By Stephen L. Baxter
Early in my leadership journey, I led an organisation into administration.
There was no shortage of capability. Strategy had been developed. Decisions were being made. All the expected motions of leadership were in play. Looking back, what was missing wasn’t skill or knowledge or effort, it was the interior capacity to carry the weight that leadership actually demands and a companion to help me see it.
That experience left a mark. Not just the failure itself, but what it revealed: you can be trained for a position and still be unformed for the pressure it carries.
At the time, I didn’t have language for what I’d experienced. It took years of walking alongside other senior leaders, and designing leadership development myself, including writing a programme for a national organisation, before the pattern became clear enough to name.
The profession is asking an important question right now: how do we embed learning in the flow of work? How do we make it development responsive, continuous, and human-centred? These are good questions, and the progress has been genuine. What I’m discovering is that there is a deeper layer beneath them worth exploring.
We already have sophistication in programme design, integration of learning into workflows, and a genuine attention to learner experience. All of this matters. Much of it has measurably improved how people grow in their work. And yet, a pattern keeps surfacing that even the best programmes rarely reach. Leaders who execute brilliantly but can’t discern wisely. Leaders who manage complexity with impressive skill and are being quietly hollowed out by it. Leaders who have every competency the moment requires and still sense, privately, that something essential hasn’t been developed in them.
It’s not a personal failing, more a structural one. The word I’ve come to use for what sits beneath this capability is formation.
Training builds capability. It transfers knowledge, develops skill, strengthens performance. It asks a good question: how can this person be more effective? Formation works at a different level. It shapes character, cultivates discernment, builds the interior architecture that allows a leader to carry what effectiveness demands. It asks a different kind of question: who is this person becoming, and can the person they’re becoming hold the weight their work now places on them?
These aren’t competing questions. They just operate at different layers. The first addresses what a leader can do. The second addresses who a leader is becoming while they do it. Most organisational learning strategies address the first with growing sophistication. The second can be completely absent.
A senior executive overwhelmed by the pressures of leadership once put it this way: “I can see there are problems, but I can’t see the path forward.”
We met that afternoon walking along the foreshore. No agenda. Just two people walking at the same pace until clarity began to emerge. By the end of the hour, something had shifted. Not because new information had been introduced or advice given, but because the conditions allowed what was already known to surface. Values buried beneath years of crisis management became accessible again.
Clarity didn’t come from pushing harder through complexity. It emerged when space was created. Here, the information this leader already knew and carried, was able to surface. That’s a formational moment. And it happened within the rhythm of this leader’s working life, not outside it. No classroom. No module. Just conditions, woven into the week, where reflection could do what content delivery alone could not.
A mentor of mine put it simply some years ago and it changed the way I understand learning: growth doesn’t come through experience alone. It comes through reflection on experience.
It helped me to appreciate there is a relationship between pressure and formation, yet it is one I’m still learning to understand. Pressure forms leaders, but only when leaders are given conditions to be formed by it rather than simply surviving it. The work itself is the formational terrain. What’s often missing isn’t better content to layer over the top. It’s the reflective space that allows the work to become a teacher.
Without that space, pressure doesn’t produce wisdom. It produces coping. And many of our most capable leaders are coping brilliantly while their interior architecture slowly gives way.
This insight is not new. In fact, it may be the oldest form of human development in existence.
Long before competency frameworks, communities understood that growing into responsibility required something deeper than information transfer.Apprentices weren’t just taught a trade. They were shaped by proximity to someone who had been formed by the work. Learning wasn’t separated from practice. It was embedded in it. The workshop, the field, the boardroom table itself were the learning environment. And the learning that mattered most, the formation of character and judgement, happened through relationship, through time, through the pressure and through the patient presence of someone who had carried similar weight.
Many of those institutional pathways have disappeared. Religious traditions that shaped character have receded. Civic organisations that apprenticed people into public life have weakened. Professional formation has narrowed to technical competence, leaving the moral and relational dimensions largely unattended.
The result is leaders who have been trained but not formed. Competent, but untethered from the interior depth that makes competence trustworthy under sustained pressure.
Perhaps the most innovative thing the profession could explore right now is something that was once understood as foundational. What’s key is that formation doesn’t happen in isolation. It never has.
I keep experiencing this: leaders who have been formed in the presence of companions who know the terrain. Not because they have a method, but because they’ve walked the ground themselves. They’ve been shaped by similar pressures and now carry a steadiness that can hold space for someone else’s becoming. Older traditions called these people elders. The word has fallen out of use, but the need for what it describes has not.
What keeps showing up for me is this: the need for deep and true companionship, not as a replacement for programmes on capability and performance, but to build the relational ground on which the deeper work of formation is made possible.
The encouraging thing is that many already sense this and are doing something about it. They’re creating learning environments where the whole person shows up. They’re building relational containers where honest conversations can happen. They’re designing for spaciousness alongside content. And in doing so, they’re enhancing the learner’s experience in the most fundamental way possible: by treating the person as a whole human being, not simply a competency gap to be closed.
The instinct is there. What might be useful is the language. Formation gives the profession a word for the layer of development that training, however sophisticated, doesn’t reach on its own. And the ancient practice of eldering gives a name to the companionship that formation has always required.
The leaders who stay grounded under pressure, who hold complexity without fragmenting, who remain human when the climate rewards detachment, haven’t just been well trained. They’ve been formed. And almost always, if you trace it back, there was someone alongside them while it happened.
The profession’s instinct to embed learning in the flow of work is sound. The question I’m still sitting with is whether we might also learn to embed formation there, and to recover the kind of companionship that makes formation possible.
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Stephen L Baxter runs a practice walking alongside senior leaders, CEOs, and chairs across Australia as a formational thought partner. Drawing on decades of governance, leadership development, and mentoring experience, he helps leaders remain human while carrying significant responsibility. His forthcoming book Never Lead Alone, explores the importance of formation and companionship in the development of leaders.