Episode 244 - Experience Doesn’t Automatically Make You a Better Leader
Summary
We tend to assume leadership experience naturally makes us better leaders, but experience by itself isn’t enough. New research suggests how we process and remember leadership experiences helps to shape our confidence and identity as leaders. This episode looks at how to get more development from the experiences we’re already having.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to episode 244 of the Leadership Today podcast, where each week we share practical tips to improve your leadership. This week we look at why having more leadership experience doesn’t automatically make you a better leader.
We often think about experience as if it automatically produces development. Someone has been leading for ten years, so we assume they have ten years of leadership development behind them. But that’s not necessarily true. It’s possible to have ten years of experience, or essentially the same year of experience repeated ten times.
New research published in the Journal of Business and Psychology looked at how people process leadership experiences and how that relates to the way they see themselves as leaders. The researchers were particularly interested in something called event binding capacity. That’s our ability to take the different parts of an experience and connect them into a coherent memory that we can draw on later.
Imagine you’ve just led a difficult meeting. Several people disagreed, you tried a different approach, the conversation shifted and eventually the group reached a decision. You could simply move on to the next meeting, or you could think about what happened. What changed the discussion? What did you do that helped? What made things worse? What would you do differently next time? This additional reflection time is what leads to growth, not just the experience.
In one of the studies, people with more leadership experience and greater capacity to process events in this way reported a stronger identity as a leader. The experimental findings also suggested that experiences that were personally relevant and involved other people were particularly important in shaping leadership identity and confidence.
The research highlights an important principle: experience gives us a foundation for development, but we still need to do something with it.
Here are three things I’d suggest.
First, pause after important leadership moments. You don’t need to reflect on every meeting or interaction. Focus on events that surprised you, challenged you or mattered to you. Those are often the experiences with the most potential for learning.
Second, make the reflection specific. Instead of asking, “How did that go?”, ask, “What did I do that influenced what happened?” and “What would I repeat or change next time?” That helps turn an experience into something you can actually use.
Third, talk important experiences through with someone else. The research highlights the relational nature of leadership development. A coach, colleague or trusted peer can often help you notice something about an experience that you missed while you were in it.
Bringing all of this together, experience doesn’t automatically produce development. The more useful question is: “What am I learning from the leadership experiences I’m already having?”
Reference
Fu, Y., Lord, R. G., & Braun, S. (2026). Predicting leadership self-concepts: The role of memory in processing self-relevant and relational events. Journal of Business and Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-026-10149-5
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