Leadership Is Learned in the Moments That Matter

Leadership in Practice

Why do capable, intelligent, well-credentialed people sometimes fail to become effective leaders, while others with no title and no formal authority manage to lead powerfully? It’s a question worth sitting with, because the answer is rarely what we assume. It’s almost never a deficit of technical ability. The people who struggle in leadership roles are usually the ones who mastered their craft. They know the numbers, the systems, the strategy. What they haven’t mastered is something harder to name and harder to measure: the accumulation of small decisions that, over time, either build trust or quietly spend it.

That accumulation is where leadership actually lives. Not in the org chart, and not in the annual strategy offsite, but in the ordinary moments most of us don’t think of as leadership at all. How you handled one difficult conversation. Whether you followed through on one small promise when no one would have noticed if you hadn’t. Whether, when something went wrong, you protected the people around you or protected yourself. These moments feel minor in isolation. In aggregate, they become a culture.

I’ve come to believe that titles are conferred, but leadership is demonstrated. More than that, it is learned — and it’s learned in precisely these moments that matter. A title can be granted in an afternoon. The judgment to lead well is earned slowly, through experience, reflection, and no small amount of getting it wrong. This is not a sentimental claim. It turns out to be one of the better-documented findings in leadership research, and it’s the reason I’ve decided to write this series.

Throughout my career I’ve become convinced that organizations perform at their best when their leaders understand not only what they do, but why they lead in the first place. That conviction didn’t come from a book. It came from watching leadership succeed and fail, at close range, across more than two decades — and from slowly realizing that the difference between the two had almost nothing to do with intelligence or credentials, and almost everything to do with what leaders chose to do in the moments no one was grading.

Leadership Is Learned, Not Conferred

Start with the research that reshaped how I think about leadership development.

For years, the dominant assumption in most organizations has been that you build leaders in classrooms. Send the promising manager to a workshop, a certificate program, an executive seminar, and you’ll get a leader back. The evidence suggests otherwise. A well-established model in the developmental literature — sometimes called 70-20-10 — holds that roughly seventy percent of leadership capability is developed through challenging on-the-job experience, about twenty percent through relationships and mentoring, and only ten percent through formal coursework and training. A 2022 study of experience-driven leadership development among young clinicians, published in BMC Medical Education, reinforced exactly this pattern: the assignments that actually produced leadership competence were the ones that carried real stakes. The researchers found that what mattered most were what they called learner-driven characteristics, autonomy, high levels of responsibility, exposure to diversity, and the demand to create change. In other words, people learn to lead when they are given something real to be responsible for and then have to navigate it.

This is worth pausing on, because it reframes what leadership development even is. If seventy percent of the growth happens on the job, then the “curriculum” is not "the seminar". The curriculum is the Tuesday afternoon hard conversation you’re tempted to postpone, the failing project you’d rather not own, the moment a team member needs candor instead of comfort. Leadership scholars sometimes call the most formative of these experiences crucibles: moments that test and reorient a leader’s sense of who they are and what they value. You don’t schedule crucibles. You recognize them, usually in hindsight, as the times you were genuinely challenged and changed.

There’s a second idea I want to introduce carefully, because, in my experience, it’s usually handled badly. We’ve all heard some version of the line that “managers do things right, while leaders do the right thing”. The notion that management is about tasks and control while leadership is about vision and inspiration. It’s a tidy distinction, and I think it’s mostly wrong. It traces back to a 1977 essay by Abraham Zaleznik that first split the two apart, and the field has been perpetuating the divide ever since. But as the authors of a widely cited 2017 commentary in the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education argued, there is no real scientific evidence supporting a clean separation between leadership and management. They make the case that the two are better understood as a single continuum, that the functions flow into one another and are, in their word, transposable. A CEO with a compelling vision but no ability to allocate resources accomplishes nothing. A department head who allocates resources flawlessly but has no sense of direction accomplishes nothing worth having. Excellence requires both, integrated, in the same person.

I raise this not to be pedantic but because the “managers bad, leaders good” cliché, usually perpetuated by those who consider themselves leaders, does real damage. It gives people permission to neglect the unglamorous work of execution in the name of being “visionary,” and it lets others dismiss the harder work of developing people because they see themselves as operators. The leaders I’ve admired most refused that false choice. They planned and they inspired. They controlled costs and they built trust, and when needed, they rolled their sleeves up and helped do the work. They were, by any honest accounting, excellent managers and excellent leaders at the same time, because they understood the two were never really separate.

