The Ripple Effect: How Developing One Leader Can Transform an Organisation
Capability doesn’t stop with the person you develop.
What happens when you invest in one person?
You might improve their performance.
You might help them communicate better.
You might prepare them for greater responsibility.
But occasionally something much bigger happens.
They begin developing other people.
More than twenty years ago, I began working with an ambitious unit head inside a large organisation.
Over time, he progressed through the business and eventually became Deputy CEO.
But his own development was only the beginning.
Over more than a decade, I went on to work directly with 96 people inside that organisation.
One person’s development had created a ripple.
PERFECT TEAMS START WITH YOU
This is one of the earliest ideas behind Perfect Teams®.
Before you can understand the people around you, you need to understand yourself.
What do you naturally see?
What do you miss?
What are your strengths?
When can those strengths become limitations?
And what do other people bring that you don’t?
Self-awareness isn’t the destination.
It’s the starting point.
Because once leaders understand themselves, they become better equipped to understand and develop others.
FROM UNIT HEAD TO DEPUTY CEO
When I first met this particular leader, he was running one of the organisation’s business units.
He was ambitious.
He wanted to progress.
And the organisation could see potential in him.
Our work together focused on many of the principles that eventually became part of Perfect Teams®: understanding yourself, recognising difference, developing relationships and becoming more capable of working with people who don’t necessarily think as you do.
He subsequently achieved what he described as a “substantial promotion.”
Eventually, he became Deputy CEO.
That’s a considerable return on an investment in one individual.
But it still isn’t the Ripple Effect.
THE ORGANISATION GOT SOMETHING MORE VALUABLE
Developing somebody internally creates something external recruitment can rarely buy.
Context.
They know the organisation.
They understand its history.
They know its people.
They’ve built relationships.
They understand how things actually get done.
And if they’ve been developed well, they don’t simply carry that knowledge upwards.
They begin passing capability outwards.
That’s what happened here.
The positive experience of one leader helped open the door to working with another 95 people across the organisation.
The investment began to compound.
CAPABILITY COMPOUNDS
We normally think about investment in financial terms.
Put money somewhere.
Generate a return.
Reinvest the return.
Allow it to compound.
Human capability can work in much the same way.
Develop one person.
They take greater responsibility.
They become more capable.
They lead others.
Those people develop.
Some of them become leaders.
They develop others.
Capability creates capability.
That’s the Ripple Effect.
RECRUITMENT OR DEVELOPMENT?
Years later, I had a conversation with another business facing a familiar decision.
It was growing and considering recruiting additional people.
The recruitment fees alone for some of the positions would have exceeded £19,000 per role.
But there were already people inside the organisation with potential.
So the question changed.
Instead of:
Who can we recruit?
they began asking:
Who could we develop?
That is a very different question.
It doesn’t mean organisations should always promote internally.
Sometimes the capability you need genuinely isn’t there.
Sometimes fresh experience and different thinking are exactly what’s missing.
But organisations can easily overlook the human capital already sitting inside them.
BEFORE YOU LOOK OUTSIDE, LOOK INSIDE
The original Perfect Teams philosophy described this rather colourfully as:
Who’s who in the zoo?
In other words, before adding somebody else to the team, understand who’s already there.
What character do they bring?
What capabilities already exist?
What potential is hidden?
Who could take more responsibility?
Who might become a future leader?
And what’s genuinely missing?
Only then can you make an intelligent decision about whether to develop or recruit.
DEVELOPING PEOPLE BUILDS ORGANISATIONAL CAPABILITY
This is where the Ripple Effect becomes strategically important.
If every time an organisation grows it has to buy capability from outside, growth becomes expensive and increasingly dependent upon the recruitment market.
But if the organisation can develop capability internally, something changes.
People grow with the business.
Future leaders emerge.
Knowledge remains inside the organisation.
Responsibility spreads.
Capability compounds.
And the organisation becomes less dependent upon a handful of individuals at the top.
That’s not simply people development.
It’s organisational capability.
ONE PERSON CAN CHANGE A SYSTEM
Looking back, that’s what strikes me about this story.
We started with one ambitious unit head.
He developed.
He progressed.
The organisation saw the value.
The work spread.
Eventually, 96 people were directly involved.
And the effects continued long after the original intervention.
That’s the real return on investment.
Not simply what one person becomes.
But what becomes possible because that person became more capable.
That’s the Ripple Effect.
You can’t download capability.™
Who inside your organisation could become more capable?
Before looking outside for your next leader, it may be worth looking at the people you already have.
Perfect Teams® helps leaders understand the character and capability already within their teams, identify what’s missing and develop stronger, more interdependent organisations.
Originally published 10 December 2021. Updated August 2026.
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