THE GROWTH EDGE

The Leadership Edge

Development Insights for Leaders Who Do the Work
April 2026  •  Issue #1

Here’s something I’ve noticed across 20 years of coaching leaders: the ones who grow the fastest aren’t the ones with the most talent. They’re the ones who are most honest about what they don’t see.

Self-awareness sounds like a soft concept until you watch a technically brilliant executive derail because they couldn’t read the room, or a high-potential manager stall because they kept solving problems their team needed to solve. The patterns are consistent. The good news is they’re also addressable — if you’re willing to look.

This newsletter is for leaders who are willing to look. Each month I’ll share what I’m seeing in coaching work, research that matters, and practical tools you can use without hiring anyone. Let’s get into it.

What We Published This Month

We launched The Growth Edge blog with five posts. Here are the two most relevant to your own leadership development:

Data-Driven Development: How Assessments Change the Leadership Conversation

Most leaders think they know their strengths and blind spots. Most are partially right and significantly wrong. This post explains how validated assessments like Hogan, EQ-i 2.0, and CliftonStrengths work as mirrors (reflecting patterns you can’t see from the inside) and maps (giving you language and direction for development). The key idea: understanding your assessment profile is 10% of the value. The other 90% is application and integration.

Read it: totalgrowthcc.com/blog/data-driven-development-assessments/

Building an HR Function from Scratch: A Practical Roadmap

This one’s written for organizational leaders, but there’s a reason I’m including it here: if you’re a leader inside a growing company, understanding what good HR infrastructure looks like makes you a better advocate for your team. You’ll know what to ask for, what’s missing, and where the gaps will hit your people first. It’s also useful if you’re the person who just got asked to “own HR” in addition to your day job.

Read it: totalgrowthcc.com/blog/building-hr-function-from-scratch/

Worth Knowing: What the Research Is Saying

Gartner’s latest HR leadership survey confirms what many of us feel: leader and manager development has been the #1 priority for HR leaders three years running — and managers still describe themselves as overwhelmed by expanding responsibilities and under-equipped to lead change. The gap between what organizations expect from their managers and what they’ve actually prepared them to do is widening, not closing. If you’re a manager who feels this, it’s not a personal failure. It’s a systemic one.

DEVELOR’s 2026 L&D Kaleidoscope research surveyed HR and L&D professionals across 24 countries and found the top five leadership development priorities are: motivation and engagement, agility and adaptability, developing others, feedback, and team collaboration and trust. Notice what’s not on that list: technical skills, industry knowledge, or strategic planning. The competencies organizations need most from their leaders right now are fundamentally human — emotional intelligence, coaching ability, and the capacity to build trust. These are exactly the capabilities that assessments measure and coaching develops.

And from the research side: a study published in Frontiers in Psychology examining coaching-based leadership found that managers trained in coaching skills showed sustained improvements in both their own performance and their employees’ performance four months after the intervention. The employees of coached managers also showed significant gains in extra-role performance — meaning they didn’t just do their jobs, they went beyond them. The takeaway: coaching isn’t a soft perk. It’s a performance multiplier with measurable downstream effects.

Resource Spotlight

The Leadership Assessment Guide — Not sure which assessment is right for your situation? This guide compares Hogan, EQ-i 2.0, CliftonStrengths, DiSC, 360° Feedback, TKI, and other tools with use case guidance for individuals, teams, and organizations. It’s the same selection framework we use in our assessment practice.

Get the Leadership Assessment Guide →

Curious what an assessment or coaching engagement would look like for you?

I do free 30-minute discovery calls. No pitch — just a conversation about where you are, where you want to go, and whether structured development would help you get there.Schedule a Discovery Call →