Stage and time allocation
Where the leader sits on the stage ladder, and whether their calendar shows them operating there.
Competency model and stage ladder
Use the company's model first
If the company has a leadership competency model, use it. If not, build 8 to 12 competencies from two sources: the outcomes the leader's role must produce this year, and the stage transition they are making. Split them into two groups, because they develop in order:
- Leading self: self-awareness, composure under pressure, learning speed, judgment with incomplete information, accountability, resilience, integrity.
- Leading others: coaching, communication, influence without authority, team building, leading change.
Leading-self competencies are the foundation. A leader cannot coach others well without self-awareness, or lead change without resilience. When leading-others scores plateau, look underneath.
Defining a competency
Every competency gets four rows. The overused row is the one most models miss.
| Row | Example: Coaching others |
|---|---|
| Skillful | Asks before telling; agrees one specific behavior to practice; follows up within a week; reps can name what they are working on |
| Unskillful | Tells reps the answer; feedback is general ("be more consultative"); coaching happens only after a loss |
| Overused | Coaches every interaction; reps stop deciding without approval; the leader becomes the bottleneck the coaching was meant to remove |
| Questions to ask | "Tell me about the last rep you coached through a specific skill. What changed, and how do you know?" "Which of your reps improved most last quarter, and what was your part in it?" |
Rating scale
| Score | Label | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Emerging | Rarely demonstrated |
| 2 | Developing | Demonstrated inconsistently, breaks under pressure |
| 3 | Proficient | Consistent, occasional gaps under heavy stress |
| 4 | Advanced | Consistent everywhere; others learn it from this leader |
The stage ladder
| Stage | Scope | Question the role answers | The transition that breaks people |
|---|---|---|---|
| Individual contributor | Self | Am I hitting my number? | Letting go of personal production as the measure of worth |
| Manager | Team of 3 to 10 | Is my team hitting its number, and could it without me? | Success becomes team output; coaching becomes the main job |
| Manager of managers | 10 to 50 | Are my managers building teams that hit the number without me? | Coaching managers to coach; stopping skip-level rescues |
| Functional leader | 50 to 200 | Is my function carrying its share of the plan? | Leading through systems instead of relationships |
| Enterprise leader | Whole company | What has to change across the company for growth to happen? | Leading experts in domains the leader does not know |
Each stage has a time-allocation standard: see the next section. A leader whose calendar matches the previous stage has not made the transition, whatever their competency scores say.
The progression across the ladder: do the work, develop people, develop leaders, build the system. Each step asks the leader to produce less personally and create more capability through others.
Stage transitions are adaptive challenges. They are identity shifts, not skill gaps, and training alone does not move them.
Time allocation by stage
The question is not only whether a leader has the right competencies. It is whether they spend their time at the level of leadership the role now requires. Most failed stage transitions are visible on the calendar before they show up in any survey.
The standard
Productive leadership time is normalized to 100% across four activities. Administrative work is excluded on purpose: the leadership system should automate, delegate, eliminate, or compress it, not treat it as a legitimate share of leadership capacity. Report admin time separately as its own finding.
| Stage | Coaching and developing | In deals and customer work | Planning and operating system | Across functions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Manager of individual contributors | 35% | 35% | 20% | 10% |
| Manager of managers | 35% | 15% | 25% | 25% |
| Functional leader (VP, CRO) | 20% | 10% | 30% | 40% |
These are operating thresholds, not universal laws. Adjust for the business: a manager in a high-velocity transactional motion may run more deal time; a functional leader during a reorganization may run more planning time. Write the adjustment and the reason down.
What each category means
| Category | Counts | Does not count |
|---|---|---|
| Coaching and developing | 1:1s, call and deal review used to teach, feedback, role play, skill building, career development, helping people solve their own problems | Inspecting numbers without teaching anything |
| In deals and customer work | Deal strategy, customer calls where leadership presence changes the outcome, executive sponsorship, observing sellers in the work | Taking the deal away and closing it yourself |
| Planning and operating system | Strategy, capacity, forecasting, hiring plans, resource allocation, organizational design, succession, priorities | Building reports nobody acts on |
| Across functions | Marketing, product, customer success, finance, the CEO, the board, partners, peer leaders | Status meetings with no decision |
Classification rule for joint work. A joint customer call where the leader observes and debriefs the seller afterward is coaching. A joint call where the leader runs the conversation is deals.
35% coaching is not 35% inspecting. At every stage, coaching means the other person leaves more capable.
How each stage goes wrong
Manager of individual contributors. About 70% of time sits close to people and customers. The trap is becoming the super-rep who takes over deals. Deal time should make the seller better, not replace them.
Manager of managers. The most commonly botched transition. Coaching stays at 35%, but the people being coached change. The question shifts from "can I make this rep better?" to "can I make this manager capable of making ten reps better without me?" Deal time drops from 35% to 15%. A second-line leader still coaching reps directly and inserting themselves into deals is using the wrong unit of leverage.
Functional leader. The leader least likely to be fixing an individual deal. If a CRO repeatedly rescues opportunities, that is a finding about the management system underneath. Ten percent in deals keeps the leader close enough to customers to avoid abstraction. Forty percent across functions is not bureaucracy: at this level, alignment is the work.
Measuring it
Do not ask leaders where their time goes. Look at the evidence.
- Pull 4 to 6 representative weeks of calendar data. Skip holiday weeks and quarter-end anomalies.
- Classify every meeting and working block into the four categories, plus admin.
- Cross-check against activity data: deal records the leader touched, coaching sessions logged, customer meetings attended.
- Compute the actual mix and the gap against the stage standard.
A gap of 10 points or more in any category is a finding. Several 10-point gaps in the same direction are a pattern.
Reading the gap
The delta between required and actual allocation is more useful than either number alone.
Example. A newly promoted VP Sales actually spends 10% coaching, 50% in deals, 25% planning, 15% across functions. Against the functional-leader standard (20/10/30/40), deals run 40 points over and cross-functional work 25 points under.
Do not diagnose "poor delegation." The richer diagnosis is: this leader is still operating primarily as the job they were promoted from. That is an adaptive challenge, an identity shift, and it changes what the development sprint has to do.
| Gap pattern | Usual reading |
|---|---|
| Deals well over standard, coaching under | Still operating at the previous stage; often the leader's comfort zone or the system's dependency on them |
| Coaching over standard at manager-of-managers level, but coaching reps rather than managers | Right activity, wrong unit of leverage |
| Planning over, people time under | Retreat into analysis; check for avoidance of hard conversations |
| Across functions under at functional level | Optimizing the function instead of the company; check for peer conflict |
| Admin above 20% of total time | The system is consuming the leader; fix the system first |