Before you can develop your team, you have to understand what developed you.
Article 02 in the Leadership Journey Series
I want to ask you something before we go any further in this series.
Think back to the environment where you developed the capabilities that eventually got you promoted into leadership. Not the job you are in now. The one before it. Or the one before that.
What made it possible for you to grow?
I have been thinking about this question for a while and the answer surprised me. Most of what made me successful as an individual contributor was not something I was taught. It was something the environment allowed.
I did not have a technical manager in several of my early roles. Don’t misunderstand, I had a manager, but they were typically an administrative manager who did not understand the technology that we worked with. At the time I thought nothing of it. Looking back, that absence was one of the most important developmental conditions of my career. Nobody was there to tell me what was outside my lane. Nobody defined the edges of what I was allowed to attempt. When I needed to solve something I researched it. I found the tools. I built what was needed. I operated with the assumption that a solution existed and my job was to find it.
That assumption is not universal. Most people are not taught to operate that way.
Most people are taught to work within the environment. To use the approved tools. To follow the established process. And when the environment cannot support a solution, to report that back and wait for direction. That is a reasonable operating model under certain kinds of management. It is also one that produces people who stop at boundaries instead of questioning them.
Where the judgment trap lives
Here is where it gets uncomfortable for leaders.
When we look at a team member who stops at boundaries, who comes back with we cannot do it rather than here is what I found and here is what we would need to make it work, our instinct is to judge that as a capability gap. They lack initiative. They lack imagination. They are not a problem solver.
That judgment is sometimes right. But before we arrive at it we owe ourselves an honest question.
Did we build an environment that taught them to stop at boundaries?
Google asked this question in the early 2000s and answered it with a policy. Engineers could spend twenty percent of their working time on projects outside their primary responsibilities. No approval process. No justification required. Management was explicitly instructed not to block or discourage participation. The policy produced Google News, AdSense, and a culture of innovation that defined the company for a generation.
But the products were not the point. The signal was.
You are safe to explore here. Finding a solution is always the goal. The environment is the variable, not the constraint.
The very thing that allowed me to grow is the thing that I did not provide for my team. Because I was very technical, I measured their responses against my own. This makes success very difficult for them which lead me to judge them incorrectly.
I had capable people. I had not built the environment that made capability visible.
What the environment should signal
Here is what I try to build now.
The goal is always to find a solution. That is the non-negotiable. Whether the solution is supportable within the current environment is a separate question, and that is when leadership gets involved. Not to hear that the problem could not be solved. To hear here is the solution I found and here is what we need to deploy it. That conversation is about the environment, not the capability. It keeps the goal fixed and treats everything else as negotiable.
That is a different expectation than most teams have ever been given. It requires a leader who is willing to be challenged on the parameters they have set. It requires an organization that can absorb the friction of someone pushing on a boundary rather than accepting it.
And it applies equally to a network engineer, a salesperson, an admin, and a customer service rep. The technical context changes. The operating philosophy does not. A customer service rep with this mindset does not close the ticket. They ask why the ticket exists and whether it has to keep existing. A salesperson with this mindset does not accept the standard playbook as the only available tool. They find what works and bring it back to the organization.
The goal is fixed. Everything else is negotiable.
The question worth sitting with
But it produces something that traditional management almost never does. People who treat the goal as fixed and everything else as negotiable. People who come back not with a closed case but with a found solution and a conversation about what it needs to work.
That is the beginning of something worth building on. The next article in this series is about what makes it possible to develop that kind of thinking in others. Before a leader can do that they have to make their own invisible process visible. The steps that happen inside your head between recognizing a problem and arriving at a solution. Most of us have never had to name them. That is exactly why they are so hard to teach.
But before we get there I want to leave you with the question I started with, in a slightly different form.
Think about the environment that made you. Now think about the environment you have built for your team.
How close are they?
About this series
This is the second article in the Leadership Journey series. Article 01, "My first Director role did not go well," introduced the challenge of transitioning from individual contributor to leader and the problem of making invisible thinking visible. Article 03 will explore how to begin surfacing that invisible process so it becomes something you can develop in others.
Sources
Google 20% Time Policy: IPO letter, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, 2004. Referenced in multiple sources including IdeaWake.com (May 2026) and Stratrix Vault (March 2025).
Google products confirmed as 20% time projects: Google News (Krishna Bharat), AdSense (Susan Wojcicki). Source: Stratrix.com, IdeaWake.com.