A regional manager invests equally in every team member, then learns to invest by the soil each person grows in.
Stick with me on this one!
Equal investment in unequal conditions does not produce equal results. The best operators read the soil.
The old parable of the sower casts identical seed on four soils and gets four harvests. The soil decides the yield. The lesson holds for talent: the same investment produces wildly different returns depending on where it lands.
In multifamily leadership development, soil means the individual’s readiness, their capability gap, their appetite for growth, and the conditions around them that feed or starve it.
The leader who invests identically across everyone, whatever their conditions, is being equally inefficient.
Read the soil before you plant. One team member sits in conditions where a specific investment returns exponentially. Another needs the ground prepared first. A third needs a different investment than the one you keep making.
The regional invested equally for two years, got unequal results, and couldn’t say why.
Read the conditions before you invest.
Develop every team member, and invest most where the conditions make the investment pay. That is leadership.” – Mike Brewer
Discussion Prompt: Map your current development investments against each person’s readiness and growth conditions. Find one person getting significant investment in conditions not yet ready to support it. Redirect that investment to preparing the conditions first.