Are you skipping leg day for your leadership team?

You can hire all the flashy sales teams and spend a fortune on marketing campaigns, but if your leadership team isn’t ready for the future, you’re pouring water into a bucket full of holes. Strengthening your CEO and executive team’s skills lays the groundwork for future growth. Think of it as giving your business a stronger backbone. Complacency is the enemy of growth, and assuming last year’s skills will conquer next year’s challenges is a one-way ticket to stagnation. So, ask yourself – are you proactively beefing up your leadership muscle, or hoping your team can suddenly bench-press double their weight without training?

Focusing on the future

It’s tempting to splurge investment on what feels like quick wins, especially when things are going well: a marketing campaign here, a product launch there. But pause for a second. What about the engine driving all those initiatives – your leadership team? If you want to scale Everest this year, you’d better ensure your sherpas (a.k.a. your execs) have the right gear and know-how. Investing in training for your executive team at budget refresh time isn’t a “nice-to-have” – it’s insurance for your growth plans.

Picture this: your client base doubles over the next year – would your current team rise to the challenge or collapse under the weight? If the answer gives you the heebie-jeebies, that’s a sign. Maybe your Sales Director has never managed a team this big, or your Ops lead is sweating at the complexity of scaling processes. These are gaps you can address with development and coaching. It’s far better to identify and bolster weak spots now than to find out the hard way in Q3 that your “A-Team” was actually an accident waiting to happen. Many of the clients I have worked with have realised that the most significant obstacle to scale is leadership – promoting people who weren’t ready or hiring outsiders at great cultural cost. The solution? Develop your own people before the cracks show. In other words, fix the roof while the sun is shining.

Taking the next step on your growth journey

The truth is, the leadership approach that worked for a team of 20 will not work for a team of 200. Yet many CEOs charge onwards, expecting the same crew, with the same abilities, to achieve bigger and better results. It’s a bit like expecting a Fiat 500 to tow a caravan just because it won last year’s go-kart race. It’s time to upgrade the engine, not overload its existing capabilities.

This isn’t a knock on your team’s talent or loyalty – it’s reality. Growth demands evolution. Either your leaders level up, or they become the limiting factor. I’ve seen it time and again: companies hit a wall because an early hire (or even the founder themselves) has become the bottleneck. It’s not about being ruthless; it’s about being honest. Are they still the right person in the right seat? If not, can they grow into it with support? As I pointed out in a recent blog, “garage-band rockstars” were perfect for the pub gig, but the arena tour requires different skills. Training and development can be the bridge that transforms a one-hit wonder into a consistent headliner. It’s how you turn potential into performance, before your growth plans hit a talent cap.

So ask yourself: has each member of your executive team grown as fast as your company? Are there signs of strain – frayed communication, strategic drift, “imposter syndrome” peeking out in meetings? These are flashing indicators to invest in development. Ignoring them in the flush of a new year would be like ignoring the check engine light before a road trip. Sure, you might get away with it for a while… until you’re stranded on the side of the M1 wondering where it all went wrong.

Strengthen the foundation before you add another floor

Scaling a business is a bit like adding floors to a building. Without strengthening the foundation, the whole thing risks a wobble (or worse). You and your leadership team form that foundation – their effectiveness, cohesion and vision hold up everything above. If you’re aiming to scale, shore up this base first. That means investing time and resources in leadership training, coaching, and development now, early in the year, so the structure can bear the weight of your ambitions later.

Think about structure and processes: as companies grow, what used to be an ad-hoc chat over coffee now needs to be a structured weekly executive meeting. Decisions that were once instinctual now require data, deliberation and delegation. Many executive teams don’t naturally have these habits – they need to learn them. In fact, when I start with new clients, I often find no consistent goal-setting or meeting rhythm in place. It’s not that these leaders aren’t smart; they simply haven’t been shown the frameworks. By implementing a cadence of daily huddles, weekly check-ins, monthly reviews and quarterly off-sites, leadership teams can dramatically improve execution. But establishing this discipline often requires an outside nudge or some training on the Rockefeller Habits or OKR methodologies. The payoff? Alignment and clarity cascade down the organisation, instead of chaos. As the saying goes, you don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems – so build those systems into your team’s skillset.

