Stay Curious About the Leader You’re Becoming Leadership development often focuses on becoming better at something: communicating more clearly, making stronger decisions, building trust, managing conflict, or navigating change. We learn models, develop skills, gain experience, and gradually form ideas about what good
leadership looks like. Along the way, however, we can also become increasingly certain about who
we are as leaders.
Experience gives us good reason for some of that confidence. We learn what works. We recognize
situations we have encountered before. We develop instincts that allow us to respond without
having to reconsider every decision from the beginning. But experience can also make it easier to
stop being curious about ourselves. What began as a deliberate leadership choice can eventually
become simply “the way I lead.”