Leadership — How Leaders Develop

How leaders develop

This model describes how skill changes over time. The same growth curve takes a completely different shape depending on the scale you observe it at. Below, from the most distant macro view all the way in to the micro view that matches reality.

Macro: it looks linear

As long as you keep improving every day, pull the time scale back far enough and the rate of growth looks like a steady rising straight line — you accumulate what you put in.

Zoom in: it’s a staircase

Shrink the time scale and look closer, and the growth turns out to be uneven: fast-growth stretches alternate with slow ones. The skill line isn’t a smooth slope — it’s a staircase going up one step at a time.

Before each step, the curve digs down

Here’s the key: a fast-growth stretch rarely appears out of nowhere. It comes from bringing in a new technique or method — and before you’re fluent with the new thing, your performance actually drops first. You’re temporarily slower and clumsier than you were. Only after you push through and get fluent do you break past the old ceiling and land on a higher step.

So before every step up, the curve digs down a corner: one step back, then two forward.

Micro: a jagged saw

Back to reality: how well you perform is tightly coupled to the state you’re in right now — a tool you know well and you look good, a tool you just switched to and you look bad. So at the smallest scale, hugging what actually happens, the growth curve is a jagged saw, not a clean line.

Reflection

League of Legends

I used to be good at League of Legends — I’ve played since 2010 and still get a few games in. Looking back, the fastest growth happened at exactly the points where I changed how I played: at first I played all five roles and was mediocre at all of them; then I specialised in ADC and my rating jumped a long way; then I rode the patch and practised whatever champion was strong at the time, another jump; then I ground one champion until I really knew it, another step — and eventually hit Master.

That maps straight onto the staircase. Every “specialise in a new way of playing” is a step up, and before the jump there’s almost always a stretch of being unfamiliar and watching the rating go down instead of up.

Master wasn’t the end, though. Holding it is harder than getting there. Stop practising for a while and your game sense dulls, your muscle memory fades — and the environment itself keeps moving: fewer new players, the ones who stay are strong, the whole water level rises, and staying near the top gets harder. So up close, skill isn’t a clean rising line. It’s a saw that moves with your current state and your environment — and it can recede.

Vannise

The model is simple to describe, but the people inside it rarely notice it — least of all the dip that comes before the growth.

At Vannise we built a storefront and live-stream toolset to replace the old workflow. For a while after the live-stream assistants and the hosts switched over, things kept going wrong: they couldn’t find anything, a viewer called out an order and it looked like it hadn’t gone through, and support had no idea how to pull an order up. But fluency came with time — assistants listed products fast, bundle promotions became intuitive to configure, buyers found it easier to pull quantities — and every link in the chain moved up a gear.