(This is part two; for part one go HERE)
Leading people, not categories
Leaders are surrounded by advice on how to manage different “types” of people. Personality profiles, talent segments, demographic cohorts, generational tribes – neat models that promise quick understanding if you learn the right labels.
The problem with that? People don’t live inside those labels. People are wonderfully messy, shifting combinations of stage, experience, context, constraint, ambition and chance.
The best leaders I’ve worked with have something in common. They don’t lead categories. They lead humans. They stay curious longer than everyone else. They resist the temptation to settle for the first explanation that feels satisfying. They ask another question. Then another.
Not because they enjoy uncertainty – though they do embrace it. But because they understand that people are almost always more complicated than our first story about them allows.
One of the most useful phrases I’ve come across comes from Susan Golden: “stage, not age.” It’s one of those deceptively simple ideas that quietly reorganises the way you see people. Two people can be exactly the same age and yet they live completely different lives:
- One 59-year-old may be stepping into the most significant leadership role of their career.
- Another may be caring for ageing parents, managing their own health, helping adult children back onto their feet and wondering how much longer they want the politics of corporate life.
Same age. Very different stage.
The reverse is equally true. Two people at the same stage can be decades apart in age. Think about people who are:
- stepping into leadership for the first time
- returning to work after caring responsibilities
- rebuilding confidence after burnout
- starting a second career
- looking for more flexibility
- wanting greater challenge
- shifting from building capability to mentoring others
Their birth year tells you almost nothing about what they need from a leader. Their stage tells you a great deal.
“Stage, not age” is a simple invitation to begin with the reality of someone’s life, not with a neat demographic marketing story. Leadership is not about becoming better at categorising people. It’s about becoming better at understanding them.
“New to leadership. Caring for two young children. Keen to grow but running low on bandwidth.”
Now we’re getting somewhere. Now we have the beginning of a conversation.
If “stage” asks where someone is in life, there’s another question that digs even deeper:
What is true about this person that isn’t true of almost anyone else?
That question borrows from Nilüfer Merchant’s idea of “onlyness”: the unique spot each person stands in, shaped by their experiences, relationships, values, passions and perspective.
Leaders rarely ask it explicitly. But the best ones behave as though it matters.
- They notice the early-career employee quietly carrying responsibilities far beyond their years.
- The experienced manager ready for a completely different challenge.
- The specialist desperate to mentor others, not just do more work alone.
- The high performer beginning to burn out.
- The person whose motivation has shifted because life has shifted.
None of those stories can be predicted by a label. Every one of them can be discovered through attention. That’s the real pivot: away from “What are people like them usually like?” and towards “What am I missing about this person?”
These questions are not abstract. They have very practical implications for how leaders lead day to day. And this is where Russ Laraway’s work becomes so useful.
When they win, you win
Laraway’s philosophy is refreshingly straightforward. He doesn’t ask leaders to memorise characteristics or decode tribes. He doesn’t promise that one framework will reveal the hidden truth about human behaviour.
Instead, he asks them to do three things exceptionally well:
- Set clear direction.
- Coach frequently.
- Know where each person wants to go – and help them get there.
Simple.Not easy. Notice what’s missing:
- No “young employee engagement strategy”
- No “experienced staff retention plan”
- No demographic playbook
Just disciplined conversations about work, repeated consistently over time. And the deeper you go into those three disciplines, the more “stage, not age” becomes a practical reality rather than a nice phrase.
Clear direction is not a generic vision statement. It’s a specific answer to questions like:
- What does good look like in this role, right now?
- How will we know it’s happening?
- What does success at this stage unlock next?
For someone new to leadership, clarity reduces anxiety and gives them a fair chance to succeed. For someone rebuilding confidence, clarity helps them distinguish progress from self-doubt. For someone ready for stretch, clarity makes sure the bar is high enough to be worth their effort.
You cannot set meaningful direction if you don’t understand someone’s stage. And you cannot understand their stage if all you can see is a label.
Frequent coaching is where curiosity stops being a value and becomes a practice. Coaching conversations are not about categories. They’re about:
- What are you seeing?
- What’s working?
- What’s hard?
- What do you want to try next?
- How can I help?
Done well, coaching exposes assumptions on both sides. It reveals where your story about someone differs from their experience. It surfaces constraints you didn’t know about, strengths they haven’t named, and ambitions they’ve never said aloud.
There is no way to coach well if you’re more interested in explaining behaviour than understanding it. The leader who thinks, “This is typical of people like them,” will always miss something.
The leader who thinks, “I wonder what else might be true here?” has a chance to learn.
This is the piece most organisations quietly skip. We know where the organisation wants to go.
We know where the role fits. We sometimes know what skills we want people to develop. But how often do we know where each person wants to go.
Not in a superficial “Where do you see yourself in five years?” sort of way. In a more honest, personal stage-aware way:
- What kind of work feels energising now?
- What kind of challenge would feel meaningful?
- What do you want less of? More of?
- What would progress actually look like for you at this stage?
When leaders know those answers, Laraway’s third discipline becomes powerful.
You can align opportunities with emerging strengths. You can design stretch that fits a real life, not a generic career plan. You can say no to work that will burn someone out and yes to work that will help them grow.
That’s leadership built on people, not categories.
Put these ideas together and a pattern appears. Good leadership is not about decoding tribes. It’s about paying attention to actual people.
– Stage: Where are they in life and work?
– Onlyness: What is true about this person that isn’t true of almost anyone else?
– Direction: Do they know what success looks like?
– Coaching: Are you helping them learn in real time?
– Growth: Do you know where they want to go next?
None of these fits neatly into a keynote title. It won’t sell as many workshops as the latest personality fad.
In the end, trust and performance do not come from decoding categories. They come from the slower, harder, more human work of paying attention: asking better questions, noticing the person in front of you, and shaping leadership around what you discover. If your leadership stops at a label, it hasn’t really started.
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