Long before I worked in leadership development, I worked in education. I taught mathematics for many years, but over time my work expanded far beyond the classroom. That work took me from teaching into teacher development, curriculum design, Train-the-Trainer programs and large-scale education transformation.
Looking back, I realize that much of what I now believe about leadership was already there in classrooms, in teacher training rooms, in conversations with educators trying something new, and in those moments when people were uncertain, curious, resistant, confident, afraid of getting something wrong or suddenly able to see something differently.
Education taught me that development is never only about transferring knowledge. It is about what happens to people when they are asked to think, learn and change. And increasingly, I have come to believe that this is a leadership question too.
From Difference to Trust and From Trust to Learning
In my first article, Leading Across Differences, I explored what happens when we stop expecting people to think like us. In the second, Trust Before Collaboration, I wrote about why people need enough trust to speak honestly, question assumptions and contribute fully.
But there is another step: people also need enough trust to learn.
Learning requires us, at least temporarily, to accept that we may not know. That we may need help. That something we believed may need to change. That another person may see something we have missed. Those moments can be deeply productive, but they can also be uncomfortable. And how people respond to that discomfort tells us a great deal about both learning and leadership.
What Mathematics Taught Me About Uncertainty
There was one sentence I heard again and again during my years of teaching mathematics: “I’m not good at this.”
Sometimes a student said it after struggling with one problem. Sometimes before they had even tried. What fascinated me was how quickly a difficulty could become an identity. The student was no longer saying, “I don’t understand this yet.” They were saying, “This is who I am.”
Later, working with adults and experienced professionals, I began to notice something surprisingly similar. When people encounter uncertainty, they often begin protecting themselves from it. They stay close to what they already know. They avoid asking a question. They defend an established approach. They become reluctant to expose the fact that they are unsure. Sometimes we would rather appear competent than become curious. That is deeply human. But it has consequences. An organization cannot learn very well if everyone believes they must always appear as though they already know.
The Fastest Answer Is Not Always the Best One
As a mathematics teacher, I often knew exactly where a student had gone wrong. It would have been easy to correct them immediately and show them the next step. But the fastest answer was not always the most useful one.
Sometimes the better response was a question. What do you already know? Where did the problem become unclear? What have you tried? What changes if you look at it another way?
A good question did something an answer could not always do: it allowed the student to continue thinking. And that mattered because the goal was never only to solve one problem. The deeper goal was to develop the confidence and thinking needed to approach the next one.
I believe leadership works in much the same way. There are moments when a leader absolutely needs to give direction. But there are also moments when answering too quickly takes something away from the people around us, their thinking, their ownership and their opportunity to discover what they are capable of.
Sometimes good leadership is not about having the answer first. It is about knowing when not to give it.
Working With Teachers Changed My Understanding of Development
Teacher development taught me something different again. Adults do not enter a learning environment empty. They arrive with experience, expertise, habits, successful practices and their own understanding of what works. Often, they also have very good reasons for doing things the way they already do.
That changes the nature of development. If we want experienced professionals to grow, we cannot begin by treating them as empty containers waiting to be filled with better information. We have to respect what they already know while creating enough space for them to examine what may no longer serve them.
That is where reflection becomes powerful. The important question is not only “What did you learn?” It is also: What did this make you notice about the way you already work? What would you keep? What would you change? What happened when you tried something differently?
Those questions move learning from information into practice. And that is where development becomes real.
The Right Structure Creates Room to Think
Mathematics also taught me that freedom and structure are not opposites. Creativity does not always come from having no boundaries. Very often, it becomes possible because the right boundaries exist: a clear problem, a few known principles and enough room to explore.
The same is true of teams and organizations. People need clarity. They need to understand purpose, responsibility and what matters. But within that clarity, they also need space to think, test, question and adapt.
Too little structure creates confusion. Too much structure removes ownership. Good learning and good leadership often lives somewhere between the two.
The purpose of structure should not be to close down thinking. It should be to make better thinking possible.
Mistakes Tell Us Where Learning Can Begin
Perhaps one of the most valuable lessons education gave me was not to be frightened by a wrong answer. A wrong answer contains information. It shows where the thinking went. It tells us something about the assumptions behind it. It gives us a place to begin.
Yet in professional environments, people can become remarkably skilled at hiding mistakes. And when mistakes disappear from conversation, learning often disappears with them.
This does not mean removing accountability. Accountability matters. But accountability and learning do not have to compete with each other. A strong learning environment can ask: What happened? What can we understand from it? What should we do differently next time? A strong team should be able to ask those questions too.
Leadership Is Also About Creating the Conditions for Learning
After more than twenty years in education, adult learning and development, I no longer see these experiences as separate from my work in leadership. They are part of the same story.
Leadership shapes whether people feel able to question. Whether uncertainty becomes embarrassment or curiosity. Whether a mistake becomes something to hide or something to learn from. Whether experience becomes rigidity or a foundation for further growth.
And perhaps most importantly, leadership shapes whether development is something done to people or something people actively participate in. That distinction matters to me.
Because people do not grow simply because we give them more information. They do not grow because we give them all the answers.
People grow when we create the conditions in which they are willing to question, think, try and keep learning.
And perhaps that is one of the most important things education has taught me about leadership.
Leadership itself is a learning environment.
