Become Replaceable: Why Leaders Must Start Developing Leaders Before They Need Them

Listen to this article (BETA)

Preparing the reader…

Your progress: Not started

Mark Complete Start Over Reset History

▶ Listen

There is a leadership principle I have believed and practiced for decades: The moment you step into leadership, start developing other leaders.

Actually, I would push it further than that.

The moment you start a business—or preferably before you start it—you should begin thinking about how you will develop the people who will eventually lead alongside you. The moment you take a new position in an established organization, begin developing leadership around you. The moment you become responsible for a ministry, a department, a project, a team, a family, or simply yourself, begin learning leadership and helping others learn it too. If you have no clue how to lead… start now. It’s not something you’re born with, it’s something you learn.

You may be thinking, But I don’t have anybody working for me.

It doesn’t matter.

You can lead up. You can lead sideways. Eventually, you may lead down. And every single day, you must lead yourself.

Leadership development should not begin when you finally have enough people to justify it. By then, you may already be behind.

One of the great mistakes entrepreneurs and new leaders make is believing that leadership is something they will learn after they become successful. It works almost exactly the other way around.

Your ability to lead—and your ability to develop other people who can lead—will eventually determine how much success you are capable of stewarding.

* * * * *

You Will Eventually Reach the Limit of Your Own Leadership

When you start something, you can often do almost everything yourself. You answer the emails, make the calls, solve the problems, talk with the customers, make the decisions, fix what went wrong, and make sure everybody knows what is happening. In the beginning, that can work remarkably well. You may even become proud of how much you can carry. But eventually the organization grows beyond what one person can carry. More customers arrive, more employees are hired, more decisions must be made, more problems need solutions, more opportunities appear, and more relationships require attention. Suddenly the very thing that made you successful in the beginning—your willingness and ability to do almost everything—becomes the very thing preventing further growth.

John Maxwell calls this The Law of the Lid, one of the foundational principles in The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership.¹ I have taught this principle for years as a member of the John Maxwell Team because it explains something leaders often discover only after they have run into it: your leadership ability determines the level of your effectiveness. If your leadership ability is relatively low, it puts a lid on what you can sustainably build. You may compensate for a while with energy, intelligence, charisma, expertise, money, or sheer determination, but eventually you hit the lid.

Think of leadership ability on a scale of 1 to 10. If you are functioning as a 4 in leadership, you are not likely to build and sustain an organization operating at a 9. You may have a great product. You may be a gifted salesperson. You may know your industry better than almost anyone. You may work sixteen hours a day. None of those things removes the leadership lid. The organization will eventually begin reflecting the leadership capacity of the person or people leading it. As the leader goes, so goes the organization.

There are two important implications here. The first is obvious: raise your own lid. Become a student of leadership. Read. Get training. Find a mentor. Ask better questions. Learn to communicate, delegate, confront, encourage, decide, listen, and develop people. Leadership is not something you finish learning. After decades of leading people, teaching leadership, running businesses, mentoring, and coaching executives, I still learn leadership. Because the person I need to lead the most… is me.

But there is a second implication that leaders sometimes miss. You are not the only lid in the organization.

Suppose you grow your leadership capacity considerably but never develop the people around you. Eventually their leadership capacity becomes another lid. You can be an excellent leader and still build an organization incapable of growing beyond you because every significant decision, relationship, problem, and opportunity eventually works its way back to your desk.

Sooner or later, you run out of you.

There are only so many hours in your day, conversations you can have, decisions you can make, people you can personally coach, fires you can extinguish, and places you can physically be. Therefore, raising your own leadership lid is only the beginning. Mature leaders intentionally help raise the lids of the people around them.

Plus, heaven forbid, what if you’re not… a good leader? How are you going to find out? Maybe some of the things you do are antithetical to good leadership practices. I was a poor to mediocre leader my first 20 years of work. And when studying leadership with John, I found out that I learned more about how to be a good leader from all the bad leadership things I did!

That is where leadership development becomes multiplication.

---

Start Before You Need Them

There is an old proverb:

“The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second-best time is now.”

