There is a sentence I have heard several times after appointing someone: “Thank you for giving me this opportunity.” I understand why people say it. Someone has just made a decision that may change their career, perhaps significantly, and gratitude feels natural. But I tend to correct them. I did not give you the opportunity. You earned it. I may have been involved in the decision. I may have recognised something in you, argued for you or opened a door that had previously been closed. But you still had to be good enough to walk through it. That distinction matters more to me than it once did, because I know what can happen when leaders begin to believe that another person’s progress belongs partly to them.
One of the biggest jumps in my own career came when I moved from a relatively junior position into a significant leadership role. I was competing against people with considerably more formal leadership experience, including people who were already leading teams. Some appeared, on paper at least, to be the more obvious candidates. I wanted the role enormously, but I was surprised when I got it. Looking back, I have sometimes wondered whether the person appointing me was also making a statement to the wider team by choosing the less obvious candidate. I cannot know that with certainty. What I do know is that I accepted the opportunity gladly. Whatever somebody else’s motives may have been, I still had to do something with it.
The problem was that I immediately felt I had something to prove. I had moved quickly, bypassing some of the steps other people might reasonably have expected to come first, and some of those people were now colleagues I was expected to lead. Relationships changed overnight. People who had been alongside me, and in some cases had more leadership experience than I did, suddenly had to adjust to my new authority. I responded badly to some of that insecurity. I tried too hard to look like a leader. I sent unnecessary emails. I praised people in ways that could feel performative. I was far too concerned with demonstrating that I belonged in the role. What I needed to do was much less impressive and much more useful: listen, learn and get better.
That experience sits behind a phrase I have used for years: don’t prove, improve. I cannot point to a single morning when I stopped trying to prove myself and became a different leader. Leadership development rarely works that neatly. At some point, I became more conscious of the shift, but it had probably been happening gradually for years. What matters to me now is the distinction. When we are trying to prove ourselves, our attention tends to turn inward. How do I look? Do they think I am capable? Have I shown enough? Improvement asks different questions. What do I not understand yet? Who knows more about this than I do? What could I do better next time? The first is concerned with legitimacy. The second is concerned with learning.
That is one reason I tell newly appointed people, “You’ve got nothing to prove to me.” It does not mean they have nothing to learn, or that performance no longer matters. Of course it matters. It means the selection decision has already happened. I have seen enough to believe they can do the job. I would rather they put their energy into doing it than spend part of that energy continually trying to reassure me that I was right to choose them. If I then hover, interfere, repeatedly check decisions or make them feel that every mistake reopens the question of whether they deserved the appointment, my behaviour contradicts the message. The interview has ended. The work has begun.
There is another reason the language matters to me. I once had a leader say words to the effect of, “Remember what I did for you.” I found that deeply uncomfortable. It made me question something I had believed I had earned. Was I really the right person, or had somebody simply decided to give me a chance for reasons of their own? More importantly, the comment seemed to ask for acknowledgement of a debt: remember that part of what you have is because of me. I am perfectly comfortable giving credit where credit is due. None of us develops entirely alone. People teach us, advocate for us, challenge us and sometimes back us before everyone else can see what they see. Gratitude is healthy. Indebtedness is something different.
A leader can open a door without owning what happens on the other side of it. That is the boundary I want to preserve. If someone I appoint goes on to become an outstanding leader, I can be pleased that I recognised their potential. I can even be proud that I played some part in their development. But their success is still theirs. They did the work, made the decisions, survived the mistakes and grew into the responsibility. Leadership becomes uncomfortable when support is converted retrospectively into ownership: I made you, I gave you your break, remember who put you there. An opportunity should not become a debt that can be collected later.
Of course, before any of that can happen, someone has to get the opportunity in the first place. This is where leadership decisions have a compounding effect that is easy to miss. Most organisations have people who are known quantities. When an important project appears, there is someone you know will deliver. Choosing them can be entirely sensible, particularly when the consequences of failure are significant. I am not inclined to take unnecessary risks with genuinely high stakes work simply to give somebody developmental experience. But if the safest pair of hands receives every meaningful opportunity, they accumulate something beyond the work itself: experience, visibility, confidence and evidence of success. Those things make them an even safer choice next time.
Meanwhile, somebody else may remain capable but untested. They cannot demonstrate experience they have never been allowed to gain. After enough repetitions, the difference between the two people can begin to look like a difference in ability when part of it is actually a difference in opportunity. That does not mean every overlooked person would have succeeded. Leaders should not romanticise potential or pretend everyone is ready for everything. It does mean we should occasionally examine how the people we trust became trusted in the first place. Very often, somebody once allowed them to do something before the outcome was guaranteed.
