Experience Doesn’t Expand Your Leadership. This Does.
In my last article, I argued that leadership matures when our strengths remain strengths but never stop being choices.
That raises an obvious question: how do leaders actually expand those choices?
The usual answer is experience. We assume that the longer someone leads, the more capable they become. And experience matters. But experience can also reinforce the patterns that already work for us.
A decisive leader gets faster at deciding. A collaborative leader gets better at building consensus. An analytical leader becomes even more skilled at finding the flaw in an argument. Those capabilities may continue to sharpen while the leader’s range remains almost exactly the same.
Success can make this harder. The behaviors that helped us get where we are have been rewarded, often for years.
Until the work changes.
A CEO I coach has been navigating exactly this transition. He built a rapidly growing organization in part by staying close to most important decisions. He was good at it, and for a long time the organization needed him there.
As the organization grew, his job changed. More of his time needed to go toward long-term relationships and strategic work that only he could do. That required his executive team to make many more decisions without him.
But simply delegating more wouldn’t necessarily build greater leadership capacity. So we worked on both sides of the shift. His executive team developed a structure for challenging and refining one another’s thinking while giving individual leaders clear ownership and accountability for their decisions. His work was to step much further back, notice when he was being pulled toward decisions he no longer needed to make, and distinguish those from the moments when his involvement genuinely mattered.
He’s making that shift. And the result is larger than freeing his time. Individual executives are developing greater judgment and ownership. The team is becoming more capable as a unit. The organization is becoming less dependent on him.
That’s what expanding range can look like.
There’s a significant difference between knowing what you should do and being able to do it when the moment arrives. Understanding that you should delegate more, listen longer, speak more candidly, or hold a firmer line doesn’t expand your range. Practicing a different response when your familiar one is pulling at you does.
There’s a deliberate-practice quality to this: working at the edge of your existing repertoire in situations that actually matter. Notice your instinct. Consider whether it fits. Try something different when it doesn’t. Pay attention to what happens. Adjust. Repeat.
This is one reason I believe good coaching can accelerate growth. A coach can help you see patterns that are difficult to see from inside them, challenge assumptions that have become invisible, turn insight into experiments in the work you’re already doing, and learn more from what happens.
Experience matters. But years of experience and years of development aren’t the same thing.
Development happens when we keep learning from experience instead of simply accumulating it.
Where might the next stage of your leadership require something different from you?
If that’s a question worth exploring, I’d be glad to think about it with you. We can use a Leadership Clarity Conversation to look at what’s changing in your work, where you may be getting pulled toward familiar patterns, and what greater range could make possible.