Leadership development works much the same way.

The best time to develop the leader you desperately need today was several years ago.

The second-best time is today.

This is particularly important for entrepreneurs. You should be thinking about leadership before your first employee walks through the door. Even before you start the business.

Why? Because if you wait until you desperately need someone, desperation will begin making hiring decisions for you. You need another pair of hands, so you hire quickly. Then you need somebody to supervise those hands, so you promote quickly. Then you need somebody to manage the supervisor, so you promote again. Before long you have people exercising authority who were never prepared to carry it.

Some of them may be wonderful people. They may be loyal. They may work hard. They may genuinely care about the organization.

But good character does not automatically produce good leadership.

Leadership is something people must learn.

Peter Drucker wrote, “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”³ Both matter. And neither happens automatically because someone’s business card suddenly contains the word Manager.

Bad Leadership Does Not Have to Be Malicious to Be Destructive

We tend to imagine bad leaders as bad people. That is far too simplistic.

Some destructive leaders are arrogant, selfish, manipulative, dishonest, or abusive. Those are character problems and must be treated as such. But many bad leaders are simply untrained leaders. They were given authority before they developed the wisdom necessary to use it.

They do not communicate clearly. They avoid difficult conversations. They overcontrol or under-manage. They make decisions too quickly—or refuse to make them at all. They fail to delegate. They delegate responsibility without authority. They confuse personality differences with insubordination. They reward the wrong behaviors. They allow problems to continue because addressing them feels uncomfortable. They solve every problem themselves until their people stop thinking.

They may have absolutely no intention of hurting anyone. But intentions do not eliminate consequences.

Jesus said:

“If a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.” ~Matthew 15:14 BSB

Notice that Jesus did not say the first blind man maliciously pushed the second one into the pit. He simply could not see.

Leadership incompetence can damage people without leadership malice ever being present.

That is one reason developing leaders is not merely an organizational strategy.

It is stewardship.

When you give someone authority over people, you are entrusting human beings to that person’s leadership.

That deserves preparation.

Train Them—or Keep Them Untrained

A question commonly repeated in business and leadership circles captures the dilemma wonderfully. The wording appears in several forms, but the idea is essentially this:

What if we train our people and they leave?⁴

The better question is:

What if we don’t train them and they stay!⁴

Think about that.

Leaders sometimes resist investing deeply in people because they are afraid those people will become more capable and eventually leave.

They might.

Develop them anyway.

Teach them. Coach them. Give them increasingly difficult assignments. Let them make decisions. Let them make some mistakes. Correct them. Encourage them. Give them another opportunity. Help them become so good that somebody else would love to hire them.

That may sound dangerous.

I think the greater danger is surrounding yourself with people nobody else would want.

Entrepreneur and business mogul Richard Branson has been widely credited with the leadership maxim, “Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t.”⁵

There is wisdom in both halves of that statement. Developing people always involves risk. So does refusing to develop them.

I will take the first risk.

Your Goal Should Be to Become Replaceable

This sounds almost heretical in some leadership cultures.

You should work intentionally to become replaceable.

Not irrelevant.

Not unnecessary.

Not disposable.

Replaceable.

Those are very different things.

If nobody can do what you do, that may initially make you feel valuable. But organizationally, it makes you a bottleneck.

If every significant decision requires you, you have not developed decision-makers. If every customer problem eventually reaches you, you have not developed problem-solvers. If every conflict requires your intervention, you have not developed reconcilers. If every meeting needs you in the room, you have not developed leaders.

And if the organization cannot function when you leave for two weeks, you have learned something important about the organization.

Paul understood this extraordinarily well. He told Timothy:

“And the things you have heard me say among many witnesses, entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others.” —2 Timothy 2:2 BSB

Look carefully at the multiplication.

Paul → Timothy → reliable people → others.

Four generations of leadership development appear in one sentence.

Paul was not trying to make himself indispensable. He was deliberately transferring truth, responsibility, and capability to people who could transfer it again.

That is multiplication.

And multiplication is one of the clearest signs of mature leadership.

