When Development Takes Root: The Leader Who Makes It Possible

It has been a while since I last wrote.

My last month vanished into a blur of client engagements. I’ve been running leadership workshops across wildly different cultures, geographies, and corporate structures. I’m still processing most of it. Over time, I’ve learned a hard truth: don't force reflection into words before it’s actually ready. This is consistent with how I write from a post-modern gaze that holds knowledge as situated, partial and provisional, and from an action research sensibility that locates meaning-making within practice rather than above it. Action research operates on a cyclical logic. When you spend months locked in sustained action, you need an equivalent turn toward reflection just to see the patterns forming (Reason & Bradbury, 2001). What Schön calls reflection-on-action, the stepping back that allows a practitioner to see what the practice shows, cannot be rushed (Schön, 1983).

As I lingered with the ideas in my last essay, on authority derived from inhabiting one’s own idiom rather than performing a role, I found myself thinking about something rarer and more generative: leaders who exercise agency in the service of others, who understand their role as the creation of conditions in which the people around them can develop, flourish and contribute to something larger than any individual agenda. In an earlier essay in this series, I wrote about my own formation in organisations that had sophisticated organisation development and learning functions - environments in which development was an integral strategic and cultural commitment. That formation shaped how I practise. This essay puts the focus not on the function but on the leader who commissions such work, and on what makes it possible for development to take root.

What I write about here is inspiration from two leaders I work with currently, one leading a supply chain organisation within a large company in Asia, the other leading a research institution in Europe. Both are multi-year, long-term engagements, spanning leadership teams and extending into developmental programmes for emerging leaders. It acknowledges the critical role they play in the success of any developmental work they commission. What these leaders share is a particular quality of leadership that made it possible for development work to take root. I have encountered this quality in many leaders I have been fortunate to work with over the years, and I have seen it in how they exercised agency in their own development, taking neither their position nor their impact on others for granted, and carrying a strong and genuine people agenda.

Development work sustains or gets forgotten beyond the intervention and in what follows it - in the everyday conversations, the moments of conflict, the operational pressures that quickly consume whatever reflective space the workshop created. Whether it gains traction depends almost entirely on how the system carries it forward. And that depends on the sponsoring leader.

What These Leaders Share

The leaders who commission development work in ways that lead to meaningful change carry the material, measurable and economic goals of their role with equal seriousness alongside a strong and deliberate focus on their talent. They identify people whose values align with the organisation, and invest in their development as a deliberate, forward-looking commitment rather than a corrective one.

What distinguishes them goes deeper than a belief in learning and development as a good idea. Their understanding of leadership is personal and grounded, not the exercise of authority for its own sake but the paying forward of what they themselves had received, been given, or had to find the hard way. Most are actively engaged in their own development, genuinely alert to their own patterns, their impact on others, and the gap between intention and effect. They receive difficult feedback without deflection and model vulnerability openly, being seen as someone constantly reflecting and developing.

In practice, this also showed up in how they engaged with me. Time was made for in-depth diagnostic and contracting conversations, they found budgets for development beyond what was available and difficult findings were heard. I was supported in surfacing them directly in the workshops, and these leaders did not shy away from carrying the difficult questions their own inner patterns posed - both to themselves and in the way they led.

A belief sits beneath all of this - that leadership is a continuing practice of paying it forward, of creating for the people around them the conditions for growth that the best leaders in their own growth once created for them. The experience of mistakes made, periods of not knowing, highs and lows navigated, all of this had produced in them a quality of personal inquiry that extended outward rather than remaining self-directed.

Perhaps the clearest test of this commitment is their willingness to act in the best interests of a team member’s development even when it costs them something: supporting a move, highlighting when someone has outgrown their current role, advocating for what is right for the person rather than what is convenient for the team.

The Conditions for Human Development and Flourishing

We spend an extraordinary proportion of our lives at work. Organisations are not simply places in which economic activity happens, they are environments in which people spend years of their lives. They shape relationships, identity, confidence, and much more and, sometimes, bring opportunities they never thought possible. This makes them important sites for human development and flourishing.

The question is not whether organisations should choose between performance and flourishing, but whether we can imagine the two being held together. The leaders that inspire this essay understand this and view the organisation’s outcomes as inseparable from the quality of the people and relationships who deliver those outcomes.

What This Asks of the Practitioner

Being trusted with this quality of access asks something in return from the practitioner: rigour, preparation and honest engagement with the organisation’s actual state. It asks the practitioner to bring difficult findings without trying to manage for the next engagement, and to hold the developmental agenda across time without losing either the thread of the work or the trust of the people in it.

It also asks a quality of self-knowledge that mirrors what is being asked of the leaders themselves. The practitioner must know their own characteristic responses, the particular way their presence shapes the encounter. As I wrote in my last essay, touching one’s own depths is the condition of genuine reception, the prerequisite for holding another’s.

Development in individuals and teams is enabled by the quality of authority, relationships and attention that people encounter in the seemingly ordinary working moments. Leaders who understand this exercise authority in ways that make development possible. And because practitioners are themselves part of the system, this quality of sponsorship affects not only the team but the practitioner’s capacity to think, perceive and intervene and innovate in developmental offerings.

These leaders see their role beyond commissioning development work. They stay present to carrying it forward, in the conversations that follow, in the decisions being made, in how the team is working together day to day. That active ownership of developmental outcomes, at the individual and team level, is what gives development work the conditions to take root and last. It is also, I have come to think, one of the highest expressions of care these leaders offer.

© 2026 Kavitha Iyer. All rights reserved. If you found this useful, please share with attribution. You can find out more about my practice on kavithaiyer.com. Photo from Unsplash.

Further Reading

Reason, P. and Bradbury, H. (Eds.) (2001). Handbook of action research: Participative inquiry and practice. Sage.

Schön, D. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Basic Books.