Grow by Choice, Not by Chance

Written by Bart Nichols

Solutions Advisor

Boomer Consulting, Inc.

Leadership capacity does not appear when an organization suddenly needs it. It grows through the choices leaders make every day.

Growth is one of those words leaders use constantly. We want our organizations to grow, our people to grow, emerging leaders to step into greater responsibility, and established leaders to keep developing instead of relying on what worked in the past.

Yet beneath all that ambition sits a risky assumption: that growth will happen naturally.

Something will always grow. Culture grows. Habits deepen. Relationships strengthen or weaken. Informal leaders emerge. Silos form. People learn what gets rewarded, what gets ignored, and what they can get away with.

Organizations are always evolving. The real question is not whether yours is growing. It is whether you are growing by choice or by chance.

Leadership development is often left to chance

Consider how many people become leaders. They are good at their jobs. They are dependable, understand the business, and produce results. Then an opportunity opens and someone says, “We think you’re ready.”

Suddenly, that person is responsible for other people. But being an excellent accountant, engineer, salesperson, technician, teacher, or project manager does not automatically prepare someone to lead.

Too often, we promote people and hope experience will teach them the rest. Sometimes it does. Sometimes they simply repeat the leadership they experienced. Sometimes they spend years discovering lessons that could have been cultivated much earlier.

That is not a failure of the individual. It is often a failure of the system around them.

Think like an ecosystem

Walk through a healthy forest and you will see enormous trees that have grown for decades alongside saplings that have only recently emerged. They are not competing for the right to belong. They are at different stages of growth.

Mature trees provide stability, protection, and resources. Younger trees represent renewal and the future. Beneath the surface, an interconnected system supports them both. Organizations are not so different.

Established leaders carry experience, institutional knowledge, relationships, and hard-earned judgment. Emerging leaders bring energy, new ideas, and fresh perspectives. Other people may never hold an executive title, yet influence those around them every day.

The opportunity is to create an environment in which all of them can grow. That takes more than sending people to leadership training. It requires building the conditions where leadership can take root.

Leadership is an activity not a position

One of the most important shifts an organization can make is to stop treating leadership primarily as a title. Leadership is an activity.

People lead when they take responsibility, help someone else succeed, ask the difficult question, connect colleagues who should be talking, challenge an outdated assumption, or create clarity in the middle of uncertainty. They lead whenever they make the organization stronger without needing credit for it.

When leadership belongs only to people with formal authority, the organization limits who can contribute. When people throughout the organization are encouraged to practice leadership, the organization builds capacity instead of merely developing a handful of individual leaders.

Established leaders must create room for others

For experienced leaders, intentional growth eventually requires a shift: the responsibility is no longer only to become a better leader. It is to create the conditions in which other leaders can emerge.

That can be uncomfortable. Successful leaders spend years building expertise and instincts. When someone less experienced approaches a problem differently, the natural reaction is often, “That’s not how I would do it.” They may even be right.

But sustainable leadership is not about creating younger versions of ourselves. It is about helping other people develop the judgment, confidence, relationships, and self-awareness to lead in their own way.

That means moving from having all the answers to helping others discover better ones. It means transferring wisdom without demanding imitation, and giving people meaningful responsibility before circumstances force us to.

One of the clearest measures of leadership is not what happens while we are in the room. It is what continues when we are not.

Emerging leaders must own their growth

The responsibility does not belong only to established leaders. Emerging leaders cannot wait for someone else to develop them.

Ask questions. Seek feedback. Find mentors. Volunteer for assignments that stretch you. Learn how the organization actually works, not only how the organizational chart says it works. Build relationships outside your immediate area. Study people who lead well and people who do not.

Most importantly, do not confuse ambition with readiness. Wanting the next opportunity is different from preparing for it.

The strongest emerging leaders do not simply ask, “When will I get my chance?” They ask, “What must I become capable of doing when my chance comes?”

Build the conditions not just the programs

Organizations spend enormous amounts of money on leadership development. Workshops, assessments, coaching, mentoring, books, and training programs can all be useful. But they are tools. They are not the ecosystem.

The real work happens between the programs: in conversations between managers and employees; when someone is trusted with a difficult assignment; when failure becomes an opportunity for reflection rather than punishment; and when experienced leaders share what they know.

It also happens when emerging leaders can question how things have always been done, coaching becomes part of everyday leadership, and organizations decide how technology and AI can strengthen human judgment rather than simply replace human activity.

Organizations build sustainable leadership when development becomes part of how work gets done, not an event, a class, or an annual initiative, but a system.

Intention is not rigidity

Healthy ecosystems adapt. Conditions change, new challenges emerge, and people need different things at different stages of development. Intentionality does not require controlling every outcome.

You can create direction while leaving room for experimentation. You can establish expectations without creating bureaucracy. You can cultivate leadership without deciding exactly what every future leader must look like.

Growing by choice means deciding what kind of organization you are trying to become, identifying the leadership capabilities that future requires, and creating opportunities for people to practice them. It means connecting established and emerging leaders so knowledge moves across generations rather than disappearing with them.

Then you coach, reflect, measure, adjust, and do it again.

The cost of waiting

What happens when leadership development is left to chance? Eventually, someone leaves or retires. A key leader burns out. The business grows faster than its leadership capacity. Technology changes the work. An emerging leader gets tired of waiting and goes somewhere else. A crisis exposes weaknesses everyone knew existed but no one addressed.

Only then does leadership development become urgent. The organization searches for replacements, creates succession plans, hires consultants, launches programs, and asks how development can be accelerated.

But leadership capacity is difficult to manufacture during a crisis. The best time to grow the next generation of leaders is long before you desperately need them.

What are you intentionally growing today

Imagine your organization five years from now. Some of today’s leaders will still be there. Some will not. People who are early in their careers now may be making significant decisions. AI and other technologies will have changed familiar jobs and created roles we cannot yet imagine.

Your organization will be different. Will the leadership needed for that future be ready?

Something is already taking root. Your culture is teaching people something. Your systems are rewarding something. Your leaders are modeling something. Your emerging leaders are learning something.

The only question is whether those things are happening because you chose them, or because you allowed them to happen.

Great leadership does not reproduce itself automatically. Great cultures do not sustain themselves automatically. The next generation of leaders will not magically appear precisely when we need them.

We have to cultivate them by choice, not by chance.