Developing leadership skills has similarities to training to be a fire fighter. You need a combination of study, direction, and experiential application. But the experiential part of the training should build according to your skill level. A first day fire fighter trainee for instance never sees any real fire – they could easily get hurt or hurt someone else. The really difficult tasks must build on skills that have been learned before. Knowledge must be internalized and feel fully integrated before you apply it on a dangerous ground – and leading others can often be dangerous ground. Leadership develops in scalable stages I’ve been both a fire fighter and a manager and so I can find many similarities in the development process. You can be a novice and inexperienced fire fighter and still contribute to the effort of the crew, provided that you are surrounded with more experienced, patient, and yes even insistent fire fighters who will be assertive and courageous enough to keep y...