The Leadership Learning Ladder

How Learning Leadership Differs

Learning leadership is not like learning most other skills. It is different in a couple of ways:

Leadership is a process, not a destination : Taking a class or earning a certification or degree does not make you a leader. Those things can certainly help but, earning credibility from those around you, especially those on your team, makes you a leader. In that evolution, you quickly see how a leader is always listening for feedback and striving to improve as a leader. You never “arrive” as you are always learning and growing. Leadership should be in your own words : Everyone has their favorite leadership best practices. No doubt that they can be useful. But, if you take them on face value (literally), you will be leveraging someone else’s words and thinking. You can do better than that. If you think they are valuable, put the best practices in your own words. Make them your own, your own thinking. It is very unlikely that the person who shared the best practices developed them entirely on their own. They are either passing them along verbatim or in their words. Put them in your own words.

The Leadership Learning Ladder

Leadership best practices can be conveyed via multiple methods. Each has a different level of effectiveness. I refer to each method as rungs on the leadership leading latter. If you climb higher on the ladder, you will learn more and evolve into a better and better leader. Here are the four rungs:

Sharing : This is “Look at this leadership smart thought.” Your LinkedIn feed is filled with them. It is things like “Empathy is the greatest strength of a leader.” Lots of these are what I would call leadership templates. They are mental models (conceptual frameworks) that help you assess the situation and choose the best response. Teaching : This is the next level of sharing. If the concept is being taught, it is likely more complicated than a few sentences. It goes beyond sharing because it is interactive. You can ask questions to confirm or deepen your understanding. Teaching is “This is what you do.” Coaching/Mentoring : This is taking teaching to the next level. Instead of being specific, it is focused on general concepts and how they could be applied to varied specific circumstances. Coaching/mentoring is “This is how you do this. This is where you start. Give it a try.” For the sake of simplicity, I am including mentoring with coaching. Mentoring the next level of coaching where you have a deeper ongoing relationship where you delve deeper into your developing leadership approach. Coaching tends to be more transactional and less wholistic by covering topics such as conflict management, personal organization, and setting goals. Mentoring is more focused on you, the leader as a person with your unique strengths and weaknesses. Servant Leading: This is taking coaching/mentoring to the next level by adding a direct and ongoing connection to a role model. Not only are you learning from what the coach/mentor is covering, you are learning by watching what they do. Due to the direct relationship, you have real-time access to leadership challenges and how the servant leader considers alternatives and chooses the path forward.

In your leadership journey, you will stand on the different rungs of the leadership learning ladder at various times and different circumstances. Hopefully, you will experience the top rung of having a leadership coach/mentor who is your manager and a servant leader.

Build a Personal Leadership Model

As you take in more and more leadership advice, you will find that you start to internalize the learnings differently and more deeply. You started by collecting leadership best practices and rephrasing them in your own words (creating leadership templates, conceptual frameworks). As you evolve, you will see overlap across the concepts. You determine if you already heard the lesson or if it is new. Instead of collecting duplicates, you pivot to building your own personal leadership model. You flip from striving to pull and apply the right leadership template from your inventory to the situation at hand to living by your leadership code comprised of leadership principles and methods that resonated the most with you.

This, building a personal leadership model, is a primary focus of my leadership book, “Strategic Pause: Stop. Think. Lead.” Check it out!

Questions

Which rung of the leadership learning ladder are you usually standing on? Which rung do you stand on in front of your team? Are you striving to climb the ladder and be the best leader you can be?

Thank you for reading my leadership blog post. I hope you found it interesting and thought provoking.

Check out “Strategic Pause” on Amazon. Follow me on Twitter (@DonThinks).

© 2025 Don Graumann. All Rights Reserved. Other than personal sharing, please do not redistribute without permission.