Building leaders at Delivery Hero

Clear goals. Strong teams. Real results. 

Leadership is one of the few career transitions where success depends on letting go of the behaviours that got you there.

Most people become managers because they are excellent at what they do. They solve problems, deliver results and become trusted experts in their field. Then, almost overnight, the job changes. Success is no longer measured primarily by what they achieve themselves, but by how well they help others succeed.

It is one of the biggest shifts in a career, and one that few people are fully prepared for.

Four years ago, when our Learning & Leadership Development team began building Delivery Hero’s leadership development journey, this was one of the challenges we wanted to address.

How do you turn leadership knowledge into daily practice?

Because most new managers do not need another presentation about leadership.

They may already know that they should coach more, delegate, give meaningful feedback and build trust. The challenge is not only knowledge. It is behaviour.

Under pressure, we all fall back on our habits. For many first-time managers, those are still the habits of an individual contributor: solving the problem yourself, jumping in with the answer, holding on to the “how,” or protecting the team by taking on more work.

One graduate who moved from an individual contributor role into engineering management described feeling as though every other manager had already worked out the “right” way to navigate complex team dynamics and stakeholder challenges. Another reflected on how difficult it was to let go of the details and trust people to reach an outcome in their own way.

Their experiences were different, but the underlying tension was the same: becoming a manager is not simply the same job with greater scope. It requires a fundamentally different mindset.And that mindset develops by practising new behaviours in real situations and reflecting often enough that they gradually become a new default.

How do you grow leaders? 

That belief became the foundation of the Leading People Program.

Rather than treating leadership as a collection of disconnected skills, we designed the journey from the inside out.We begin with the person behind the manager: exploring leadership values, self-awareness and the patterns that shape how we show up for others.

From there, the focus shifts to leading individuals through coaching, feedback and situational leadership, before expanding to leading teams, understanding team dynamics, setting priorities and navigating change.

The cohort-based program combines nine workshops with practical “mini-missions” between sessions. Managers apply the learning in their daily work, reflect on what happened and return to the group with real experiences rather than hypothetical cases.

Looking back after more than 30 cohorts and hundreds of managers, however, one of our biggest learnings was not about the curriculum at all.It was about people.

Realising you are not alone

Participants tell us that the moments they remember most did not happen while listening to a facilitator.

They happened in conversations with other managers: in breakout rooms, during reflections, or while sharing a challenge they thought only they were experiencing, and hearing someone else say, “I’m dealing with exactly the same thing.”

For many participants, those conversations helped demystify leadership. Hearing peers discuss team alignment, stakeholder pushback and their own self-doubt shifted their perspective. Leadership was not something everyone else had mastered. It was an ongoing practice of learning and adapting.

This matters because leadership can feel surprisingly lonely, especially at the beginning.

Managers often sit between competing responsibilities: still contributing as experts, responding to stakeholders and delivering results, while also taking responsibility for the development, motivation and performance of other people.

Creating a space where managers can think out loud, be honest about what they are struggling with and learn from one another has therefore become one of the most powerful parts of the program.

From solving problems to enabling others

Another recurring theme has been coaching.

Almost every cohort identifies coaching as one of the most impactful parts of the journey. Not simply because participants learn a framework or questioning technique, but because coaching challenges one of the strongest assumptions many new managers bring into the role: that they are expected to have all the answers.One of the most rewarding moments as facilitators is seeing that mindset begin to shift.

The question changes from:

“How do I solve this?” to: “How do I help someone else think through it?”

Leadership becomes less about stepping in and taking over, and more about creating clarity, ownership and the conditions in which other people can succeed.

Sometimes that means asking a better question. One graduate resisted the instinct to rewrite a team member’s proposed priorities. Instead, he explained what was missing and allowed the employee to develop the answer. The team member returned with two stronger priorities of their own—one of which later translated into tangible progress.

The result was not only a better plan. It was genuine ownership.

Sometimes it means setting a firmer boundary.

Faced with frequent last-minute requests that threatened her engineering team’s capacity, another graduate moved beyond either accepting the work or simply saying no. She explained the impact, proposed a more sustainable process and protected the team’s roadmap while maintaining a constructive relationship with stakeholders.And sometimes leadership means doing less.

One of our earlier graduates described how uncomfortable he once felt when silence emerged during team discussions. His instinct was to fill it: to make a joke, call on someone or find another way to move the conversation forward.

Through exploring how teams develop, he began to see that silence was not always a problem to solve. People sometimes needed time to build trust and find their way into the conversation.

Learning not to intervene immediately helped him become more patient and less reactive—and better able to give his team the space it needed to develop.

How do we know the program is making an impact?

Managers return to graduation sessions with a different way of talking about leadership: more reflective, more intentional and more curious about their own reactions and the impact they have on others.

They describe becoming more deliberate about building team culture, developing ownership and creating stronger conditions for collaboration. They reflect not only on what they did, but on why they did it, what happened and what they might try differently next time.

As one graduate put it, leadership is not ultimately about how many frameworks or management tools someone knows. The real change happens when that knowledge begins to shape their character, principles and everyday choices.We also see graduates recommending the program to newly promoted managers on their teams, often before we have begun promoting the next cohort. Some return to speak at later graduations, sharing not a polished success story but an honest reflection on how their leadership continues to evolve.

For us, that continuing reflective practice is one of the clearest signs that something has shifted.

Leadership as an ongoing practice

The challenges managers face will continue to evolve, often without a single framework or “right” answer to guide them.

The program will need to evolve with them. But the central belief behind the journey remains the same: Leadership is not developed in a single workshop. It grows through self-awareness, reflection, practice and the willingness to keep learning—together. Over time, those repeated choices become the habits managers can rely on when the pressure is on.