Leadership is a set of learnable skills

Abstract

Leadership is not an amorphous state one becomes, but a set of nameable skills that can be deliberately practised with feedback. Naming the specific components — visioning, pitching, strategy, leading meetings, coaching — makes it possible to find opportunities to practise them and, crucially, to identify people who can coach you in each.

The situation

• The author joined BlueDot wanting to learn how to build and run an org, without a clear sense of what specifically that meant.
• At the start of 2026, Dewi (BlueDot’s CEO) offered her a leadership role.
• She didn’t feel equipped for “leader-y things” — setting org goals, running team meetings — especially under high uncertainty, and didn’t know how she’d step up.
• The unlock was a resource Dewi shared framing leadership as a set of four capabilities. The reframe: it isn’t something you become, it’s skills you can learn.

The five skills she chose to focus on

Selected by the criterion of what made her wonder “how did he do that?”:

1. Visioning — crafting a compelling picture of the future when there are many possible routes to impact and the future is uncertain.
2. Pitching — getting the team and external people excited about that vision.
3. Strategy — choosing the right frameworks to get from today to the vision.
4. Leading effective meetings — designing them so everyone leaves clear on what they’re driving towards.
5. Coaching — supporting individual growth through 1:1s and feedback.

Why naming them mattered

• Naming the skills made it easier to spot opportunities to practise them.
• Observation alone has limits. Citing Peak, the best route to improvement is useful, frequent feedback while practising the real thing.
  • Visioning couldn’t be practised by writing a doc alone — no real constraints, no real feedback.
  • Meeting-leading couldn’t be learned from watching outputs without seeing the planning behind them.

Shadowing as the key intervention

• The single best thing she did was asking to shadow Dewi.
• She observed him planning the week, building meeting agendas, and setting org goals — with his thinking externalised, including the messy paths, the frameworks he chose, and how he used AI tools.
• After a few weeks, leadership “felt less mysterious”: what he had was practice, plus mechanisms for getting feedback on his work.
• Follow-on realisation: she should be doing the same with everyone on the team whose ways of working she admired.

Closing frame

• Quoted from “In Praise of the Incomplete Leader” (HBR, 2007): leaders should stop trying to be all things to all people; only by seeing themselves as incomplete — having both strengths and weaknesses — can they compensate for missing skills by relying on others.
• Naming the specific skills you want to learn focuses where to improve, and more importantly, helps you find people who can coach you.