Years ago, I was hired to build an entire medical department.
There was one rather important detail: I’m not a medical doctor.
I was the Medical Department Director, not the Medical Director. My job was to build the department pretty much from scratch. Define our capabilities, build the team’s capacity to deliver them, coordinate with other departments, and deepen our collective knowledge.
Ultimately, we needed to be able to deliver what was needed to communities experiencing some of their worst days.
I knew how to lead people. I knew how to build new things, navigate complexity, see across a system, build bridges, and bring people together.
But I was leading people who had expertise I didn’t have.
And not everyone thought I belonged there.
One peer told me so directly. I felt it in other ways too. I found myself explaining my role, justifying my contribution, trying to prove why I belonged in the room.
Early on, the Chief Medical Officer who hired me, who later became CEO, said something that stayed with me.
Meghan, I hired you because you aren’t a medical doctor. We don’t need another one. We need a leader. Someone who can build something from scratch. Someone who can listen and know when to ask questions.
I don’t remember his exact words anymore, but I remember what they gave me.
Permission to stand more fully in the role I was actually there to play.
My team members were the medical and disaster response subject-matter experts. My responsibility wasn’t to become a medical expert.
It was to create the conditions for their expertise to come together. To build the team, coordinate different perspectives, build relationships across departments, and help us collectively deliver what was needed.
That experience gave me a question I would keep returning to:
Where do I lead, and where do I let myself be led?
I wish I could say I figured that out and moved on.
I didn’t.
I would understand something about it, then find myself in a new situation where the question showed up differently. Expertise was part of it, but so were voice, responsibility, belonging, boundaries, and knowing what was actually mine to carry.
Sometimes I got it right. Sometimes I didn’t.
Sometimes I knew something and didn’t listen to myself. And sometimes I couldn’t see what an experience was showing me until much later.
I thought I was there to build something
At the time, I thought my job was to figure things out.
Not only within my department. I could see tension and mistrust across the organization too, and I wanted to help bridge it.
I wanted to fix it. Help people see what I could see.
That instinct had served me well before. I am good at seeing across boundaries and noticing connections and unique contributions. I’m good at stepping into complexity and helping make sense of it.
Those are real strengths.
They are also part of what made this experience complicated.
Because being able to see something didn’t necessarily make it mine to fix. And knowing that intellectually didn’t mean I always acted like I knew it.
At one point, I was asked to step toward a broader organizational leadership role. Later, I interviewed for that position and wasn’t selected.
There was disappointment in that. But there was information too.
Not necessarily information about whether I was capable of doing the role. Information about what I wanted.
I remember realizing that I didn’t want to be Chief of Staff simply to be Chief of Staff. I wanted the way of working I associated with it.
I wanted to work fluidly and strategically. To advise. To work closely with a person or group, help set something in motion, and then let them carry it forward. I wanted to see across boundaries and use more of what I knew I could contribute.
I didn’t have all of that language immediately.
Some of it emerged while I was there. Some came later. Some of it I’m probably still understanding differently now.
That’s one of the things I’ve come to appreciate about our experience.
We don’t always know what we’re learning while we’re learning it.
Some learning takes longer to become visible
I knew I was learning while I was there. In fact, at some point I made a bargain with myself:
As long as I’m still learning, I’ll stay.
The complicated part is that another part of me already knew I needed to leave.
I’ve written before about the condition I had placed around leaving. I could leave when I stopped learning. [see essay here]
Except I’m almost always learning. Curiosity can find something to learn almost anywhere.
So learning wasn’t actually going to tell me when it was time to go.
Looking back, I can see how many different things were true at the same time. I was learning. I was grateful for what the experience was teaching me. I was also frustrated and disappointed by parts of what was happening.
I knew there were things I wanted to be different. I knew there were things I couldn’t change. And somewhere underneath all of that, I was beginning to recognize something about what I wanted next.