The CEO: chief example officer

Let’s address the crown-wearer: the CEO. If you’re in that role, you might think “It’s my team that needs training, I’m doing just fine.” But here’s a cheeky reality check – leadership development is not a one-and-done, and everyone (yes, even you at the top) has room to grow. In fact, the best CEOs are often the most insatiable learners. By visibly investing in your own development, you send a powerful message down the line: we never stop improving here. It sets the tone for a culture of learning rather than a culture of ego.

And as CEO, if you’re carving out time for your growth, your exec team will follow suit. Encourage a bit of vulnerability at the top: share what you’re learning, admit what you don’t know. It’s amazing how a leader willing to say “I need to get better at this” can create a domino effect of development. The new financial year is a perfect moment to reset the norm. Instead of the usual bravado about crushing targets, start with a different question: “How will we each grow as leaders this year?” Set the precedent that investing in yourselves is part of the strategy. After all, your people are your strategy – and that starts with the people steering the ship.

Training: expense or investment? (Spoiler: it’s the latter)

Let’s be clear: training your executive team is not about staging trust falls and singing Kumbaya. It’s about business outcomes. Better leadership yields better decisions, which yield better results. It creates a trickle-down effect of capability. Middle managers learn from the example set above, and employees feel the impact of more engaged, empathetic, and effective leaders. If you cultivate excellent leaders, you not only boost performance but also become a talent magnet and retention machine. In the day-to-day rush, it’s easy to treat training as a cost centre – something to trim when budgets are tight. But reframed as an investment, it’s like watering the roots of a tree. It might not yield fruit overnight, but give it a year (or less) and you’ll see the impact in growth, stability and the ability to weather storms.

Future-proofing your scale-up

Ultimately, investing in your leadership team now is about future-proofing. It’s ensuring that as you scale, you’ve got the right people with the right skills ready to step up. Think of it as succession planning in action. You’re not just preparing for the challenges you know about, but building capacity to handle those you haven’t even imagined yet. By developing talent in-house, you retain your culture and institutional knowledge while expanding capabilities. It’s the classic win-win. 

Of course, not everyone CAN develop in the way you need them to. And that’s fine. You will end up hiring new executives as you grow, but if you’ve been investing in training your top team, they’ll be joining a culture of development that onboards them into a learning, adaptive team – not a static one.

So, how do you actually do it? You’ve budgeted the funds – now make it count. Consider bringing in expert coaches or enrolling the team in executive education programmes. Set personal development goals for each exec (CEOs included) as rigorously as you set business goals. Maybe your CFO needs to become a better communicator to pitch that IPO – send them on that storytelling course. Perhaps your Head of Sales could use mentoring on managing managers (as opposed to managing customers). There’s training for that. Don’t forget less formal development too: peer learning, book clubs (pick a business classic each quarter – we run a great book club at Monkhouse & Company and we’re always recruiting), even swapping mentorship within the team. The key is to bake development into your yearly plan. Make it non-negotiable.

By doing this, you’re setting the tone. You’re saying: We’re building the company to last, and we’re starting with ourselves. It’s challenging, sure – it takes humility and a long-term view. But it’s also fun! There’s a special kind of excitement in a team that’s growing together, challenging each other, and celebrating new skills gained. It creates momentum that money can’t directly buy – but wise investment can certainly spark.

No time like the present

There is a Chinese proverb that says, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” The same goes for planting the seeds of leadership excellence. Waiting until problems smack you in the face is costly. By then, the budget’s gone, the team’s in firefighting mode, and development takes a back seat (or gets kicked down the road again). Break that cycle before it starts. Be proactive. Be daring. Allocate budget to a leadership bootcamp or coaching series before allocating it to something easy to justify like new hires or fancy tools. Those things are important, but without a strong leadership framework to integrate them into, they often underdeliver.

So here’s a challenge (you knew one was coming): will you strengthen the steel of your organisation now, or patch cracks later? In cheeky terms, are you going to be penny wise and pound foolish? Saving a bit on exec development might please the finance sheet this month, but it could starve your company of growth in the months to come. On the flip side, a well-trained, cohesive, and strategically sharp leadership team will make everything else easier. It’s the gift that keeps on giving – better hiring, clearer strategy, smoother execution, happier teams. Future you – the one basking in record-breaking results a year or two from now – will want to hop in a time machine and give present you a big high-five for making that call.

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Written by business coach and leadership coaching expert Dominic Monkhouse. Contact him to schedule a call here. You can order your free copy of his book, Mind Your F**king Business here.