“Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.” So said Jack Welch, one of the greatest proponents of leadership development of the 20th century.

People may argue with Welch’s leadership of GE on any number of issues. His commitment to developing leaders isn’t one of them.

The John F. Welch Leadership Development Center — Crotonville, as it is affectionately known among GE employees — has become a model for CEOs across the globe.

It speaks to the importance of effective leadership that institutes like Crotonville and its progeny exist, where developing leaders step away from their day-to-day work to become better managers. Of course, not all organizations have the resources to build huge programs or send their employees away for a week or more.

Still, the underlying message applies: leadership development is not something to squeeze in when there’s time. It’s a priority that must be built with intention.

The four elements of a leadership development program

There are probably as many ways to build a leadership development program as there are leaders. Every organization will put their own unique spin on it.

Whether you’re creating a full-fledged training program, helping a few high-potential individuals, or support a recently promoted manager, you need four things to support their development.

The elements of an effective plan: training, coaching, peer support, and mentoring.

1. Training

If you plan on developing or promoting someone to a management role or hiring a manager from outside the company, you need to consider leadership training.

Back in the late 80s, I joined a Silicon Valley startup that was pioneering full-text document search. I was hired as an engineer. I liked the work and the team.

As with many startups, as the organization grew, it began to develop gaps and tensions between engineering and other departments. My boss did some reorganization and, because I had “people skills,” promoted me to Development Manager of a newly formed Operations Group.

I jumped right in without any management or leadership training — just like my own manager, the CTO who was a founder of the company. I solved problems. I allocated resources. I documented things. I hired people.

And I had no idea what I was doing. I was making every possible rookie managing mistake. I received no training, no coaching, no mentoring, and no peer support.

My performance review reflected my lack of training and experience. Though I was young and defensive, I soon realized it was time to move on. You can read more about my time there.

Thirty years later, I know the experience would have been wildly different if the leadership there had recognized the importance of training people for management roles.

2. Coaching

No surprise here: it’s a lot harder to have successful leadership development without coaching.

The little training I was given at the first few Silicon Valley startups wouldn’t have been enough without a coach to help me develop those skills. I needed the outside-in, unemotional perspective that a coach offers.

New managers especially need a safe place to be vulnerable. They need to be able to talk about how they might be getting it wrong, the fears they have. They can’t do that with their boss. They can’t do it with their direct reports.

A coach can help a new manager harness their emotional intelligence by offering an outside-in perspective for self-evaluation. They can provide accountability and problem-solving support that reduces anxiety.

A new manager may ultimately develop the skills they need to be successful without a coach. They’ll make a lot more mistakes along the way and grow much more slowly than if they had that support.

3. Peer support

Peer support is an element of leadership development that often gets overlooked, which is a big missed opportunity. It’s important to both the leader being developed and to the overall culture of your organization.

The concept is simple: there are multiple people within your organization going through a similar evolution. They’re all recently promoted managers. Or they’re all high-performing potential leaders, even if they’re not at the same level within the organization. A peer support group helps them work together on their leadership styles.

All these individuals are wired differently. You likely interact with each of them differently. They may have different coaches or mentors. They work in different departments, and may have different bosses. They have different data and process that data differently.

Notice all that difference?

Your job is to create alignment alongside the difference. That develops your leadership culture. One of the biggest challenges we face with companies is inconsistency. The business development team is treated differently from the engineering team. On one level, that makes sense — they’re two distinct teams that don’t operate in the same way.

Culturally, though, they should be one.

When you have the leaders and managers of your organization working closely together, sharing their experiences, developing as one, then you create consistencies in behavior. Your core values are driving your hiring choices, and the people you hire and promote help build your culture. Peer support groups are a great way to ensure that your teams remain aligned.

If your organization isn’t large enough for an effective peer support group, you can look to outside local or national groups that offer peer support. Make sure their values align with your organization’s.

See more: How to Develop Your Core Values (and Implement Them) in Six Steps

4. Mentoring

People sometimes conflate coaching and mentoring. They’re actually two very different relationships, and a developing leader needs both.

Coaches help develop skills. Mentors impart wisdom. Whereas working with a coach is a transactional relationship that covers a specific period of time, the relationship between a mentor and a mentee could go on for years, decades, a whole lifetime even.

A mentor passes along their wisdom and experience, something a new manager is almost always searching for. A mentor can share those “when I was in your shoes” stories that offer new ideas as well as a sense of comfort for an anxious leader: they’re not alone in this struggle.

A mentor can come from within your organization, but they don’t have to.

For instance, I’ve recently been coaching a CTO. I’ll continue meeting with him regularly. I’ve also paired him with a very experienced CTO from another organization that can do more mentoring. He can talk about how he handled things when he was a young CTO. He can build a relationship and impart wisdom in a way that I don’t as a coach.

See more: What to Look for in a Business Mentor and the Mentoring Relationship

Can you afford leadership development?

Leadership development is an investment. I’m never going to tell you to go cheap on it. The more you invest, the more you’ll get out of it.

That being said, not every organization is in the position to create a huge leadership development program or hire a coach for every one of its employees. If you’re in that boat, don’t let it stop you from putting some leadership development steps into place.

There are lots of ways to get creative. LinkedIn Learning has great self-paced resources. Peer support groups tend to be less expensive than individual coaching. You could even have a book group where you discuss the methods in a different book each month — an almost zero-cost option.

Final thoughts

In 1989, Jack Welch said this in an interview with Harvard Business Review:

“Ten years from now, we want magazines to write about GE as a place where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody. An open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters, and where that sense of accomplishment is rewarded in both the pocketbook and the soul. That will be our report card.”

More than 30 years later, a decade after he left GE, and a year after his death, his legacy of leadership development remains. It continues to inspire global corporations around the world, and it inspires me in my work with dozens of small and mid-sized organizations.

That your people are the backbone of your business isn’t just a pretty phrase. Acting on that knowledge is the difference between organizations that grow and succeed and organizations that don’t.

Great leaders are rarely born. They’re built and supported through training, connection with their peers, wisdom passed on by mentors, and skills honed through coaching.

We’ve become leaders, and now our success is all about growing more leaders. Contact us to learn how we can help your organization.