And the behaviors that distinguish the best of them are not mysterious. Researchers have spent decades studying what’s often called transformational leadership, the pattern of articulating a clear vision, paying individualized attention to people, motivating through meaning rather than fear, and building genuine trust. These behaviors have been measured, tested, and repeatedly linked to better outcomes. They aren’t a personality you’re born with. They’re a set of practices you can learn — which is precisely the point.

What I Learned by Watching

Over the course of my career, I’ve worked alongside extraordinary leaders, I've witnessed leadership decisions that produced unintended consequences for employees, teams, and entire organizations, and I've worked alongside leaders willing to knowingly make decisions that will lead to significant negative outcomes all in the name of "being right". Those experiences fundamentally changed the way I think about leadership, and two patterns in particular have stayed with me.

The first is that leadership almost always shows up before the title does.

At one point in my career, a senior technology role sat vacant after an abrupt departure, leaving several critical departments without executive oversight. I was the most senior person across those functions, so I stepped in, voluntarily, without additional pay or a change in title, and carried the executive responsibilities until the role could be filled. For several months, I did the work: setting direction, holding the departments together, building the cross-functional relationships that keep complex projects from collapsing. No one had handed me authority. I simply looked at the gap between what the mission needed and what was currently happening and decided to stand in it.

I don’t tell that story to congratulate myself. I tell it because of what it taught me. Leadership, in that stretch, wasn’t a position. It was a choice, a decision to take ownership of an outcome and to look after the people to my left and right, well before any org chart said I was allowed to. That’s the version of leadership I’ve come to trust most: the kind that acts because something needs doing and someone needs protecting, not because a title grants permission.

The second pattern is the harder one to talk about, and I’ll keep it deliberately general, because the specific people and places don’t matter. What matters is the dynamic.

I’ve watched individuals with significant positional authority consistently fail to exhibit leadership. Not because they lacked intelligence or experience, but because, in the moments that mattered, they optimized for the wrong thing. When a decision went badly, the instinct was to protect the decision rather than examine it. When a hire clearly wasn’t working, the instinct was to defend the choice rather than admit the error, sometimes for years, while the cost quietly compounded for everyone downstream. When credit was available, it flowed upward; when blame was available, it flowed down. When evidence arrived that contradicted a leader’s earlier judgment, it was waved off with stock responses like “there’s more to this than you know,” “you’re not privy to all the information”, language that ends inquiry rather than inviting it and appreciating it.

None of these were dramatic villainies. That’s the point. Each was a small, understandable, human act of self-protection. But sustained over time, they taught everyone watching a lesson: that honesty was risky, that raising a concern was a career liability, that the safest move was to keep your head down and say nothing. And once people learn that lesson, an organization stops getting the truth from the people who can see it most clearly. The best information stops traveling upward. Problems that could have been caught early are discovered only when they’ve grown too large to hide.

Somewhere in the middle of watching all of this, I had my own turning point. I began to notice that the highest-performing environments I’d been part of were not the best-resourced ones. They didn’t have the biggest budgets or the deepest benches. What they had was something less visible and far more valuable: people who trusted each other enough to do their best work, to disagree openly, admit mistakes early, and take intelligent risks without fear of being punished for them. That was the variable that separated the teams that thrived from the teams that merely survived. Not resources. Trust.

That realization is what leadership scholars would call a crucible, one of those experiences that quietly reorganizes your understanding. It’s why, when I think about leadership now, I don’t start with strategy or structure. I start with trust, because I’ve seen with my own eyes that it’s the thing that determines whether everything else works.

Why the Small Decisions Aren’t Small

If leadership is learned in the moments that matter, then the natural question for any serious executive is: so what? Does any of this actually move the outcomes we’re accountable for?

The evidence says it does, and consistently. The transformational behaviors I described earlier, vision, integrity, individualized attention, investing in people, are repeatedly associated with higher job satisfaction, stronger commitment, and better performance. A 2024 study of leaders in healthcare organizations, published in Nursing Reports, found that transformational leadership was significantly linked to both job satisfaction and what the researchers called personal mastery, the ongoing growth of people’s skills and confidence. Notably, the same study found that a laissez-faire style, the absentee leader who avoids decisions and conversations, showed no positive relationship with satisfaction at all, and that more autocratic styles tended to erode it. How leaders behave in ordinary moments is not cosmetic. It shows up in the data.

But the deeper mechanism, the one that ties all of this together, is trust. And trust has been studied with more rigor than most executives realize. A frequently cited 2014 model published in Management and Production Engineering Review traced a clear causal chain: trust in management builds organizational trust, and organizational trust drives organizational performance. When employees trust the people at the top, their commitment and their sense of identity with the organization strengthen, and the researchers found, they work harder and invest more of themselves in the job. Trust isn’t a soft benefit that’s nice to have alongside performance. In the evidence, it’s an input to performance.

