A friend once questioned: ‘Do they learn leadership?’ At first, I thought about my own education. During my degree in Business Administration, I remember taking a course titled Leadership, that lasted eight weeks. I wrote, on average, about ten essays, completed two graded quizzes, and sat for an examination.
And yet many still walk around expecting social conditioning to somehow produce leadership behaviour. But my own experience of leadership did not begin with social conditioning because people immediately imagine that being the firstborn meant I was inherently leadership material. Ask my siblings; I was too fragile for that.
How did it happen then? At 22, I was seeing schools with dilapidated libraries and thinking, these children need books; perhaps I should do something about it. And I remember nailing a partnership with Heinemann Books. I had also been the child who was a Brownie, who genuinely thought she could save the world. Perhaps I did.
But what I did not yet understand was that the responsibility of a calling is only the beginning of leadership. Business Administration-and that leadership course in particular-began teaching me something my enthusiasm could not: that wanting to solve a problem is not the same as knowing how to lead its solution. You need judgement. You need strategy. You need to understand people, institutions, resources and incentives. You need to make decisions when the answer is not obvious. You need to stay when the excitement wears off. You need to persuade people who do not already agree with you. And sometimes, you need to carry responsibility for an outcome that does not go according to plan.
The Problem with Relying Solely on Conditioning
As I earlier explained, it was quite counterintuitive for me to be a leader. You can ask my primary and secondary school peers. And that is the thing about relying on social conditioning alone to reproduce leadership behaviour: people are not always equally socialised or given equal opportunities to practise agency, risk-taking, confrontation or decision-making.
We hold boys to a different set of expectations. They are often encouraged to be bold, take risks, speak up and take charge. Girls, on the other hand, are often encouraged to be caring, polite, accommodating and protected. Over time, these expectations can shape the behaviours people practise and become comfortable with. Assertiveness, agency and independence become more strongly associated with masculinity, while care, deference and receptiveness become more strongly associated with femininity.
There is nothing inherently wrong with either set of qualities. The problem begins when we treat them as opposites, or assume that one belongs in leadership while the other does not. A good leader needs both. You need the courage to make a difficult decision and the empathy to understand its consequences. You need the confidence to speak up and the humility to listen. You need the ability to take charge and the willingness to collaborate. You need firmness without becoming domineering, and care without becoming conflict-avoidant. When social conditioning gives people unequal opportunities to practise these different capacities, however, we can end up reproducing stereotypes rather than developing leaders.
Make Leadership Healthier, Not Easier
Some people have argued that, in our effort to make workplaces more inclusive, we are simply trying to make things easier for women. No. We are trying not to reproduce trauma. We are trying not to codify harmful norms. We are trying to build workplaces where women do not have to endure dysfunction or unnecessary hardship simply to prove that they belong. But there is an equally important conversation we need to have. If we have spent years challenging leadership models built around aggression, emotional suppression, constant competition, and the idea that exhaustion is evidence of commitment, we must also be careful not to swing to the other extreme. We cannot prepare women for leadership by protecting them from everything that makes leadership difficult. Because leadership is difficult.
Leadership sometimes means making a decision when everyone will not agree. It means delivering difficult feedback, disappointing people, holding someone accountable, and making an unpopular call. It means sitting with ambiguity, taking responsibility when the outcome is uncertain, and having conversations you would rather avoid.
It means withstanding criticism. It means carrying the consequences of a decision. It means saying no. It means making decisions with incomplete information. And sometimes, it means choosing what is institutionally right over what is personally comfortable. These are not male qualities. They are leadership capacities.
The objective, therefore, is not simply to get more women into leadership. It is to prepare women to exercise leadership. Getting women through the door is representation. Preparing them to make difficult decisions, exercise authority, navigate conflict, withstand pressure, and carry responsibility is leadership development. And perhaps that is the balance we need to find: remove unnecessary hardship, but do not remove necessary challenge.
A Real World Example
Perhaps this is why I think of Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. In an interview about taking on the leadership of the World Trade Organization, she was asked about what she described as an ‘impossible job.’ Her response was revealing: ‘maybe I’m a masochist, and I like challenges.’
But the point is not that women should enjoy suffering. It is that leadership will sometimes place you in situations where there is no easy option. Okonjo-Iweala has had to navigate those kinds of situations precisely. As Nigeria’s Finance Minister, she led the country’s delegation in the 2005 Paris Club negotiations, at a time when Nigeria’s public-sector debt stood at about $36.2 billion, including roughly $30 billion owed to Paris Club creditors. Later, during the COVID-19 pandemic, her work with Gavi involved confronting another kind of difficult problem: how to secure access to vaccines in a world where supply was scarce, and countries were competing for doses.
These are not simply stories about a woman occupying an important position. They are stories about judgement, negotiation, strategy, uncertainty and consequence. They remind us that preparing women for leadership cannot mean preparing them only to be visible, collaborative or inspiring. We have to prepare them to carry responsibility when the answer is unclear, the stakes are high, and somebody still has to make the decision.
Final Thoughts
So, do they learn leadership? I think we have to stop treating leadership as something that people simply absorb from their environment and start treating it as something we intentionally develop.
Social conditioning matters. It shapes what people believe they are capable of, the risks they are encouraged to take, the authority they are comfortable exercising, and the behaviours they get to practise. But conditioning is not leadership development. If anything, relying on it alone can reproduce the very inequalities we are trying to change.
We should give girls opportunities to take risks, make decisions, disagree respectfully, solve problems, manage resources, fail, recover and try again. We should teach women not only how to enter rooms, but how to use their voice when they are in them. And perhaps this is where the conversation about women and leadership needs to mature.
We should not have to make women suffer to prove that they are capable of leading. But neither should we confuse a healthier leadership environment with an easier one. The goal is not to protect women from every difficult experience. The goal is to ensure that they encounter necessary challenge without unnecessary harm because leadership will always ask something of us.
And sometimes, as Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s example reminds us, to walk towards problems that other people might reasonably consider impossible.