The Development Mirror
- Cristina Stensvaag
- Aug 18
- 3 min read
What changed for your team because of how you led and developed them this month?
August 18, 2026
Originally published in One More Rep, a weekly newsletter for people managers who want to get better through practice. Subscribe here — it's free.
Week 33. Rep 33. You've worked through three weeks of developing your people. This week, we'll look at what this work showed you about how you lead.
Read
The Moment
Over the last three weeks you've focused on your team. You tracked whether you coach or fix. You practiced staying in the question. You had a development conversation that wasn't tied to a project or a performance gap.
Three reps that give you one picture of what it looks like to lead by putting your people first.
The Pattern
Do you measure your own development by how the work turned out? If you ask yourself things like "did the project land?" or "did the team hit the goal?", you're looking at outcome measures. They tell you about your team's execution but they don't tell you much about your leadership.
The right measure is what your team is doing differently because of how you're leading them. Are they solving problems before they bring them to you? Are they growing into responsibilities you haven't given them yet? Are they having conversations with you they wouldn't have had six months ago?
That's what this month has been building toward.
Why This Matters
Q3 has been about leading through others. In July you handed the work off. In August you started developing the people doing the work. Those two things compound if you can see where you are and what still needs work.
This week you step back from the individual reps and look at what August has shown you about how you develop your people, and what one thing would make the biggest difference going forward.
Rep
This Week's Practice
Review your three August reps. You're looking at your own pattern as a developer of people: where you showed up well, where you defaulted to old habits, and what one thing would be the most impactful if you kept working on it.
Your Rep
Answer these three questions:
Where did you genuinely invest in someone's development this month?
Where did you default to fixing, managing, or avoiding the development conversation?
What's the one habit you most need to build to develop your people more deliberately?
What to Notice
Success looks like:
Your answers are based on what you observed, not how you felt about your performance
At least one answer is uncomfortable because it's accurate
Resistance looks like:
Writing what you intended instead of what you actually did
Identifying three habits to work on instead of committing to one
It's working when:
You can point to one person on your team who is doing something differently because of a conversation you had this month
Common Mistakes
Mistake #1: Grading yourself on effort. How hard you worked on developing someone isn't the measure. What changed for them is. Stay focused on evidence, not intention.
Mistake #2: Skipping the uncomfortable answer. The habit that's still not working after three weeks of deliberate practice is the most important thing on the page. Don't bury it under what went well.
Reflect
Which person on your team grew the most this month, and how much of that was because of you versus in spite of your habits?
What would it look like to develop your people as deliberately through the rest of the year as you did over the last three weeks?
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Cristina Stensvaag is co-founder of LeaderReps and creator of One More Rep, a weekly practice-based leadership newsletter for people managers.