My August blog post and LinkedIn newsletters explored several human capacities increasingly important to leadership: openness, perception, the ability to integrate – to bring different kinds of information together – and wise action.
But identifying capacities leaves us with a more difficult question:
How do we actually develop or expand them?
Much of leadership development focuses on acquiring knowledge and skills. If someone needs to become a better communicator, we teach communication skills. If someone needs to become more strategic, we provide frameworks for strategic thinking.
Skills are important. But capacity is different. It is broader and deeper, and it develops differently.
Think about world-class athletes.
My friend Mike did his PhD research on world-class triathletes, resulting in his dissertation on self-organized learning. He found that beginning and intermediate athletes often had one coach, sometimes a father or uncle.
But to become world-class, something had to change.
The athlete became far more self-aware and began recognizing specific developmental edges. Often that meant giving up the coach who had brought them this far and working with different coaches or therapists on different aspects of performance—sometimes three or more.
An elite athlete doesn’t simply decide to become “more athletic.”
Performance reveals something. Perhaps an old technique that worked at one level of competition no longer works at the next.
Performance shows the athlete what needs to develop next.
Leadership is not so different.
For example, a leader repeatedly decides too quickly and later discovers information that would have changed the decision. Another knows she needs to delegate but keeps stepping in when the stakes rise.
Someone else is excellent at analyzing data but repeatedly misses what is happening among the people in the room.
These are not failures. They may be developmental edges -places where what the situation requires exceeds what is currently available to the leader.
And that is where development can begin.
Experience is only the beginning
Experience matters, but experience alone doesn’t necessarily develop us.
We all know people who have had twenty years of experience but seem to have repeated essentially the same year twenty times.
Something has to happen to experience.
A question may cause us to notice something we missed. Someone may make an observation that surprises us. We may recognize a recurring pattern. Sometimes the body registers something before we can explain it—a tightening, hesitation, or sense that something isn’t quite right.
Something that was previously outside our awareness becomes visible.
That insight creates possibility. But insight isn’t development either.
Practice at the edge
The world-class athlete doesn’t practice randomly. Practice is shaped by what performance has revealed.
Leadership practice can be equally specific.
A leader who closes too quickly might practice staying with a question longer before deciding.
A leader overwhelmed by conflicting information might practice holding two apparently contradictory interpretations without immediately deciding which one is right.
A leader who relies heavily on data might begin paying attention to what is happening among the people in the room—noticing hesitation, tone, or what isn’t being said.
These are small practices. But they are not trivial.
Repeated in real situations, they begin to expand what the person is capable of perceiving, holding, and doing.
And then something interesting happens.
When you no longer have to remember
At first, practice requires conscious attention.
Pause.
Listen.
Don’t decide yet.
What am I missing?
Over time, something can change.
The leader no longer has to think; I should pause here. The pause occurs.
They don’t have to remind themselves; I should pay attention to what isn’t being said. Their attention goes there.
They don’t consciously tell themselves; Don’t rush to closure; there may be something else here. They naturally remain open a little longer because their capacity for holding complexity has expanded.
The capacity has become embodied.
It is increasingly available when the situation calls for it.
And this may be one of the most important differences between learning something about leadership and actually developing as a leader.
Development doesn’t end there
There is no final step.
As capacity expands, leaders begin to perceive things they could not perceive before. And those new perceptions reveal new developmental edges – and therefore have a larger range of possible responses.
The process begins again.
Experience. Insight. Practice. Expanded capacity. New experience.
Not as a formula or a series of discrete steps, but as an ongoing developmental movement.
Over time, something else may happen as well. Like the world-class athlete, the leader can become increasingly able to recognize what their own development is asking of them.
That changes the questions we might ask about leadership development.
Not simply:
What does this leader need to know – or do?
But: What kind of experience, insight, practice, or support might help that capacity develop?
In a world that continues to ask more of the people leading within it, that may be one of the most important purposes of leadership development.
This moment is asking more of leaders.
The question is whether we are willing to grow to meet it.
