Leadership from Within: Growing Leaders, Not Just Positions

Leadership from Within: Growing Leaders, Not Just Positions

There are moments in life when you stop chasing titles and start asking a quieter question: who am I growing around me? For much of my life I thought leadership meant occupying a role—principal, director, minister. Over the years that modest conviction has shifted into something deeper: leadership from within is a practice that seeds itself in teams, institutions and communities so the next leader emerges naturally when the moment calls for it.

I carry two memories with me when I think about this: one is the school principal who transformed his institution with little support—someone I wrote about years ago as an example of creative, in-place leadership (University of Innovation). The other is a fact I keep returning to: women remain underrepresented in decision-making worldwide, and that underrepresentation is not just a statistic but a loss of potential leaders in every sector (UN Women).

Why "from within" matters

• Leadership from within is not succession planning alone; it is daily practice. It is creating routines, language and expectations that invite people to lead—especially those who have been excluded historically.
• It is modest and structural at the same time: modest because it begins with a conversation or a small delegation of authority; structural because it needs institutional scaffolding—benchmarks, education, practice environments—to scale.

I see this interplay playing out across sectors I care about.

What institutions can do (and are doing)

• Educational facilities: Groups like APPA remind us that facilities leadership is not cosmetic. Well-designed spaces and processes—benchmarked, measured, shared—enable leaders to focus on learning and student outcomes rather than firefighting (APPA). Their Facilities Performance Indicators (FPI) program, for example, is a model for how measurement can make internal leadership visible and accountable.
• Health and public health training: In maternal and child health, leadership is cultivated through competencies and team-based practice. The University of Minnesota’s Center for Leadership Education in Maternal & Child Public Health emphasizes interdisciplinary team-building and real deployments that convert classroom learning into leadership experience (UMN MCH). That concept—teaching leadership by practice, not just by lecture—is essential.
• Simulation and practice environments: Real-scenario simulations (like simulated hospital wards) let emerging leaders make decisions, fail safely, and improve. I discussed this in relation to healthcare skill development and its political implications in an earlier post on honing clinical practice through simulation (Honing healing skills in a simulated hospital ward).

Why gender, quotas and budgets matter to internal leadership

I do not shy away from policy tools that change internal dynamics. The data are blunt: women continue to be underrepresented in parliaments and executive positions globally—progress is real but slow (UN Women). Quotas and targeted policies have driven concrete gains in representation and policy outcomes. The evidence that women-led local councils in India produced more drinking-water projects is a striking example of how representation changes priorities and outcomes (UN Women).

But quotas are only one instrument. Budgets that meaningfully invest in women’s welfare—like the large allocations several Indian states made in 2024–25—create the conditions for leadership to emerge from within communities, because leadership needs time, security and resources to grow (Women’s welfare budgets). I’ve written before about the urgency of structural reforms in higher education and how multidisciplinary institutions can incubate leaders who move comfortably across the public, social and private sectors (Set up new university in Pune).

A few concrete habits that build leadership from within

• Teach through practice: create simulation labs, field deployments, and team problem-solving as standard curriculum—this is what strengthens judgement under pressure (Honing healing skills in a simulated hospital ward; UMN MCH).
• Measure what matters: use benchmarking tools (facility performance, learning outcomes, gender representation metrics) so internal leaders can see impact and iterate (see APPA’s FPI work) (APPA).
• Design for inclusion: quotas, targeted investment and accessible pathways are stop-start tools—useful to change the field quickly and then create longer-term cultural pathways for people to lead from within (UN Women).
• Flatten authority: rotate responsibilities, create cross-functional teams, give junior people real ownership of projects. I’ve celebrated similar ideas when noting how new universities or reimagined degree programs can build such experiential leadership pathways (University of Innovation).

A personal note on legacy and continuity

I have been attracted to institutions that incubate leadership—local schools, new universities, health training centres—because they let a single idea ripple outward. That is why I’m fascinated by the idea of continuity beyond a single lifetime: a digital twin or a living archive that keeps perspectives alive. I’ve been experimenting publicly with the idea of collaborative platforms and digital continuity—ways to make one person’s learning and judgment accessible to others long after the original author has moved on (Gemini talks about Humans). For me, leadership from within is both immediate and enduring: it is the person who steps up this week, and the culture that produces such people for decades.

Why this matters now

The world is asking for leaders who can: collaborate across disciplines, make rapid decisions in complex systems, and centre historically excluded voices. Institutions that invest in internal leadership—through practice, measurement, inclusion and deliberate cultures—will not only survive change, they will shape it. When I read that women remain so underrepresented in the highest offices, I do not simply register a statistic; I feel a responsibility to accelerate the internal cultures that produce women leaders—whether through quotas that open doors now, or through training and budgets that sustain leadership over time (UN Women; Women’s welfare budgets).

A closing reflection

Many of the ideas I’m writing about now were on my mind years ago—new universities, integrated internships, and leadership by practice. Seeing these themes show up in real projects and policies feels validating and urgent at once: validation that some early intuitions were sound; urgency because rhetoric without structural change is wasted time. The core idea I have tried to convey in earlier posts is the same one I return to now—take a moment to notice that I had brought up these thoughts years ago, predicted outcomes and proposed solutions, and that today the world is finally catching up. That continuity matters: it confirms that leadership from within is not a fad but a durable pathway.

Leadership is not a locker you open when needed. It is the daily cultivation of people, processes and places so others are ready when the bell rings. That is the work I wake up for.

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Regards,
Hemen Parekh