What makes a great leader?
Early in our careers, leadership can feel like achievement: hit the number, earn the promotion, become the expert, prove you belong in the room. But the best leaders eventually discover that leadership isn’t really about how high they can climb. It’s about how many people they can help grow.
On a recent episode of Hunters & Unicorns, Luster CEO and Co-Founder Christina Brady shared the experience that fundamentally changed how she thought about leadership.
Early in her career, Christina was leading a high-performing sales team and felt certain she was ready for the next promotion. Instead, she didn’t make it past the first round. The feedback was difficult to hear: her team respected her, but they weren’t behind her. She wasn’t leading them. She was pushing them.
Christina admits she didn’t receive that feedback particularly well at first. But eventually she realized she had a choice: reject it because it hurt, or use it to become a better leader.
She chose the latter.
Instead of chasing the next title, she focused on learning how to lead. She studied communication, leaned into coaching and Radical Candor, and became obsessed with helping people discover and develop their strengths. Eventually, that philosophy crystallized into one line:
“I don’t want to be anybody’s ceiling. I want to be their soil.”
A ceiling defines the limit. Leaders become ceilings when they need to be the smartest person in the room, when every decision runs through them, or when their teams become dependent on their approval.
Soil does something different. It creates the conditions for someone else to grow.
For Christina, that changed the measure of leadership success from How far can I go? to How many people can I help get to the point where they pass me?
But being the soil doesn’t mean simply making people feel supported. Growth requires feedback.
One of Christina’s core beliefs about Radical Candor is that leaders have to earn the right to give constructive feedback. That starts with caring enough to understand the person: what motivates them, what they’re working toward, where they want to grow, and what support they need.
When that relationship exists, feedback lands differently. A challenge stops feeling like I’m coming down on you and starts feeling like I’m helping you get where you told me you want to go.
But the opposite is also true. Caring about someone while avoiding the conversations that could make them better isn’t great leadership either. Care enough to understand the person. Care enough to tell them the truth. And care enough to help them improve.
That philosophy is deeply connected to why we built Luster.
Too much coaching and enablement today happens after the moment that mattered. A rep struggles on a customer call, someone identifies the problem later, and coaching happens after the customer has already experienced the mistake.
We believe development should happen earlier.
Luster helps identify where someone needs support, understand where that gap is about to matter, and create the right intervention before the point of failure. That might mean personalized practice, coaching, or giving a manager the insight they need to step in and reinforce the right skill.
And that distinction matters in the age of AI.
There’s a lot of conversation about what AI can replace. We’re much more interested in what AI can help people become better at.
Technology can surface a blind spot, personalize practice, and give someone a safe place to make mistakes. But managers still create the trust that makes feedback meaningful. They understand the person behind the performance. They reinforce the learning. They help people grow.
The goal isn’t to automate the humanity out of leadership. It’s to give leaders better tools to help more people reach their potential.
Years ago, Christina received feedback she desperately didn’t want to hear. Instead of letting it become a ceiling, she used it as the soil for what came next.
That’s the opportunity great leaders create for others, too.
Don’t become the ceiling your people eventually run into. Become the soil that helps them grow beyond it.
