Leaders Who Multiply Others

Nick Saban retired from coaching in January 2024 with seven national championships, six of them at Alabama. If that were the end of the story, his place in college football history would already be secure.

But something fascinating happened after he left.

Saban kept winning.

Not personally, of course. He was sitting behind a television desk wearing a headset instead of stalking a sideline wondering why a defensive back was three inches out of position. But everywhere you looked across college football, someone who had spent time learning under Saban was leading a major program.

Kirby Smart built a powerhouse at Georgia and won back-to-back national championships. Steve Sarkisian took over at Texas. Dan Lanning became the head coach at Oregon. Mario Cristobal took over Miami. Lane Kiffin rebuilt his career under Saban before returning to head coaching. And Curt Cignetti, who served on Saban's original Alabama staff from 2007 through 2010, eventually took over an Indiana program that had gone 3–9 the year before he arrived.

Two seasons later, Indiana won the national championship.

By the 2025 College Football Playoff semifinals, something almost absurd had happened: every remaining head coach had once worked for Nick Saban.

Think about that.

Saban wasn't coaching any of the four teams.

In a sense, he was coaching all of them.

Maybe That's the Better Definition of Leadership

Managers naturally measure themselves by the performance of the team in front of them. Did we hit the goal? Did we finish the project? Did sales increase? Did customer satisfaction improve? Did we make the quarter?

Those things matter. Managers are responsible for results.

But there may be another measure of leadership that takes much longer to see.

What happens to the people who spend several years working for you?

Do they become more capable?

Do they make better decisions?

Do they develop confidence?

Do they learn how to handle difficult conversations?

Do they understand how to set expectations, hold people accountable, build trust, and develop others?

And eventually, when they get their opportunity to lead, are they ready?

That is a different kind of scoreboard.

Imagine looking around your company ten years from now and discovering that five managers, two directors, and a vice president can trace part of their leadership development back to the years they spent working for you.

You may never have your name on a stadium.

You may not even get a particularly good parking spot.

But that is a leadership legacy.

Liz Wiseman Calls Them Multipliers

This idea is at the heart of one of the leadership books I would recommend to every manager: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman.

Wiseman studied leaders who seemed to have very different effects on the people around them. Some leaders were exceptionally intelligent but had a strange habit of making everyone else less capable. They had the answers. They made the decisions. They solved the difficult problems. When something went wrong, they jumped in and fixed it.

Wiseman calls these leaders Diminishers.

Then she studied another kind of leader. These managers didn't need to prove they were the smartest person in every room. They asked better questions. They gave people real problems to solve. They stretched talent, created ownership, invited debate, and expected people to think.

She calls them Multipliers.

Wiseman's research found that people working for Multipliers reported that these leaders accessed nearly twice as much of their capability as Diminishers did.

That's an extraordinary idea for a manager.

You can hire the exact same people and get dramatically different capability depending on how you lead them.

The Accidental Diminisher

What makes Wiseman's work especially useful is that many Diminishers aren't tyrants.

They're good people trying to help.

That's where managers should pay attention.

Imagine an employee comes into your office with a problem. You know exactly how to solve it. In fact, you solved the same problem three years ago. So you save everyone some time and give them the answer.

Helpful, right?

Absolutely.

Do it often enough and something else begins to happen.

Your employee learns that difficult problems come to you.

Another employee is struggling with a project, so you jump in and rescue it. The project succeeds, but they never experience working through the difficult part themselves.

Someone is preparing for an important presentation, so you rewrite half of it because you know what the executives want to hear.

Someone makes a decision differently than you would, so you correct it even though their approach might have worked.

Eventually, you have created a team of people who are very good at bringing things to you.

Congratulations.

You are now extremely important.

You're also exhausted.

This is one of the great paradoxes of management: the manager who always has the answer can accidentally train everyone else to stop finding answers.

Nick Saban Didn't Create Nick Saban Copies

This is what makes the Saban coaching tree so interesting.

Kirby Smart isn't Nick Saban.

Lane Kiffin certainly isn't Nick Saban.

Spend approximately twelve seconds watching the two of them and this becomes reasonably clear.

Curt Cignetti has his own personality and approach. Dan Lanning has his. Steve Sarkisian has his.

They learned inside Saban's system, absorbed principles, watched how an elite program operated, and then eventually built something of their own.

That's what development should accomplish.

Your goal isn't to create five miniature versions of yourself walking around the office using your phrases and making every decision exactly the way you would.

Your goal is to give people principles, judgment, opportunities, feedback, and increasingly difficult problems until they become capable of leading without you.

Maybe they eventually become better than you.

I hope they do.

Wouldn't that be the point?

Business Has Coaching Trees Too

We usually talk about coaching trees in sports, but business has them as well.

General Electric became famous for developing executives during Jack Welch's years as CEO. Welch's overall legacy is complicated and some of his management practices have rightly been debated in the years since he left GE. But one part of the GE system remains worth studying: the company took leadership development seriously.

Executives who developed inside GE went on to lead major companies. GE became known not simply for producing products and financial results, but for producing leaders.

That changes how you think about talent.