Not in a clean, Oh, now I know exactly what I want kind of way.
It was messier than that.
Some things I could see while I was there. Others required distance.
Some became clearer through reflection and self-study. Some became visible because a coach, peer, or trusted person reflected something back to me that I couldn’t see on my own.
And some of it I can see differently even now.
For a while, I thought the experience was mostly helping me understand what I didn’t want.
And it did.
But looking back, I can see that it was also helping me understand what I wanted more of.
How I wanted to work and contribute. The kinds of relationships I wanted around me. The responsibility I wanted to hold...and the responsibility I didn’t.
The kind of impact I wanted to have. The way I wanted to use my voice.
I was developing capacities through that experience there that I would carry long after I left it.
I didn’t leave with a tidy list of lessons. I left with experience.
And over time, as I returned to that experience, I could see more of what had been happening.
That has changed how I think about leadership development.
What if the work itself is part of our development?
We often think about leadership development as something we step away from work to do. A workshop, a course, a book, a framework, a conversation with an advisor.
I’ve learned through all of those things. I still do.
But I’ve become increasingly interested in what we might miss when we treat development as something separate from the work itself.
What if some of the richest material for our development is already present in the leadership we’re living?
The conversation that didn’t go the way you expected. The decision you keep returning to. The responsibility you automatically picked up. The moment you didn’t say what you wanted to say.
But also...the meeting that went beautifully. The experiment that surprised you. The moment you trusted yourself. The thing you did almost instinctively and didn’t overthink. The contribution that energized you. The moment you let more of yourself be seen.
The contribution someone else recognized in you that you hadn’t quite recognized in yourself yet.
Our experience doesn’t have to be difficult to become developmental material.
I learned that in another leadership experience years earlier.
I was the program director for an organization that hosted a regional solar and storage conference. At the time, there was an undertone of disappointment and despair in the industry. The solar coaster.
I could feel our conversations narrowing around what wasn’t working.
Something in me knew we needed a different perspective. So I wrote down what I wanted to say and shared it at one of our member meetings a few months before the conference.
I pushed back on some of the prevailing woe is me narrative and offered another way of looking at what was happening.
I was nervous. I knew what I was saying might be unexpected. I said it anyway.
And people responded.
I was recognized for it. I think I surprised some people. I probably surprised myself a little too.
When I look back at that experience, what stays with me isn’t simply that the speech went well.
It’s that I trusted something I could see, and I gave it voice. It had an impact.
There was something to notice in what had gone right.
Something about my voice and what happened when I trusted my perspective. Something about my willingness to say what I saw even when I wasn’t sure how it would be received.
That’s developmental material too.
Our experience becomes a teacher when we learn how to be in relationship with it.
Come think alongside me.
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I don’t mean we need to analyze everything
I don’t want to turn leadership into an endless exercise in analyzing ourselves. And I don’t believe every experience arrives with some predetermined lesson we’re supposed to uncover.
Sometimes a meeting is just a meeting. Sometimes something doesn’t work. Sometimes we make a choice and don’t know what to make of what happened.
And sometimes we don’t understand the significance of an experience until much later.
The invitation, for me, is much simpler:
Pay attention. Become more of an Observer than a Judge of yourself.
A mentor once offered me something I still come back to when disappointment shows up: curious over defeated.
I don’t always get there immediately. Sometimes I’m disappointed first. Sometimes I’m angry. Sometimes I need distance before I’m interested in being curious about any of it.
But eventually, curiosity can change my relationship with what happened.
But eventually, curiosity can change my relationship with what happened.
Instead of only asking Why did this happen? or What went wrong?, Instead of turning uncertainty immediately toward myself, I can get curious about what else might be happening.
What am I noticing? What surprised me? What feels important here?
What did I do that I want to remember? What am I carrying that might not actually be mine? What do I know now that I didn’t know before?
What might I want to try next?
Not every question needs an immediate answer. Sometimes the question itself changes what becomes available to see.
