50% to 200% of that person's annual salary [source], and its research finds that 42% of voluntary turnover is preventable [source]. Preventable means someone could have named the standard, taught the skill, or handed over the trust before the resignation letter arrived. Sustained investment is how you stop paying for the same lesson over and over.

And the return compounds. A leader who was developed learns how to develop others. The emerging professional who was taught the standard becomes the manager who teaches it. That is what an investment with exponential return actually looks like inside an organization. Not a line item that repeats every year, but a capacity that multiplies.

I still sometimes take on more than I should. But I've learned to let go before I'm drowning, and I've settled on a measure for my own leadership that I'd offer to any organization: the people who work with you should be better when they leave than when they arrived. Even the ones who move on carry your standard into the next room, and your workforce reputation travels with them.

So here is one thing to do this week. Choose one piece of work you've been holding onto, and hand it to someone on your team along with two things: why it matters, and what good looks like. Then let them do it.

If your best people walked out tomorrow, would they leave better than they arrived, and would that be because of a system you built or because of luck?

The base that elevates everything.