The Permission to Be a Beginner – A Leader’s Quest

Experience is supposed to make us better at what we do. Over time, decisions become quicker, judgment becomes sharper, and behaviors that once required conscious effort become almost instinctive. That is one of the rewards of professional experience: we no longer have to think our way through everything.

Years of leadership experience give professionals something invaluable: fluency. Fluency has a quiet advantage: it frees up attention.

Experienced leaders know when to intervene, decide, challenge, and step back. They have a repertoire, rehearsed in the real world and reinforced by outcomes.

Senior professionals often feel unease when they decide to change how they work with the people around them. They are not learning something they have never done before. They are interrupting the flow of something they already do very well. The new behavior may be intentional. It may even be what the learning programme encouraged. Yet, for a while, it does not feel fluent. This is where the idea of “permission to fail” can be too simple.

The professionals are not necessarily asking to lower the bar or be excused from performance while they learn. They are still accountable for their decisions, conversations, team, and outcomes. What they may need is something more nuanced: permission to interrupt their own fluency to discover what another way of behaving creates.

The Disruption of Deliberate Change

Consider a leader known for resolving problems quickly. A learning program invites the leader to try something different. Rather than offering a solution, the leader allows a team member to work through the problem. The intention is to encourage ownership, yet the leader feels an impulse to intervene and reach a quicker conclusion.

The tension lies between immediate performance demands and the longer-term intention of development. The leader remains responsible for results while experimenting with how to get others deliver their work.

The wider context of leadership development in India raises a related question. In “Transforming Leadership Development in India: Insights from the SHRM India Leadership Report,” published in 2025, SHRM reported that only 10% of senior leaders considered current leadership programs truly effective, while 50% were dissatisfied with existing initiatives.

These findings raise a broader question: What happens when leaders must put a different behavior into practice while remaining accountable for results?

A leader cannot suspend accountability while trying a different approach. Work must progress, and people still depend on the leader. Is the unfamiliarity part of developing a wider range of responses, or is the change making the leader less effective?

The Experience of Being a Beginner Again

From the outside, the leader may appear composed. The conversation may even go well. Internally, the experience can be quite different.

A leader who exercises patience may question whether they are decisive enough. Someone who delegates may feel less useful than when resolving an issue personally. The uncertainty matters because the behavior being changed may have helped the professional earn credibility. They are not simply practising a technique; they are working with a response tied to their sense of effectiveness. The experience may leave them thinking, ‘I did not feel like myself.’

The leader knows what effectiveness has felt like. The alternative has not acquired the same ease or reassurance. What is unfamiliar may feel ineffective before there is enough experience to assess it.

When Other People Experience the Experiment

The leader’s internal experience is only part of the picture. Others experience the change through their existing relationship with the leader. A team accustomed to quick decisions may interpret new questions as hesitation. Greater freedom may be intended as a sign of trust but perceived as a withdrawal of support. People interpret changed behavior through their expectations and relationship history.

The leader may be working hard to change while colleagues try to understand what it means. Neither perspective tells the whole story. Discomfort does not prove failure, and good intentions do not guarantee positive impact. The experiment unfolds both inside the leader and in the responses of others.

The Outcome Becomes Part of the Learning

What happens next matters, though not always in the straightforward way a leader might expect.

Giving a team member space may encourage ownership in one situation and create confusion in another. Listening may help someone think clearly, while urgency may call for direct intervention. The outcome is information, not a verdict. Understanding what happened requires attention to context, intention, impact and available choices. A response may be retained, adjusted, or set aside. The aim is to recognize when another response serves the situation better.

Permission Reconsidered

Permission to be a beginner is not permission to abandon standards or escape consequences. It is the willingness to remain accountable while a different response is still unfamiliar.

Competence can remain intact while another response is being explored. An accomplished professional becomes a beginner not by knowing less, but by allowing themselves to be temporarily less fluent as they discover what else they can do. Experience becomes an advantage again because accumulated judgement helps the leader make sense of the experiment. Familiar responses remain available alongside new ones.

In time, the unfamiliar may become another choice. The leader’s quest, then, will not be to replace what they know, but to broaden the responses available when the situation calls for them: a new fluency.