How The Lessons I’ve Learned Along The Way Influenced Me To Become A(Hopefully) Better Leader…And Why It’s So Important To Me To Pass It On Whilst I Still Can

Over the years, I have been exposed to more theories, principles and definitions of leadership than I could possibly remember.

Some came through formal learning, some from people I admired, some from colleagues and competitors, and a fair amount came through simply getting things wrong and having to work out why. Very little of it arrived in a neat sequence, and almost none of it came with the luxury of knowing in advance which lesson would matter later.

And, if I am being honest, the manuals romanticize the makings of a leader!

Perhaps that is why I have never been particularly comfortable with the idea that leadership can be reduced to a formula. The principles themselves are often sound. Courage matters, values matter, clarity matters and judgement matters. The problem is not necessarily with the principles, but with the suggestion that they can be absorbed in exactly the same way by everyone and then applied predictably to every situation.

I was also fortunate to have people around me who taught me a great deal, although not always in the way they intended. Some mentors shaped how I wanted to lead because I respected the way they thought, behaved and treated people. Others were equally instructive because they showed me very clearly what I did not want to become. In both cases, the lessons stayed with me.

What I have tried to do throughout my career is take the ideas, experiences and examples I encountered, test them against reality and work out what they meant for me. Some survived almost unchanged, others needed to be adapted, and a few only made sense years after I first encountered them. Over time, they became less like lessons I had been taught and more like a personal philosophy shaped by experience.

In that sense, leadership has always felt less like a textbook and more like a scrapbook.

A textbook is organised for you. Somebody else decides what comes first, what follows, which examples matter and what conclusion you are supposed to reach. A scrapbook is far less orderly. It develops over time and contains things that only make sense because you know the circumstances in which they were collected. Some pages represent achievement, others carry mistakes, and many contain lessons that probably looked insignificant when they happened but became important later.

My own understanding of leadership was built in much the same way. There were decisions I believed were correct and later reconsidered, people who challenged assumptions I had carried for years, situations in which confidence helped, and others in which too much confidence became a liability. There were also moments when something I had been taught in theory suddenly made complete sense because the consequences were no longer hypothetical.

This is probably why I find many discussions about leadership slightly uncomfortable. We tend to talk about it in polished language after the difficult part has already happened. We describe courage once the decision has been made, values once the sacrifice is known and judgement once the outcome is visible. In real time, leadership rarely feels that tidy.

The same applies to certainty. Leaders are expected to know, and positions of authority can very quickly create the impression that you should always have the answer. I suspect some of my better decisions came when I was willing to acknowledge that I did not yet know enough, and some of my poorer ones came when I was too convinced that I did.

That distinction has become increasingly important to me because the world we are asking people to lead has become more complex, not less. Many of the decisions we face now involve competing interests, incomplete information and consequences that cannot be neatly separated. Under those circumstances, leadership cannot simply mean producing the fastest or most confident answer.

It must include the ability to ask better questions, invite perspectives you may not agree with and allow your own assumptions to be tested before a decision is made.

Anything feels black and white in the simulation, but once you step into reality where the test is no longer in a controlled environment and the pressure is far greater than you could ever have imagined, it is not just the lessons you have learned that are tested, but the fundamental wiring of your character as well!

At this stage of my career, I find myself thinking increasingly about what should be passed on. Not because I believe I have discovered a definitive model of leadership, but because I have had the privilege of accumulating experiences that may be useful to someone else. If there is value in sharing them, it is not so that another person can copy my way of leading. It is so that they can interrogate it, take what is useful, reject what is not and develop something that is authentic to their own circumstances.

Perhaps that is ultimately what leadership development should be. Not the production of people who all speak the same language and follow the same framework, but people who have learned enough from others to begin forming their own judgement. Watch me, learn from me, not by becoming me, but by becoming better than I ever could have been!

A textbook can give you principles. Experience gives them meaning.

The rest is the scrapbook you build for yourself.

~ Z.B.S