Jesus Developed Leaders From the Beginning

Jesus did not wait until the final months of His earthly ministry to begin preparing people to carry on the work. He called His disciples early and then allowed them to live life alongside Him. They watched Him teach and pray. They saw how He responded to criticism, handled interruptions, confronted hypocrisy, showed compassion, dealt with crowds, withdrew from crowds, answered difficult questions, cared for individuals others ignored, and remained focused on His Father’s purposes when everyone around Him seemed to have a different agenda for Him. Their leadership training did not primarily happen in a classroom. It happened while they walked with Him.

Then Jesus did something every leader who develops people eventually has to do: He let them do the work.

Luke records:

“Then Jesus called the Twelve together and gave them power and authority over all demons, and power to cure diseases. And He sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal the sick.” —Luke 9:1–2 BSB

Jesus could unquestionably have done the work better Himself, but doing everything Himself would not have developed His disciples. He sent out people who were less experienced, less knowledgeable, less mature, and far less capable than He was, and then continued teaching them through what they experienced.

That is what developing leaders requires. At some point, you must allow someone to do something less effectively than you could do it yourself so that eventually they can learn to do it without you.

For highly competent leaders, that can be agonizing. You look at something you could finish in fifteen minutes and realize it may take an inexperienced person an hour—and you may still need another thirty minutes afterward to help them straighten it out. The temptation is enormous: Just give it to me. I’ll do it.

And you probably will do it faster.

But if you do it yourself every time, five years from now you may still be the person doing it.

Spend an hour developing someone today, and eventually you may never need to do that task again. Better still, someday that person may spend an hour teaching someone else how to do it.

That is not inefficiency. That is multiplication.

Leadership Development Begins With Modeling

You may be thinking, This sounds great, but I have absolutely no idea how to teach leadership.

Then start here:

Lead well where people can see you.

You do not need a classroom. You do not need PowerPoint. You do not need a leadership curriculum. You do not even need the title Leader.

Begin by becoming someone worth following.

Keep your commitments. Show up prepared. Tell the truth. Admit when you are wrong. Make decisions when decisions need to be made. Listen before answering. Do not gossip. Deal with conflict directly and graciously. Give credit freely. Take responsibility quickly. Do not blame people beneath you. Learn to communicate clearly. Ask better questions. Treat the janitor with the same dignity you give the CEO. Be dependable when nobody is watching.

That is leadership training.

People learn leadership partly from what we teach, but enormously from what we normalize.

Paul could therefore tell the Corinthians:

“Imitate me, as I imitate Christ.” —1 Corinthians 11:1 BSB

That is an extraordinarily serious leadership statement.

Before asking, What should I teach my people about leadership?, perhaps we should first ask:

What are my people already learning about leadership by watching me?

Then Start Talking About What You Are Doing

Modeling alone is not enough. Eventually you must explain the thinking behind the behavior.

Suppose a difficult customer calls and you allow a younger employee to listen while you work through the problem. Afterward, do not simply move to the next task. Ask, “What did you notice?”

Then explain: “Did you notice that I didn’t immediately defend us when he accused us of making the mistake? I wanted him to finish first. Until I understood what he believed happened, I didn’t know which problem I was actually solving.”

That five-minute conversation is leadership development.

You just transformed an experience into a lesson.

When you make a difficult decision, explain your reasoning to someone you are developing. When you delegate something, explain why you chose that person. When you handle conflict, talk afterward about what went well and what you would do differently. When you make a mistake, let people see how a leader owns one.

Turn ordinary work into a leadership laboratory.

This is how leadership development becomes part of culture rather than another program people attend once a quarter.

Give Away Responsibility Before You Have To

One of the greatest tests of leadership development is whether you are willing to give away meaningful responsibility and authority while you are still capable of carrying it yourself.

Many leaders delegate only when overwhelmed.

That is too late.

Delegate for development, not merely relief.

Give someone responsibility because they need to grow—not simply because you need something removed from your plate.

Start small. Let someone else lead the meeting. Let them handle the customer conversation. Ask them to make the recommendation. Let them build the plan. Give them a real problem and tell them, “Solve it, then come tell me what you decided and why.”

