VALORA CALMA | FORCES & FLOW: Become the Learner Again

When I was seven years old, I would sit under an acacia tree at my home in Mexico and read for hours.

The stories unfolded in my mind like movies.

I still love books for that reason. They allow me to temporarily see through someone else’s eyes.

Books are windows into perception. They remind me that my view of the world is only one view.

That lesson has become increasingly important to me as a leader.

Expertise changes the way we see

My technical career has rewarded expertise.

Know the process.

Understand the failure.

Find the root cause.

Assess the risk.

Make the decision.

Expertise matters. In engineering and manufacturing, people depend on sound judgment built through years of experience.

But expertise carries a subtle risk.

The better we become at knowing, the easier it becomes to stop asking.

We recognize the pattern. We have seen something similar before. We know what usually happens next.

That pattern recognition can be valuable. It can also become a lens so strong that we stop seeing what does not fit it.

Authentic leadership is teaching me when to become the learner again.

One of my favorite questions is:

What am I missing?

We all wear lenses

None of us sees an organization, problem, or person objectively.

Our perception is shaped by:

Experience.

Culture.

Age.

Education.

Role.

Success.

Failure.

Power.

History.

The rooms we have been invited into.

The rooms where we had to fight to belong.

We cannot completely remove those lenses, but we can remember that we are wearing them—and become curious about what the world looks like through someone else’s.

Expertise and curiosity can coexist

Becoming the learner does not require pretending I know less than I do.

I can hold two truths simultaneously:

I have experience that may be useful.

And:

There may be something here I cannot see.

That creates a different kind of confidence.

Instead of needing to prove that I know, I can use what I know to ask better questions:

What does this look like from where you sit?

What experience are you bringing that I do not have?

What assumption are we making?

What evidence would change our minds?

What part of this problem are we not discussing?

What might someone outside our field notice immediately?

Curiosity does not weaken expertise. Used well, it keeps expertise from becoming rigid.

Developing people without making copies of ourselves

This becomes especially important in coaching.

I have always enjoyed looking for what I call the diamonds in the rough:

People whose strengths may not yet be obvious.

Someone who speaks less but notices patterns.

An engineer whose confidence has not caught up with their technical ability.

A person whose background differs from the traditional profile but whose perspective changes how the team thinks.

Earlier in my leadership journey, I might have seen development as helping someone find the right path.

Increasingly, I think my role is to notice, listen, ask better questions, create opportunity, reflect strengths they may not yet see, and challenge them when needed.

My role is not to shape them into my image.

It is to allow them to discover where their strengths can take them.

Advice is not always coaching

Technical leaders are trained to solve.

Someone brings us a problem and our brain begins working immediately.

We diagnose.

Generate options.

Recommend.

That skill is useful, but it can interfere with coaching.

Sometimes the best response is not:

“Here is what I would do.”

It is:

“What do you want?”

“What have you already considered?”

“What is making this decision difficult?”

“What would you try if you trusted your judgment?”

“What support would help you take the next step?”

Good questions return ownership to the person answering them.

I do not want people around me who can make good decisions only when I am in the room.

I want them to develop judgment of their own.

See the person they are becoming

One question I increasingly want to ask as a leader is:

Who is this person trying to become?

Not only:

What are they delivering?

What are their gaps?

Which project should they own?

Those questions matter, but people carry ambitions that may be invisible in their current role.

An engineer may be becoming a manager.

A manager may be returning to technical depth.

Someone may eventually build a company.

Another person may discover an entirely different calling.

I do not need to own that journey, but I may be able to reduce some resistance along the way.

A project.

An introduction.

A difficult piece of feedback.

A question.

A sentence such as:

“I think you could do this.”

Small moments can alter trajectories.

Strong leadership does not require being the knower

There is confidence in expertise.

There is also confidence in curiosity.

The best leaders do not need to have the answer in every room.

Sometimes leadership begins with being grounded enough to say:

I may not understand this yet. Tell me what you see.

And then genuinely listening to the answer.

Related:

What Raindrops Taught Me About Leadership

What If Burnout Isn’t Only About Doing Too Much?

Stay grounded. Rise strong.