The answer is not to gamble with the organisation. It is to create places where growth can happen before the stakes become unforgiving. Someone might lead a smaller project, take responsibility for one part of a larger piece of work, work alongside a more experienced colleague or be given a stretch that is meaningful without being reckless. If the only opportunities available are either “nothing important” or “something we cannot afford to get wrong”, then development will always favour the already proven. Potential needs somewhere to become evidence.
There is a cost at the other end of the equation too. The person who is always trusted can eventually pay a tax for being reliable. They become the name everyone suggests when something difficult needs doing. Another project arrives, then another problem, then another responsibility, because everybody knows they will deliver. I have seen strong people become overloaded in precisely this way, sometimes despite attempts to protect them, because reliance on them existed beyond one manager or one team. What looks like recognition from the organisation’s perspective can feel very different to the person carrying it. If opportunity always flows towards the same people, one group can be starved of development while another is quietly exhausted by being indispensable.
Repeatedly being overlooked has its own effect. People do not necessarily keep putting themselves forward indefinitely. Rejection is difficult, particularly when it happens several times, and eventually someone may decide that the next opportunity probably is not for them either. Organisations can then misread the behaviour they helped create: they never apply, they do not seem ambitious, perhaps they are happy where they are. Sometimes that will be true. Sometimes people have simply learned from experience that volunteering leads nowhere. Leaders need to be careful about turning reduced confidence into evidence of reduced potential.
That does not make every rejection unfair. Sometimes someone is not ready. Sometimes several people are ready and one person simply performs better in the selection process. I rarely want to interview someone I do not believe could actually do the job, which means recruitment can involve choosing between several credible candidates. I often use a jigsaw analogy. More than one piece may fit the gap, but on this occasion one piece fits it better. The pieces that were not chosen are not therefore defective. Nor does it follow that they should automatically be steered towards the next vacancy. Encouragement can easily sound like a promise. A leader can continue believing in someone without implying that another role is theirs before a fair process has taken place.
What matters after disappointment is honesty. If someone has potential but lacks experience, simply telling them they need more experience is not enough if nobody then creates a reasonable way for them to gain it. That becomes a closed loop: you cannot have the opportunity because you lack experience, and you cannot gain the experience because you are not given the opportunity. Where genuine potential exists, leaders should look for appropriate chances to develop it. Where someone was already good enough but another candidate was stronger, the honest message may be exactly that. Not every “no” needs to be disguised as a developmental deficit.
Judging potential is difficult because a CV can only tell us what someone has already done. It cannot fully tell us what they might become. I tend to think relationally as well as looking at formal experience: how somebody works with others, responds to challenge, exercises judgement and behaves over time. But that creates another danger. Relational knowledge can slide very easily into familiarity or preference. “I know them” can become “I trust them”, and “I trust them” can become “give it to them again”. That is one reason I rely heavily on teams when making significant decisions, particularly recruitment decisions. Multiple perspectives do not remove bias, but they make it harder for one person’s blind spots or personal preferences to masquerade as objective judgement.
I know I will still get some of these decisions wrong. I have almost certainly overlooked people during my career. I have probably returned to trusted colleagues too readily at times. I have also made appointments that others did not initially support. One person I appointed was not a popular choice with some colleagues, but she had performed exceptionally well in the selection process. She also challenged me and spoke her mind, qualities I valued. Over time, she stopped being “the person I had taken a chance on” and simply became a strong leader. Time had supplied the evidence. That is how trust should mature. It should gradually become less about the judgement of the person who selected you and more about the work you have done since.
Perhaps that is the balance leaders need to hold. Opportunities matter enormously, and leaders have real power over who receives them. That power should make us thoughtful about the people we repeatedly choose, the people we repeatedly overlook and the people whose reliability we may be exploiting. But granting access to an opportunity does not grant ownership over another person’s achievement. The leader opens a door; the person still has to walk through it.
And once they do, perhaps the most useful thing we can offer is not another reminder that we believed in them. It is the freedom to stop auditioning for a role they already earned. There will be plenty to learn and plenty to improve. There always is. But improvement is difficult when part of your attention is permanently turned backwards, trying to prove that somebody else was right to choose you. Give people the chance where the risk is responsible. Choose them fairly. Be honest when you do not. And when they earn their place, let it belong to them.
If you enjoyed this article, you can continue exploring these ideas through the growing collection of short leadership videos published across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn. Wherever you choose to follow, I hope the reflections encourage you to think a little differently about the quieter moments that shape leadership every day.