Then resist the temptation to snatch responsibility back the moment their approach differs from yours.

Different is not necessarily wrong.

This is especially important across personality differences. Your Inspiring person may communicate differently. Your Dominant person may make the decision faster. Your Supportive person may spend more time building consensus. Your Cautious person may want more information before proceeding.

Developing leaders does not mean manufacturing miniature versions of yourself.

The goal is not replication of personality. It is multiplication of capability and character.

Lead Up, Sideways, and Down

Leadership is influence, not merely authority. That means you can begin developing leadership long before anyone reports to you.

If you are the newest person in the organization, lead yourself exceptionally well. Help peers succeed. Bring solutions rather than merely identifying problems. Learn what your leader is trying to accomplish and help accomplish it. Ask good questions. Become dependable. Share useful things you are learning without becoming the person who constantly announces that he has been reading leadership books.

Nobody likes that guy.

Leading sideways means strengthening peers rather than competing with them. Leading up means helping your leader succeed without manipulation, flattery, or ambition disguised as service. Leading downward means stewarding authority for the good of the people entrusted to you.

All three require character.

And all three can be practiced today.

Start With Yourself

Perhaps you own no business. Perhaps nobody reports to you. Perhaps you are twenty-two years old and wondering why you are reading an article about developing leaders.

Good.

Start now.

Because before you lead anyone else, you have to lead yourself.

Solomon wrote:

“Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who does not control his temper.” —Proverbs 25:28 BSB

Self-leadership means learning to govern your appetites, emotions, habits, time, commitments, reactions, money, attention, words, and priorities. It means doing what needs to be done when you do not feel like doing it. It means becoming increasingly trustworthy with responsibility.

And for the Christian, self-leadership is never merely self-mastery. It is stewardship under the lordship of Christ.

Paul wrote:

“Therefore I do not run aimlessly; I do not fight like I am beating the air. No, I discipline my body and make it my slave.” —1 Corinthians 9:26–27 BSB

You cannot consistently lead other people beyond places you are unwilling to go yourself.

So if you have nobody to develop yet, develop you.

Start Leadership Training Much Earlier Than We Do

There is another place where I believe we have made a serious mistake in our thinking about leadership: we start far too late.

We tend to think leadership development begins when someone receives a management position, starts a company, becomes a pastor, gets promoted, or turns thirty-five and suddenly realizes people are depending on him.

Why?

Why would we wait until someone has responsibility for other human beings before teaching him how to handle responsibility?

Leadership development should begin when people are young.

If you are raising children, begin teaching them leadership now. You do not need to announce that Tuesday night is Leadership Development Night and hand your eight-year-old a management textbook. Teach leadership through life. Give them responsibility appropriate to their age and expect them to carry it. Teach them to keep their word, finish what they start, tell the truth when telling the truth costs something, arrive when they said they would arrive, care for people weaker than themselves, respect authority, manage money, solve problems, control their emotions, apologize when they are wrong, and do difficult things they do not particularly feel like doing.

That is leadership development.

Give your children opportunities to make decisions and experience appropriate consequences. Let them solve some of their own problems instead of immediately rescuing them. Teach them to look adults in the eye, ask good questions, carry on a conversation, serve other people, work hard, and take responsibility when something goes wrong. As they grow older, give them progressively greater responsibility.

Leadership muscles develop much like other muscles do: they grow through use.

And somewhere around seventeen, I strongly recommend helping a young person find a good mentor.

Not a replacement parent. Not someone who undermines Mom and Dad. Not merely an older buddy. Find a mature adult of good character who will invest intentionally in that young person, ask difficult questions, share wisdom, provide another perspective, and model what adulthood looks like from outside the immediate family.

There is something powerful that begins happening during those late teenage and early adult years. A seventeen-year-old may have heard Dad say something fifty-seven times, but when a respected mentor says essentially the same thing, suddenly the young man comes home and announces, “Dad! Do you know what Mr. Williams told me?”

And Dad has an important leadership decision to make.

He can say, “YES. I’VE BEEN TELLING YOU THAT SINCE YOU WERE NINE.”

