I spent a lot of my corporate career sitting in rooms where we talked about people’s potential.
Talent reviews, succession planning meetings, leadership development discussions. We’d spend hours talking about who was ready for the next role, who needed more experience and who probably wasn’t going to make it into management.
Sometimes the conversations were thoughtful and genuinely useful. Other times I’d sit there listening to people make very definite statements about someone’s future and wonder whether anyone had actually asked that person what they wanted.
I also remember how much weight could be placed on an assessment. We’d spend a considerable amount of money trying to understand someone’s capabilities, personality or leadership potential, and I’d find myself reminding managers that the results were one piece of information. Something to consider alongside everything else we knew about the person.
Sometimes that message seemed to get lost somewhere between receiving the report and sitting down to discuss it.
An assessment might suggest someone preferred to think things through before speaking, worked best independently or wasn't particularly comfortable making decisions without enough information. All potentially useful things to understand, but somehow those observations could become reasons why someone wasn’t considered for a leadership role.
The report might have been gathering dust in a filing cabinet, but apparently its conclusions had aged remarkably well.
I wasn’t only interested in the judgement being made. It was the assumptions sitting underneath it.
We’d developed a fairly clear picture of how a leader should behave, and we were assessing people against it. There were good reasons for that. Organisations needed ways to make decisions about capability and readiness. Competency frameworks, assessments and development plans helped make expectations clearer and gave people something practical to work towards.
I’ve seen those tools help people grow. I’ve also seen them become a rather narrow definition of what good leadership looks like.
You should be confident, but not overconfident. Assertive, but not aggressive. Collaborative, but decisive. Strategic, but close enough to the detail to know what’s going on. Preferably all before lunch.
The difficulty wasn’t that these qualities were unimportant. It was that we could become so focused on how someone was expected to demonstrate them that we overlooked other ways of achieving the same result.
I’ve met women who were already leading projects, influencing decisions and taking responsibility for other people’s work, yet still questioned whether they were leadership material.
Often they were looking at the leaders around them and seeing people who operated quite differently.
They noticed who spoke up in meetings, who seemed comfortable making decisions on the spot and whose opinions carried weight. They paid attention to what got recognised and rewarded. Naturally, they began to think that progressing meant learning to behave more like those people.
That’s where I think something important can get lost. When you’re constantly looking for the qualities you believe you’re missing, it’s easy to overlook the ones you’re already using.
Someone might be particularly good at bringing people together, noticing what others have missed or making sense of a complicated situation. But if she’s been told she needs to be more assertive or more visible, she may spend far more time thinking about how to demonstrate those qualities than recognising the value of what she’s already contributing.
I remember conversations with people who’d been told they needed to speak up more, make decisions faster or show greater confidence. Sometimes that was useful feedback. There were skills to develop and situations where a different approach would help.
I was always interested in what happened next.
Did they learn to communicate their views more clearly, or did they simply start talking more? Did they become better at making decisions, or did they start making them faster because that looked more confident? Those aren’t necessarily the same thing.
Most of us learn to navigate a workplace by observing what’s expected and adjusting our behaviour. It’s sensible to listen to experienced people, take feedback seriously and understand how things work. I wouldn’t have got very far in my own career without doing some of that.
But there’s a difference between advice that helps you become more effective and advice that simply makes you more like someone else. I think that distinction becomes important when you’re beginning to see yourself as a leader.
If you’ve spent years being recognised for doing things well, meeting expectations and delivering what other people need, it can feel quite natural to approach leadership in the same way. You identify what a good leader is supposed to look like, work out where you fall short and set about closing the gaps.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to improve. The difficulty comes when you start treating every difference between yourself and the leaders around you as something that needs correcting.
Someone who prefers time to think doesn’t need to become impulsive to make good decisions. They may need to learn how to make decisions within a tighter timeframe, but that’s not quite the same thing. Someone who works well independently doesn’t need a personality transplant to build good relationships.
Understanding how you naturally operate doesn’t remove the need to develop. It gives you a more useful place to begin.
I’ve become interested in what happens when people stop approaching their development as a list of things they need to fix. Instead, they begin to look more closely at what they’re already good at and where it makes a difference. They can still ask what they need to learn, but they’re no longer assuming that every expectation they’ve absorbed is worth pursuing.
That doesn’t always produce comfortable answers. A strength you’ve relied on for years might be getting in your way in certain situations. Or something you’ve been trying to change might turn out to be useful once you understand when and how to use it.
Trusting yourself doesn’t require you to believe you’re already doing everything well. You can recognise where you need to develop without treating every shortcoming as evidence that you’re not suited to leadership.
That becomes especially important as you take on more responsibility.
There won’t always be a process to follow or a manager who can tell you what to do. You’ll encounter situations where the information is incomplete, people disagree and the sensible option isn’t immediately obvious.
You can spend a great deal of energy trying to work out what a more experienced leader would do. Sometimes asking for their perspective will be exactly the right thing. But eventually, you’ll need to decide what you think is right.
I’ve known good leaders who were quite willing to admit they weren’t sure. They’d listen to different views, make the best decision they could with the information available and reconsider it when something changed.
There’s another change I’ve noticed as people move into leadership, especially those who’ve built a reputation for being capable and reliable. They can find it surprisingly difficult to stop being the person who does everything.
They’ve become accustomed to being the one who sorts things out, takes responsibility when something goes wrong or steps in when a job needs doing. Often those are the very qualities that helped them progress. There’s something reassuring about knowing you can handle things yourself. But being capable of doing something doesn’t mean you’re the person who should be doing it.
I’ve seen managers become so busy solving problems for their teams that they barely had time to think about the work only they could do. They were working incredibly hard, and often doing a very good job of the things they took on, but they were also making themselves responsible for decisions and tasks that other people could have learned to handle.
Sometimes the more valuable contribution would have been to ask a question, provide some guidance or give someone else the opportunity to work it out. That can be difficult when being the capable one has become an important part of how you see yourself. If you’re used to demonstrating your value by being helpful, dependable and getting things done, stepping back can feel rather like you’re not doing your job.
Yet leadership often asks you to use your capability differently.
You still need to know when to step in. There will be difficult decisions to make and moments when people need you to take responsibility. But leadership also means recognising when someone else is better placed to take something forward.
I think this is something women who are beginning to lead can find particularly difficult. They’re capable, conscientious and used to being relied upon. They want to do well and they take their responsibilities seriously, but they’re also paying close attention to what other people expect, where they think they’re falling short and whether they’re doing enough to be seen as leadership material.
That’s a lot to carry into a role before you’ve even begun dealing with the actual work.
Perhaps part of becoming a leader is learning to be a little more discerning about what deserves your attention. Not every piece of feedback needs to become a development goal. Not every strength needs to be demonstrated in every situation and not every problem needs you to be the person who solves it.
None of this means ignoring advice or pretending there’s nothing you need to improve. It means being a little more selective about what you take on board, rather than assuming that every piece of feedback is another reason to question yourself.
I often think back to those talent discussions and wonder about the people we talked about so confidently.
How many were already demonstrating leadership in ways we hadn’t fully recognised? How many had become so focused on developing the qualities we thought were missing that they’d stopped noticing what they were already good at?
We need to be more curious about the different ways people can lead.
Perhaps we need to extend some of that curiosity to ourselves.
If you’ve come to believe that you’re not quite the sort of person who makes a good leader, it might be worth thinking about where that belief came from.
What have you been paying attention to when you think about your own development and how much of that attention has gone towards trying to become somebody else?