What if one of the outputs of your department was leaders?

Marketing produces campaigns, leads, and growth.

Operations produces efficiency and quality.

Sales produces revenue.

Your team has its own measurable outputs.

But what if, over time, your team also became known throughout the organization as the place where good people become great leaders?

Imagine what that reputation would do.

Talented employees would want to work for you because they knew they would grow.

Senior leaders would trust people coming from your team because they knew how they had been developed.

And when the company needed its next manager, people would start looking toward your bench.

That's multiplication.

Give People Problems Worth Solving

One of the most important ideas in Multipliers is that people grow when leaders give them meaningful challenges and expect them to use their intelligence.

That sounds obvious until you're the manager watching someone struggle with something you could fix in ten minutes.

Development requires restraint.

Sometimes the better leadership question isn't, “How can I solve this?”

It's, “Who on my team is ready to learn how to solve this?”

That changes everyday management.

A difficult customer issue becomes a development opportunity.

A presentation to senior leadership becomes a development opportunity.

Leading a meeting becomes a development opportunity.

Training the new employee becomes a development opportunity.

Owning a small project becomes a development opportunity.

None of this means throwing inexperienced people into situations where they're destined to fail and then calling it empowerment. Managers still coach. They provide context, establish boundaries, ask questions, offer feedback, and step in when the risk genuinely requires it.

But they resist the temptation to grab the steering wheel every time the road curves.

People need some road.

Give Away Some of Your Leadership

Here's a practical way to think about this.

Look at the things you currently do because you're the manager.

You lead the weekly meeting.

You present the results.

You onboard the new employee.

You handle the difficult customer.

You coordinate the project.

You facilitate the brainstorming session.

You represent the team in another department's meeting.

Do you need to do all of them?

Or could one become someone else's opportunity?

The first time you hand over something important, they may not do it as well as you would.

That's inconvenient.

They might take longer.

They may structure the meeting differently.

They might make a decision that causes you to grip your coffee cup a little tighter.

But remember what you're trying to build.

If everything important has to be done exactly the way you would do it, you're not developing leaders.

You're developing assistants.

The Best Managers Eventually Become Less Necessary

This can be difficult for ambitious managers to accept because we like being needed.

Being needed feels valuable.

People come to us for answers. They ask our opinion. They need our approval. We solve things. We save things. We know things.

It feels like leadership.

Sometimes it is.

But one of the signs that you're becoming a better leader is that your team can increasingly operate without you.

People make good decisions when you're gone.

Problems get solved before reaching your desk.

Someone else can lead the meeting.

Employees coach one another.

The standards remain high even when you're on vacation.

And eventually someone on the team becomes capable of doing your job.

That shouldn't scare you.

That should make you proud.

Because now you can do something bigger too.

Multiplication works in both directions. You help someone become capable of taking on more, which creates room for you to take on more.

That's how organizations grow leaders instead of constantly shopping for them.

Who Is in Your Coaching Tree?

You don't need seven national championships to have a coaching tree.

You probably already have one beginning around you.

There may be someone on your team right now who will manage people someday.

Maybe they don't know it yet.

There may be someone who needs one difficult assignment to discover what they're capable of.

Someone who needs you to stop giving them answers and start asking them questions.

Someone who needs to lead the next meeting.

Someone who needs honest feedback because you see potential they haven't developed yet.

Someone who needs you to say, “I think you're ready for more.”

That's where leadership multiplication begins.

Not with a succession plan buried in a PowerPoint deck.

With one person seeing more capability in another person and creating opportunities for it to emerge.

Measure Your Leadership Ten Years From Now

Imagine it's ten years from today.

The people currently working for you have scattered.

Some stayed with your company. Others went somewhere else. A few became managers. Maybe one became an executive. Someone started a business. Someone is now leading a team of 50 people.

And somewhere along the way, they're doing something they first learned from you.

They're asking a question instead of immediately giving an answer.

They're having the difficult conversation early.

They're giving someone an opportunity because you once gave them one.

They're recognizing somebody's potential because you recognized theirs.

And then they develop another leader.

Who develops another.

That's the part of leadership we rarely get to see.

Nick Saban's record tells us how many games his teams won.

His coaching tree tells us something different.

It tells us how far his influence traveled.

Years after people left his staff, they were building programs, developing players, winning championships, and creating coaching trees of their own.

Your name probably won't appear on ESPN when one of your former employees gets promoted.

But the principle is exactly the same.

The ultimate test of your leadership may not be how many people need you today.

It may be how many people become capable of leading others tomorrow because they once worked with you.

So look around your team this week and ask yourself one question:

Who am I multiplying?

Then give that person something a little harder than they're ready for.

And don't be quite so quick to give them the answer.

Managers: Become a premium Boundless member and develop your leadership through coaching, a core group, and a structured curriculum built around the essential skills managers need to lead well.

​https://onboarding.leadwithboundless.com​

Business owners and executives: Boundless helps organizations develop managers who don't simply produce results. They build stronger teams and develop the next generation of leaders.

​https://pages.leadwithboundless.com/request-program-overview​

Onward.
​
The Boundless Team