Here’s why that matters for the argument I’m making. Trust is not built in speeches or town halls or values posters. It’s built, or spent, in exactly the small decisions we’ve been discussing. Every time a leader follows through on a minor commitment, tells an uncomfortable truth, gives credit accurately, or admits a mistake before being forced to, a small deposit is made. Every time a leader protects an ego at the team’s expense, or lets a problem fester to avoid a hard conversation, a small withdrawal is taken. No single transaction changes the balance much. But sustained over months and years, a pattern of trustworthy behavior becomes the culture, and a pattern of self-protective behavior becomes the dysfunction. That’s what I mean when I say the moments that matter are causal, not sentimental. The aggregate is the whole game.

This is also where the five themes that run through this series come together. Character and courage, the willingness to be honest and to have the hard conversation, are what produce trust. Stewardship is what develops the people that trust makes possible. Sound decision-making protects judgment from ego and politics. And organizational health, engagement, innovation, retention, performance, is the measurable result of getting the first four right, over and over, in the moments no one is watching.

What to Do Differently Tomorrow

None of this is useful if it stays abstract. So let me offer a handful of practices that follow directly from the evidence and the experience.

Treat everyday moments as the real curriculum. If seventy percent of leadership growth happens on the job, then your development plan is mostly a myth if it lives in a binder. Audit your last week honestly. Which small decisions built trust, and which quietly spent it? Where did you follow through, and where did you let something slide? That review, done regularly, will teach you more than any seminar.

Lead before you’re asked to. Influence and ownership don’t require a title. When the mission needs something and you can see it clearly, step into the gap. The habit of taking responsibility ahead of authority is, in my experience, the single most reliable predictor of who becomes a real leader later.

Do both halves of the job on purpose. Because management and leadership are one continuum, the urgent execution work will always try to crowd out the slower work of vision and development. Schedule both. Protect the time for the leadership half the same way you protect the time for the operational half, or the operational half will win by default every week.

Make trust a design decision, not a hope. Build real mechanisms for upward feedback and then reward the people who use them. Prize transparency over agreement, the person who tells you the uncomfortable truth is more valuable than the one who tells you what you want to hear. And follow through on small commitments visibly, because your team is calibrating how much to trust you based on exactly those signals.

Reflect deliberately when things don’t go as planned. One useful discipline, drawn from recent work on reflective learning as a driver of innovation, is a simple four-step loop: acknowledge the problem honestly, reassess the assumptions that led you there, consider genuine alternatives, and form a new perspective you can act on. The trap to watch for is the executive blind spot, the very human tendency to overlook the evidence that challenges a decision you’re already invested in. The best leaders I’ve known actively went looking for that evidence instead of away from it.

Protect people’s sense of safety when the pressure is highest. It’s easy to lead well when things are calm. Leadership is actually tested in moments of change, loss, and fear, the layoff, the failed launch, the crisis. Those are the moments when people are watching most closely to learn whether they’re safe. Guard that safety hardest exactly when it’s most tempting to abandon it.

The Legacy You’re Building Whether You Mean To or Not

Leadership leaves a legacy whether the leader intends it or not. When people feel genuinely trusted, and when they watch a leader act with integrity over time, they don’t merely remember that leader fondly. They perform better and they stay longer. The imprint is real, and it outlasts the tenure.

Here’s the part that took me years to fully absorb: Leadership is almost never remembered by the quarterly results. Ask anyone about the best leader they ever worked for, and they won’t cite a revenue number. They’ll tell you how that person made them feel, whether they were trusted, whether they mattered, whether someone had their back in the moment it counted. That’s the legacy. It’s built entirely out of the small moments, and it’s built whether you’re paying attention or not.

This series is my attempt to take those moments seriously. Over the next fourteen articles, I want to examine the terrain up close: the hard conversations we avoid and what that avoidance costs, what leaders wrongly choose to protect, why accountability has to begin at the top, how influence works without authority, and why high performers so often leave organizations long before they actually resign. We’ll look at leading through change and through failure, at building trust one decision at a time, at developing the next generation of leaders, and at what employees actually remember when everything else fades. The series will move, deliberately, from experience toward evidence, and it will end with what hundreds of professionals reveal, in original survey research, about the leaders who shaped them.

For now, I’ll leave you with the question that started me down this path. Every leader leaves an imprint on the people they serve. The question isn’t whether you’ll shape your organization’s culture. You will, in a hundred small moments this week alone. The only real question is whether you’ll shape it intentionally.

Mark Hennick is the founder and CEO of The Hennick Group and writes on leadership, organizational health, and the practice of leading well. This is the first article in the Leadership in Practice series.