Education is my leadership style

Someone at work asked me recently: "What do you prefer — leadership or education?"

My instinct was immediate: education is my leadership style. Then we both went quiet. He didn't know what I meant. I didn't know how to explain it fast enough. The meeting moved on.

This is what I meant.

The reason the question felt strange to me is that it assumes the two things are separate. And I think that assumption comes from a very specific and narrow version of what "education" means — classrooms, grades, diplomas. That model is real and useful for what it does, but it's not what education actually is. It's what education became in the last century or two.

Before that, people learned by working alongside someone who knew more than them. Workshops, apprenticeships, trades. The senior person didn't give lectures — they cleared the path and let you do the work. That's still how most real professional development happens. You finish school with a foundation and a starting point, but the actual skills — the ones you use every day, both technical and human — you learn them on the job, from people around you, mostly without anyone framing it as education.

Academia is excellent at producing academics. But the job market needs something different, and that gap is something most people who've moved from school to work have felt personally.

There's a distinction I keep coming back to: the difference between a teacher and an educator.

A teacher transmits knowledge. An educator creates conditions where change can happen.

I was in a long company meeting recently — the kind I usually endure. The new CEO was explaining how we're going to make decisions: what we optimize for, who our customers are, what we're building toward. On paper it sounds like a strategy session. But for me it landed like a business class. Not because it was exceptional content — you can find the same concepts in any online course. It was the grounding. When principles are attached to something real, something you're already inside of, they stop being abstract. You don't just understand them — you can act on them.

That's the difference. General material gives you the principle. Specific, grounded material gives you the ability to move.

I had a smaller version of this with a colleague. I came across a tool — OpenCode — and thought it might be useful for something she was working on. I hadn't really used it myself. I just pointed at it and stepped back. A few weeks later she had built a whole project with it, using it in ways I wouldn't have thought of. I can't take credit for what she built. I just tried not to get in the way. Guide the path, stay out of the way. I'm still learning how to do that consistently, but that moment felt like it.

So when you asked me whether I prefer leadership or education, what I was trying to say is: I don't experience them as different things.

If I'm leading a team, my job is to make sure people are growing into the skills the project needs. Not necessarily by teaching them directly — sometimes I don't know the thing either — but by removing what's in the way and making the next step visible. A good team leader and a good educator are doing the same gesture. One just happens in a classroom, and one happens everywhere else.

That's what I meant. I should have said it then.