The most formative moment of my career was not a promotion or a milestone. It was the moment someone handed me an opportunity I was not yet ready for and trusted me to grow into it.

Early in my human resources (HR) career, a senior vice president of store operations extended an opportunity that had nothing to do with my current role and everything to do with my potential. He asked me to run one of the company’s stores. Full accountability for a $20 million operation, a product floor outside my formal expertise and a seasoned team whose knowledge of the business far exceeded my own.

I took him up on it, and it reshaped how I lead.

I led with curiosity rather than authority. I asked more than I asserted, and I earned credibility by respecting the expertise already in the room before offering any of my own. Together, we built one of the more profitable stores in the region. The lesson I carried forward was to earn your team’s credibility first by genuinely respecting what they know. Then, you can do great work together.

The deeper lesson, however, was about learning itself, and what becomes possible when you step into something you are not yet equipped to master — and stay long enough to be changed by it. So, it’s worth examining why the professionals most responsible for building learning cultures are so often the least visibly committed to their own development.

The Development Gap in L&D Leadership

Learning and development (L&D) leaders devote enormous energy to architecting growth for others. They assess skills gaps, build competency frameworks and design learning journeys across every level of the enterprise. Somewhere inside that work, a subtle substitution can occur — designing learning begins to feel like learning itself.

It’s an understandable trap. L&D professionals remain informed, curate insight and facilitate transformation. But too often, they stop being participants in it. And employees notice the distinction.

When learning leaders champion adaptability and resilience while remaining anchored in their own established expertise, the message weakens. Culture is not transmitted through programming but, rather, transmitted through behavior. When learning is something you design for others rather than visibly practice yourself, the culture you are trying to build will inevitably reflect that gap.

The fix is more straightforward than it sounds. Start by treating your own development with the same rigor you apply to others. Block time for it; add it to your calendar; tell someone on your team what you are working on this quarter and why. The single act of sharing your own learning does more to shift culture than any program you could design.

It’s also important to seek out peer networks beyond your immediate organization, as the most valuable development conversations tend to happen with peers navigating the same tensions, willing to speak honestly about what is working and what is not. Finding those relationships, deliberately and consistently, is one of the highest-return investments a learning leader can make.

You might also consider identifying a reverse mentor, someone closer to the daily work who can offer a vantage point you do not have. The insight gained tends to be specific, honest and practically useful in ways that top-down development rarely is.

The Capabilities That Can’t Be Taught in a Course

The capabilities most critical for learning leaders today are precisely those that formal programs rarely produce: strategic business acumen, confidence operating in ambiguity and the ability to translate emerging technologies into enterprise-level decisions.

For most L&D leaders, the most significant development gap is not technical but strategic: the ability to make the case for workforce investment in language that moves capital, to understand the commercial engine of the business well enough to advise from insight rather than theory and to anticipate how emerging technologies will reshape capability needs before the impact is obvious. Those are the competencies that elevate the function from program administrator to strategic partner.

Building these competencies requires deliberate exposure. You might volunteer for projects outside your functional comfort zone, particularly those with commercial or financial stakes; or ask to be included in rooms where strategic decisions are being made, even when you are not the expert. The goal is not to perform competence you do not yet have. It is to develop an understanding of how those conversations work, what the real questions are and where your perspective can genuinely add value.

Regarding emerging technology, do not delegate your artificial intelligence (AI) literacy to a program you design for others. Use it yourself, regularly and imperfectly. Bring what you learn into team conversations. After all, the leaders building credibility in this space are the ones who are visibly learning alongside their people.

Reflection matters, too. After making consequential decisions, build in a brief practice of honest assessment. Ask yourself: What did you assume going in? What did you learn? What would you do differently? That discipline, sustained over time, is how good leadership judgment develops. It cannot be accelerated, but it can be made intentional.

If there is one shift that would meaningfully accelerate learning culture inside most organizations, it’s L&D leaders who learn visibly. When a learning leader shares an initiative that did not deliver the intended result, and what they adjusted next, they extend permission for others to experiment. When an L&D professional names the edges of their own understanding, they create psychological safety that no workshop can manufacture. Peer dialogue about real practice often generates more behavioral change than a perfectly designed module.

The Question Worth Considering

Consider: When was the last time you learned something that truly cost you something? Not content efficiently consumed between meetings — something that required genuine uncertainty, where the outcome was not guaranteed and the process was not clean.

This is the experience we ask employees to navigate continuously. We ask them to adopt new technologies, dismantle familiar habits and remain open to being wrong in the process.

We build programs around it; we measure it and then many of us return to the work we already know how to do.

Learning culture lives in the behavior of the people employees are watching most closely. In most organizations, that includes the leaders responsible for learning itself.

The organizations that emerge from this period of uncertainty more capable and adaptive will be those where learning leaders made a deliberate choice to be shaped by the culture they are building. The more useful question is no longer whether your organization has a learning culture — it is whether you do.