And then I go live some more.
I try something. I have another conversation. I make another decision. I notice what happens.
Maybe I learn something new. Maybe I realize I misunderstood something. Maybe I come back to an experience I thought I understood and see something entirely different.
That’s part of it too.
Development isn’t particularly linear. At least mine hasn’t been.
I circle back. I recognize an old pattern in a new context. I understand something intellectually long before I’m able to live it consistently.
I trust myself one day and second-guess myself the next. I think I’ve learned something...and then life gives me another opportunity to practice it.
Over time, though, something deepens.
Not because I’ve finally figured myself out, but because I’ve become more capable of learning from what I’m actually living.
Experience can become developmental material when we become willing and able to learn from it.
The person working and the person developing are the same person
This is the part I’ve been thinking about more and more lately.
We spend so much of our lives working. And for many of us drawn to meaningful or mission-driven work, there can be another layer of pressure. We want our work to matter. We want to have an impact. Sometimes we want it to tell us something about our own value too.
We’re leading, making decisions, navigating relationships, responding to pressure, trying things, getting things wrong, creating things that work, and holding responsibility.
We’re working alongside people who see things differently than we do, carrying their own experiences, pressures, and strengths.
And yet we often treat development as something that happens somewhere else.
We leave work to attend the leadership program. We learn the framework. We have the insight. Then we go back to work to apply it, but then the next meeting happens. Projects and deadlines pile on.
There is value in stepping away. Sometimes distance is exactly what allows us to see.
But I don’t think development only happens there.
The person doing the work and the person developing are not two different people.
What if work itself can become one of the places where we notice, reflect, discern, experiment, and learn?
And those experiences don’t happen in isolation.
We’re having them in relationship with other people, inside teams, organizations, and systems. All of these have histories, expectations, structures, responsibilities, habits, and ways of working that shape what becomes possible.
Those conditions affect us.
And we participate in them too.
Which means learning from our leadership isn’t only about understanding ourselves better. It can change how we participate in the work around us.
How we listen and decide. How we share responsibility. How we use our voice.
What we question. What we continue. What we stop carrying. What we make possible for someone else.
I think there’s something important there that I’m still exploring.
What changes when learning from our experience becomes part of how we work?
So what are you already learning?
If I could sit beside the version of myself who was trying so hard to figure everything out in that medical department, I don’t think I’d give her the answers I have now.
Those answers belong to who I am now.
She still had experiences she would live. People she would meet. Things she would try that wouldn’t work, and things that would.
But I might ask her to remember something:
Meghan, remember what you really want.
No one else can articulate that for me. No one else can put it in motion for me.
And then I’d probably invite her to pay attention.
To what she was learning about her voice. To where she felt most alive. To what she kept trying to carry.
To what she knew before she could explain why she knew it. To where she was leading, and where she might let herself be led.
I can see now that I wasn’t only leading through that experience.
I was developing through my relationship with it.
And I’m still learning from it.
Maybe that’s the part I understand differently now.
Learning from our experience doesn’t mean we need to immediately make meaning from everything that happens. Sometimes we need to live it first.
Sometimes we need distance. Sometimes we need another person. Sometimes we need another experience entirely before we can connect something we couldn’t see before.
So think about the leadership you’ve been living lately.
Not only what’s difficult. Not only what needs to change.
What has stayed with you?
Maybe it’s a conversation or a decision. Something that went beautifully. Something that didn’t.
A moment you trusted yourself. A responsibility you picked up. A reaction that surprised you. Something you can’t quite stop thinking about.
You don’t need to explain it yet. You don’t need to decide what it means.
And you certainly don’t need to fix it.
Just notice.
What still has your attention?
And maybe stay with one more question:
What might become visible if you stayed in relationship with that experience a little longer?
Come think alongside me.
The Regenerative Edge™ is a place to read, listen, notice, try something, and come back to what your own experience is teaching you.
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