Developing Your Business Leaders
A Practical Guide for Organizations Ready to Invest in Their People
Drawing on nearly three decades of experience across sales operations, technology consulting, and talent development, Tina Schust Robinson offers a much-needed reimagining of leadership development. She guides leadership investors from founders, executives, and frontline managers to those doing the hands-on design and delivery work toward a more holistic and successful approach to developing leaders at every level.
Most organizations rush to solutions. Robinson challenges that instinct. Instead of starting with programs, she begins with the business case. She explores why leadership investment is a crucial aspect of any business strategy, what characteristics define a good leader, and how to craft sustainable, highly effective initiatives tied to specific organizational and employee needs.
At the core of this book is Robinson's one-to-one, one-to-many, and one-to-all leadership investment framework. It demonstrates how organizations can pursue coaching and mentoring for individuals, improve leadership training for groups, and implement a comprehensive strategy to address leadership development throughout the talent life cycle.
Interviews with successful corporate and nonprofit leaders and talent development pros demonstrate what this three-pronged framework looks like in action. Checklists, assessments, and exercises allow leadership investors to apply the framework immediately and tailor their solutions to specific audiences and business needs.
Whether you are leading a team or shaping an entire organization, this book will change how you think about leadership and the return it can deliver. Because leadership development is an investment, not a program or activity.
What You Will Learn
- Start with why: leadership investment only creates value when it is tied directly to business strategy and outcomes.
- Define the what: get specific about the behaviors and competencies leaders actually need.
- Clarify the who: different leader populations require different development approaches and support.
- One-to-one investment accelerates growth through personalized coaching, mentoring, and accountability.
- One-to-many investment builds scalable capability when training is practical, relevant, and reinforced on the job.
- One-to-all investment embeds leadership development throughout the entire talent lifecycle.
- Leadership investment is deeply human work that requires intention, trust, and consistent reinforcement.
A Note from the Author
Writing a book is a personal act. Putting it into the world and asking people to spend their time with it requires a different kind of courage.
To every reader who has taken the time to leave a review on Amazon, thank you. Your words help other readers decide whether this book is right for them, and they remind me that the work of building workplaces where people genuinely thrive is worth writing about.
With gratitude,
Tina Schust Robinson
Founder and Chief Coach, WorkJoy
Read the Sample Chapters
“This book offers a reimagining of leadership investment based on my experience coaching, advising, and collaborating with leaders at all levels. I’ve also included the collective wisdom of business executives, nonprofit leaders, management consultants, talent development experts, and human resources professionals across industries who shared their experiences.”
Review the table of contents, preface, and first chapter before you commit. The book is structured around the WHY, WHAT, WHO, and HOW of leadership investment, making it practical to build your case from page one.
The Why: Justifying Your Investment in Leadership Development is available in full as Chapter 1. If you are an HR leader, L&D professional, or executive who has ever struggled to get leadership development taken seriously at the budget table, this chapter was written for you.
Chapter 1: The Why