Or he can smile and say, “That’s really good advice.”

Take the win.

And Don’t Stop With Your Own Children

Our responsibility does not necessarily end at the property line.

There are young men all around us growing up without strong leadership examples in their lives. Some have loving parents who are simply overwhelmed. Some have fathers who are physically present but largely disengaged. Some have no father in the home. Some have plenty of adults around them but almost nobody intentionally preparing them for adulthood, responsibility, marriage, work, fatherhood, service, and leadership.

If you are a mature man with something worth passing on, look around.

Who are the younger men in your church? Who lives in your neighborhood? Who works in your business? Who is dating your daughter?

Well, perhaps start very carefully with that last one.

But seriously, who is coming behind you?

You do not need to launch a nonprofit mentoring organization. Invite a young man to breakfast. Take him with you while you work on something. Ask him what he wants to do with his life. Teach him how you make decisions. Ask about his work. Talk about money. Talk about women. Talk about marriage. Talk about integrity. Talk about Scripture. Talk about failure. Tell him about some of yours. Help him understand that becoming a man is not primarily about getting older; it is about becoming increasingly capable of carrying responsibility faithfully.

Paul instructed Titus that older believers should intentionally teach those coming behind them (Titus 2:1–8). The biblical pattern assumes generational transfer.

Wisdom is not meant merely to be accumulated.

It is meant to be handed down.

I believe this is one of the places where our culture has failed badly. We complain about the lack of leadership in businesses, churches, government, families, and communities while spending remarkably little time intentionally developing leaders before they arrive in those places.

Then we act surprised when a thirty-two-year-old is promoted into leadership and has no idea what to do with people.

Where was he supposed to learn?

If nobody taught him responsibility at twelve, nobody mentored him at seventeen, nobody developed him at twenty-two, and nobody coached him at twenty-seven, why are we shocked that a title at thirty-two did not magically transform him into a leader?

Leadership needs to start much sooner.

And perhaps the leadership shortage we complain about is partly a leadership-development shortage we helped create.

If you are fifty, sixty, or seventy years old, there should be people coming behind you who are better prepared because you lived.

That is stewardship too.

What If I Have Absolutely No Idea Where to Start?

Then do not make this complicated.

Start tomorrow.

Choose one leadership book and begin reading ten pages a day. John Maxwell’s The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership² is a practical starting point. Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive will make you think differently. Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People will challenge your self-leadership. Jim Collins’ Good to Great will help you think about organizational leadership. Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team will help you understand what happens between people. And my favorite place to start is John Maxwell’s The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth. I’ve probably taught it hundreds of times.

But do not merely read.

Apply one thing.

Then choose one person.

You do not need to announce, “Congratulations. I have selected you for my leadership-development program.”

Please don’t.

Just begin investing in them. Ask what they want to learn. Give them something meaningful to own. Explain how you think. Ask how they think. Let them watch you handle difficult things. Let them try. Debrief afterward. Recommend something useful to read. Meet for coffee once a month. Ask, “What are you learning about leadership right now?”

And perhaps most importantly:

Ask someone further ahead to do the same thing for you.

Every leader should simultaneously have someone ahead of them, someone beside them, and someone coming behind them.

That creates a culture of continual development rather than a hierarchy of people pretending they have arrived.

The Leader Who Never Develops Anyone Eventually Becomes the Problem

There is an uncomfortable irony in leadership. The person who builds something can eventually become the person preventing it from growing.

Not because he stopped caring.

Not because he became incompetent.

Sometimes simply because he never learned to give it away.

Moses encountered this problem. He was personally hearing the people’s disputes from morning until evening until his father-in-law Jethro finally confronted him:

“What you are doing is not good. Surely you and these people with you will wear yourselves out, because the task is too heavy for you. You cannot handle it alone.” —Exodus 18:17–18 BSB

Notice the problem.

Moses was working hard. Moses was helping people. Moses was doing important work.

Moses was also doing it wrong.

Jethro’s solution was essentially leadership multiplication: teach the people, select capable leaders, give them responsibility, and reserve only the most difficult matters for Moses.

