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Most leaders struggle to get better at the task of leadership. The struggle is understandable. Time is scarce, and traditional approaches have limited impact. It's hard to learn just from books and seminars. A classroom is a sterile environment and the half-life of most training is notoriously short. Similarly, it's difficult to learn just through observation. Too often people say they can only snatch a glimpse of good leadership in action.
Still, some people do grow and improve as leaders. The key is experience and what they make of it. For all the wide-ranging theories of effective leadership, almost everyone agrees that first-hand experience is critical to any aspiring leader - but there is a hitch. Two people can have the same experience and come away with profoundly different reactions: one may blossom and grow while the other is unchanged or even depleted. Thus, while important, experience guarantees nothing by itself.
To complicate matters, many memorable leadership experiences do not occur at scheduled times or in convenient places, like work or school. For instance, when pressed to identify an experience in which they learned something important about leadership or about themselves as leaders, the dozens of men and women I interviewed described transformative events that occurred outside their professional lives as often as they cited ones that happened on the job. The most profound among those experiences - the crucibles which led to a new or altered sense of identity - were nested in family life, war-time trauma, athletic competition, or personal loss far more often than work assignments.
What is a crucible? In medieval times it was the vessel in which alchemists attempted to turn base metals into gold. In a leadership context, a crucible is a transformative experience from which a person extracts his or her "gold": a new or an altered sense of identity. A crucible is not the same as a life stage or transition, like moving from adolescence to adulthood or from midlife to retirement. Life stages can be stressful, even tumultuous; but, unlike crucibles, they tend to be gradual, reasonably predictable, and patterned. Crucibles are more like trials or tests that corner individuals and force them to answer questions about who they are and what is really important to...