“Our managers weren’t trained, our people weren’t supported,” admitted Frances Frei, Uber’s head of leadership, who’s now on an indefinite leave of absence from her role as professor of service management at Harvard Business School. When she was brought into Uber earlier this year, she found a hollow foundation.

She is addressing the core issue of what caused the criticisms and of a corporate culture that was running amok. The way managers act is what forms the practice of the company. And in Uber’s case, it wasn’t apropos.

It doesn’t matter what principles you put on a poster or manifestos you write down, what matters is what your people see, as this defines how they’ll act. And they saw clearly articulated values poisonously practised.

Early in Uber’s life, they crafted 14 very specific values to guide the company forward. These distinctive values included: “super-pumpedness”, “always be hustlin”, “let builders build”, “meritocracy and toe-stepping”, “principled confrontation”, “making bold bets”, and “being yourself”, to name a few. They resulted in a culture that rewarded hard-charging, hard-working, and even hard-partying employees — literally ranking them above others who weren’t seen as aggressive enough.

Uber has been likened to a ‘Game of Thrones’, in which employees become rivals for the throne and vie for power.

While I find the peculiarity of their values appealing, when left unchecked, undefined and undeveloped, they spelt career damage. Some HR managers in the tech industry see Uber as a potential black mark on a CV.

“If you did well in that environment upholding those values, I probably don’t want to work with you.”

During Uber’s hyper growth, more than 3,000 managers were promoted extremely quickly and often without instruction. Since hiring their first full-time employee in February 2010, Uber’s employment base has grown to 12,000, with revenues topping $6.5 billion (Dh23.87 billion). Their hyper growth left them wide open to a common mistake — not training their leaders.

I witness this nearly every day, even in companies that haven’t experienced hyper growth. Leaders are promoted without any support. They’re left to their own to discover what they should do and the best way to do it.

When you promote leaders without developing them, you’re mistakenly failing to extract the value from the promotion and potentially unintentionally setting them up to fail. It’s like taking someone on the sea to fish, giving him the gear, but not showing him how to use it. Will he be a good fisherman?

Uber’s untrained managers did what’s logical — they looked around them to see how to practice the values. So rather than providing clarity to the meaning of their distinct values and training the managers on how to excel at Uber, they were left to their own vices.

This makes me wonder, “What would Uber be like today if they had developed their leaders?”

If you’re not developing your leaders, you should be held culpable for negligence. There’s no excuse for failing to train your managers and supporting your people.

Uber is doing something about it now. Are you? Are you sufficiently training your leaders?

Recent changes at Uber include performance reviews: holding managers accountable for the performance of their team (previously this was not the case) and asking each employee to design a ‘citizenship’ goal, a task that will make the office environment better for everyone. I’m not sure this is the best place for them to focus, but at least they’re doing something.

If I could design Uber’s ideal leadership programme, it would be to bring the strength from their existing values, as they are good in intent. They just failed in practice. So, their leaders need clarity on how to live their values and then help on how to lead according to them.

Just like Uber, you need to make leadership development a priority. It’s an investment that pays off. The greatest era of productivity growth in modern business history is the same era of increased skill development, and specifically the founding of leadership science.

History and best practice says, if you want your people to produce more and perform better, build your leadership capability.

Stop underinvesting in leadership development. This is one of those instances of don’t learn from what they did, learn from what they didn’t do.

Break from being like Uber’s past and not having trained managers. Invest in building your leaders.

The writer is a CEO coach and author of ‘Leadership Dubai Style’. Contact him at tsw@tommyweir.com