We Don’t Need People to Grow. We Need to Water Their Growth.

By Sarah Brobeck, President & CEO of ALM

Recently, I watched Liz Remillong receive TRSA’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the first woman in the history of the award to receive it. These awards aren’t bought; they’re earned.

I sat down afterward to write a LinkedIn post honoring her, and halfway through, I had to stop. I realized I’d never actually said the thing out loud:

Liz’s belief in me is the difference in how I show up every day.

That sentence is the whole reason I’m writing this.

I’ve worked inside both kinds of environments in this industry. The kind where people invest in you, where you’re handed opportunities you have no business being ready for, and you grow into them because the people around you believed you could. And the kind where no one is invested in you, only in what you can produce, where you’re handed an impossible workload, told to figure it out, and critiqued on whatever solution you find. Where everything you do wrong defines you, and everything you do right is minimized or ignored.

Both shaped me. One taught me what leadership looks like. The other left me drained, defeated, and with a lifelong Celiac diagnosis I’ll carry for the rest of my life. That isn’t a complaint; it’s the receipt.

This morning, Simon Sinek said you only need one person to believe in you. I have a Board, a staff, industry friends, and people like Liz. I can feel the difference in how I show up, even when it’s hard, even when things don’t go the way I wanted them to. I’m not carrying it alone anymore, and I will never go back to an environment that asks me to.

That’s the personal piece. Here’s the bigger one.

Leadership is built, not born.

We’ve gotten this wrong for a long time in our industry. We’ve operated on the assumption that great leaders just emerge. Someone works hard, knows the operation, performs under pressure, and gets promoted. Then we hand them a title and expect them to suddenly know how to motivate people, manage conflict, communicate clearly, coach performance, and lead a team.

Technical skill and leadership skill are not the same thing.

I hear the same story from different people all the time, and it’s my story too. Someone gets promoted on skill, with no training for the role they’re stepping into. Sink or swim, and which one happens is up to them. That, singlehandedly, sets someone up to fail.

The transition from individual contributor to frontline leader is one of the hardest moves a person makes in their career, and we treat it like a reward instead of a transition. We see “natural leader” qualities in someone and decide that’s enough. It isn’t. Being a natural leader doesn’t mean you know how to lead; those are different things.

So here’s what happens. Our best operators get promoted, and they fail, not because they lack work ethic or intelligence, but because nobody ever taught them how to lead people. We trained them to run machines, manage production, control quality, and solve operational problems. We did not train them to navigate human ones.

And that is where operations break down. Turnover, burnout, miscommunication, lack of accountability, safety issues, low morale, and constant firefighting. We try to fix it with more process, more SOPs, more metrics, more meetings. It doesn’t work, because operational performance is, ultimately, a people outcome. The strongest operations in this industry are not built on equipment; they are built by leaders who know how to create clarity, trust, accountability, and growth inside their teams.

This is why people should see a future from Day 1, not just a job. Employees today are asking three questions: Can I grow here? Will someone invest in me? Is there a path forward?

The companies that answer yes will retain talent, build stronger cultures, and outperform the ones that don’t. The companies that answer no, or worse, don’t answer at all, will keep losing their best people to other companies or out of the industry entirely, and they will keep wondering why.

So when I say leadership is built, not born, here is what I actually mean: leadership is teachable. Growth has to be intentional. Career development is not an HR program; it is operational strategy. And industries like ours can no longer afford to leave leadership development to chance.

We don’t need our people to grow on their own. They aren’t seeds we scatter and hope take root. We need to water their growth, deliberately, consistently, before the fact and not just after, so they become bigger and stronger than they ever thought possible.

That’s what supportive leadership does.

I am fortunate to have an entire support team watering me now, Liz included, and I am so much better because of it. I’m trying to do the same for everyone I lead.

Be the leader you always wanted to have in your corner. Fiercely support the people in your charge, and bring the firehose to water them. And if you’re in the position I have been in more than once, where no one is watering you, come sit by me. I’ve got my hose handy, and I will gladly water you.