That principle is thousands of years old.

You cannot handle it alone.

And if your organization is structured so that you must handle it alone, growth will eventually expose the flaw.

Build People Who Can Build People

The ultimate goal is not simply to train people who can perform tasks.

It is to develop people who can develop people (Level 4 Leadership).

That is where multiplication truly begins.

If I train five people and they remain dependent on me, I have increased my reach. If I train five people who each learn to train five more, I have changed the mathematics.

That is why 2 Timothy 2:2 matters so much.

Paul did not merely tell Timothy to learn. He told Timothy to entrust what he had learned to people capable of teaching others also.

The chain was designed to continue.

So when you develop someone, eventually ask, “Who are you developing?” If the answer is nobody, leadership development has stopped one generation too soon.

Don’t Be Afraid to Train Yourself Out of Your Job

Yes, someone you develop may eventually become capable of doing your job.

Wonderful.

That was the point.

If you are leading well, you should be producing people capable of carrying responsibilities that once required you. And if someday somebody you developed can do your current job better than you can, celebrate.

Move. Grow. Take the next hill. Find another problem worth solving. Accept greater responsibility. Start something else. Help somebody else. You do not need to protect your position by keeping everyone beneath you less capable than you are. That is insecurity masquerading as job security.

Become replaceable as quickly as responsible development allows.

Always.

Every time.

Because the leader who can only occupy a position has limited value. The leader who can build other leaders capable of occupying positions can take that ability almost anywhere.

The Question Is Not Whether You Are Developing Leaders

There is one final uncomfortable thought. You are already teaching people something about leadership every day. The question is whether you are teaching them good leadership.

People watch what you tolerate. They watch what you reward. They watch what makes you angry, whether you listen, whether you keep promises, how you speak about people who are not in the room, whether you accept responsibility. They watch whether you share credit, what happens when someone disagrees with you, whether you develop them or merely use them.

You are teaching leadership whether you have ever conducted a leadership class in your life.

So begin intentionally. Learn leadership. Practice leadership. Teach leadership. Teach it to your children. Help another young person learn it. Find a mentor for someone who needs one—and make sure you have people speaking into your own life as well. Give responsibility away. Develop people. Develop people who develop people. Raise your own leadership lid, and then spend the rest of your leadership life helping other people raise theirs.

Do not wait until you need another leader. By then, you may need someone today whom you should have begun developing five years ago. Because someday your business, your ministry, your organization, your family—or simply the next responsibility God entrusts to you—may grow beyond what you can carry alone. When that day arrives, you do not want to begin looking for leaders.

You want to look around and realize you have already built them.

---

Five Coaching Questions

1. If I disappeared for thirty days, what responsibilities would immediately stop because I have failed to develop someone else to carry them?

2. Who am I intentionally developing right now—not merely training to perform tasks, but preparing to think, decide, influence, and lead?

3. What responsibility am I still holding because I can do it better, even though giving it away would develop someone else?

4. What are the people around me learning about leadership simply by watching how I behave when things become difficult?

5. Who am I preparing to replace me—and who am I preparing that person to develop next?

---

Endnotes

1. John C. Maxwell, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You, 10th Anniversary Edition (Thomas Nelson, 2007). See especially “The Law of the Lid,” Maxwell’s principle that leadership ability determines a person’s level of effectiveness.

2. John C. Maxwell, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. Maxwell’s broader leadership-development framework repeatedly emphasizes increasing leadership capacity and developing leaders rather than followers alone.

3. Peter F. Drucker, The Essential Drucker (HarperBusiness, 2001). Drucker’s work distinguishes leadership and effectiveness from simply performing managerial activity well.

4. The frequently repeated training question—essentially, “What if we train them and they leave? What if we don’t train them and they stay?!?”—is an old quote by motivational speaker Zig Ziglar.

5. Richard Branson has frequently been credited with the maxim, “Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t.” Because online versions and sourcing vary, the final published article should cite a verified Virgin/Branson source if retained as a direct quotation.

6. Scripture quotations are from the Berean Standard Bible (BSB).