Apr 25, 2026
Leadership is a set of learnable skills
When I joined BlueDot, one thing I really wanted to learn was how to build and run an org. But I didn’t have a clear idea of what exactly I wanted to learn.
At the start of 2026, Dewi (BlueDot’s CEO) offered the opportunity to take on a leadership role within BlueDot.
I didn't feel equipped to do the leader-y things, like setting goals for the org and running team meetings, particularly when things felt incredibly uncertain. And I didn’t know how I’d step up.
Then, Dewi shared a resource that described leadership as a set of four capabilities.
And something clicked.
I was thinking of leadership as an amorphous thing you become. But it's actually a set of skills — ones I could learn with practice.
The leadership skills I wanted to learn
I focused on the ones that made me wonder: “how did he do that?”
- Visioning: Crafting a compelling picture of the future when there are many ways to have impact and the future is uncertain.
- Pitching: Getting the team and external people excited about working towards that vision.
- Strategy: Choosing the right frameworks to get from where we are today to the vision.
- Leading effective meetings: Designing meetings so everyone leaves with clarity on what they’re driving towards.
- Coaching: Supporting each person's growth within the team through things like 1:1s and giving feedback.
Skills can be practiced
Naming the skills made it easier to find opportunities to practice.
You can learn a lot from observing a leader, and asking why they do what they do. But observation has its limits.
Peak says the best way to improve is through useful, frequent feedback, while practicing the real thing.
I couldn’t practice visioning by writing a doc by myself. There were no real constraints, no real feedback. And I couldn’t improve at leading meetings by only watching the output, without the planning behind it.
The best thing I did for my learning was asking to shadow Dewi.
I observed him planning the week, building meeting agendas, setting goals for the org — figuring out how to move the org closer towards our mission. He externalised his thinking and all the messy pathways it took. I saw which frameworks he chose to apply, and how he used AI tools to help him.
After a few weeks of this, leadership felt less mysterious. He was trying lots of different things and had ways to get feedback on his work.
I realised that what he had was practice, and that I could do it too
I also wondered why I didn't do this with everyone else on the team who had ways of working I admired and wanted to adopt.
I'm reminded of this quote:
The sooner leaders stop trying to be all things to all people, the better off their organizations will be. […] Only when leaders come to see themselves as incomplete — as having both strengths and weaknesses — will they be able to make up for their missing skills by relying on others.
Leadership isn’t some mysterious skill
It’s a set of learnable skills that you can deliberately practice and get feedback on. Naming the specific things within it that you’d like to learn is a powerful way to focus on where to improve.
And more importantly, it helps you find people who can coach you.