Leadership and Growth Support

One of my favorite conversations in recent weeks explored team culture and specifically how to balance one's own perspective and expertise with somebody else's domain and institutional knowledge.

In particular, the challenge of bringing in expertise and best practices while still respecting existing culture and knowledge feels worth exploring.

Developing talent doesn’t always mean teaching people your own methodologies or best practices. It can also mean creating a safe space for them to explore and develop their own. That might look like pulling teammates into projects that stretch beyond their current skill sets, so they can grow alongside the work. It could also mean taking on some stakeholder management to shield them from undue pressure, such as tight timelines, unrealistic expectations, and giving them room to make mistakes without putting them at risk.

After all, professional growth often comes not just from learning methodologies, but from developing one's own ways of working, professional mannerisms, and sense of agency, which are all crucial for sustaining motivation and engagement.

As a consultant over the past couple of years, I’ve encountered many situations where projects moved forward not because I had the right ideas or methods, or because I produced pivotal deliverables, but because I used my position within a project’s stakeholder ecosystem to advocate for other people's suggestions.

Sometimes, this kind of advocacy and evangelism, lifting up skill sets and knowledge that might otherwise be overlooked amid organizational complexity and politics, is its own way of helping people or initiatives progress. I like to think of it as another facet of facilitation.

One important callout: this isn’t a question of formal leadership. This kind of support and enablement can show up in formal leadership relationships, but it can be just as powerful between peers or in advisory and consultancy contexts, like the example I alluded to.