one name at a time.
Four levels of leader, four different programs, one set of numbers that are yours rather than mine. We work through it together, and at the end you print a single sheet with the ledger on one side and room to write the names you are nominating on the other.
Hold a stick with both hands at each end. Your right hand is the CEO. Your left hand is the front line employee. Everything between them is the middle.
Now bend the stick until it breaks. The break happens somewhere in the middle, every time. No matter how strong the branch, it gives way under the right amount of pressure.
The front line is visible. The CEO is the most visible person in the building. It is the people in the middle who stay hidden, disregarded, and unknown. And there is no stronger sign of a weak middle than a major surprise landing on your desk.
Strengthen the middle and you create more hands on the stick. More hands, and the thing stops breaking.
From Companies Break in the Middle
We take the best individual contributor and expect them to get that same performance out of other people. Managing is different than doing, and nobody taught them the difference.
Not the job the company needs. That is a culture problem long before it is a performance problem.
Please the boss above, produce from the team below, compete with the peers beside. Not a healthy focus, and it will not fix itself.
Trying to hold someone else accountable is like trying to eat their lunch for them. It cannot be done. It has to be built.
Two people in the middle agree not to tell you, and an island forms. Everything that goes wrong after that was known by somebody.
Part one
These four answers are true across your whole company, so we settle them here and never ask again. Every level below inherits them.
One thing is fixed and not adjustable. Replacement cost is set at two times base salary, based on published estimates for leadership roles, which generally run higher. Two times is the conservative floor, and leaving it locked is deliberate.
Part two
Start at the top of the house where you know your people best, and work down. Two questions per level. Skip any level where you genuinely have nobody, and notice how that feels when you do.
Part three
One person developed at each level you included, over the horizon you chose.
The printed sheet runs two pages. Page one is the ledger with your assumptions on it. Page two is blank lines, by program, for the names you want to put forward. Write them by hand and bring the sheet to our next 121.
"If I develop them, they will leave for a better offer somewhere else."
Some will. The question is not whether developed people get recruited. It is whether undeveloped people stay, and they do not. They leave later, quieter, and they take the seat with them while they are still sitting in it. I have never had a CEO tell me their retention problem was caused by investing too much in their people.
"Five percent profit improvement. Prove it."
I cannot, and I am not going to try. That is precisely why the payback figure on each card is built on retention only. Drag the improvement slider down to one percent and look again. If it still works, and at every level it does, then the soft number was never the argument.
"I would rather hire the finished executive than build one."
Then price it honestly. The outside hire costs you the search, the premium, the ramp, and roughly a coin flip on whether they fit your culture. The person already in your building costs a fraction of that and comes with a known quantity attached. Build the bench and the outside hire becomes a choice instead of an emergency.
"We are too busy right now."
That is the finding, not the objection. If the company cannot spare its leaders to get better at leading, you are running a business that depends entirely on the leaders you already have never leaving and never plateauing. That is not a strategy. That is a bet.
Retention, which carries the argument. Your turnover rate, multiplied by the share of turnover better leadership avoids, applied to a replacement cost fixed at two times base salary. Counted only during the years a person is enrolled, never after, even though the effect does not stop the day the program ends.
Payback. How long the retention value alone takes to cover one year of program cost. Profit improvement is excluded from that figure entirely.
Profit improvement, which is upside. The profit in the area a person influences, times the improvement you set, held flat rather than compounded, persisting past the end of the program.
Cost. Program fee times the years actually enrolled, capped at your horizon. A three year program viewed over ten years costs three years, not ten.
Seats. Six at Spark City, six at Emerging Leader, six at Advancing Leader, two in a Key Executive group. Those are the practical limits on how many people from one company belong in the same room.
What is not counted. The person one level down who now sees a path and stays. The customer kept because a handoff was handled well. The bad outside hire you did not have to make. The speed of a decision made by someone who already ran it past a room of peers.
Tom Cuthbert · Vistage Master Chair and CEO Coach · San Antonio · tom@tomcuthbert.com · 210-248-7330
Spark City to Emerging Leader to Advancing Leader to Key Executive to the CEO chair. That progression is the farm system, and it is the reason a company can promote from within without holding its breath.
Illustrative only, built entirely from the figures entered above. Turnover avoidance research from The Ken Blanchard Companies. Nothing here is a projection, a guarantee, or financial advice.