Why Do You Call It Development When You Mean Results?
In my previous article, I argued that leadership development cannot be reduced to accumulating more knowledge, models and content. If self-awareness is the foundation of leadership, then we need to create the conditions in which it can actually develop (through inner silence, honest feedback, contact with reality and time).
Recently, I realized that I had begun to make one of these conditions explicit. In my work with several coaching clients, I introduced a rather unusual requirement:
For this process to work, you need at least one hour a day for… nothing.
Not an hour spent answering emails from the sofa. Especially not an hour spent watching Netflix or scrolling through social media. Not even an hour devoted to another carefully optimized activity from a list entitled Things I Do for Myself.
You need an hour in which you do not have to solve, improve, or achieve anything.
You can sit in nature. Walk without headphones. Look through a window. Write random thoughts in a notebook without trying to reach a conclusion.
One client responded: “Come on… If I had an hour to myself, I would sleep. I cannot remember the last time I had an hour to myself—and you want me to have one every day?”
Exactly! That answer did not invalidate the condition. It explained why the condition was necessary. If the first thing that appears when life finally slows down is exhaustion, perhaps recovery has to come before development.
How Quickly Will This Produce Results?
Last week, a potential client asked me how quickly working with me would produce results. It was a perfectly reasonable question. Companies invest in leadership coaching because they want something to improve. People enter coaching because they want movement. I have no romantic objection to results, I have built much of my life around producing them.
But if speed is the primary concern from the beginning, are we really talking about development? Or are we talking about performance while using the more attractive language of development?
Coaching can support both. But they are not the same process.
Performance can often be improved through focused action. Development requires enough space to notice and question the system from which we operate.
Performance coaching may produce results relatively quickly because the person already possesses the necessary capacity. Development, on the other hand, may require us to discover what we cannot yet see, build a capacity we do not yet have, or question a strategy that has made us successful for twenty years.
- The high performer recognizes that achievement has become their primary source of self-worth.
- The supportive leader discovers that constantly helping people prevents them from taking responsibility.
- The decisive executive notices that speed has become a way of escaping uncertainty.
- The person who values excellence sees the fear hiding beneath their perfectionism.
These are realities we must remain with long enough for a different understanding, and eventually a different response to emerge.
Results Do Not Prove Development
A manager can improve results without changing at a deeper level. Surface-level shifts may be enough: managing time better, delegating more effectively, preparing for difficult conversations, or introducing more disciplined routines. These improvements matter. But the manager may still be operating from the same identity, assumptions, and automatic emotional patterns. They have improved the performance of the existing system without changing the system itself.
Results do not necessarily indicate development. And development does not always produce immediate, visible results.
Sometimes the first signs of development are:
- A pause where an automatic reaction used to be.
- A question where certainty used to be.
- Curiosity where defensiveness used to be.
- A difficult truth that is no longer immediately explained away.
From the outside, almost nothing may appear to have changed but…
Inside, an entire identity may have begun to move.
Development Requires Space
A coaching conversation can create insight. A workshop can introduce a new perspective. Feedback can challenge an old assumption. But where does any of it go if, three minutes later, the person is answering messages, entering another meeting, and solving the next urgent problem?
Without time to reflect, insight becomes another piece of content, something interesting we understood but never allowed to affect us.
I have seen clients arrive at a coaching session directly from one meeting and leave for another. During the session, they are present and engaged. They take notes and define actions. Then life absorbs them again. By the next session, they may remember the insight perfectly but have had almost no contact with it since. The coaching session has become one more meeting.
No powerful question can compensate for a life in which every unstructured moment has been eliminated.
This is why coaching readiness also means creating the psychological, physical, and practical space required for development. If every silent moment is immediately filled with input, perhaps what we need is space for an insight to land.
Why We Need Time For Self-Reflection
We usually imagine development as something we actively do. Read the book. Attend the program. Have the coaching conversation. Practice the new behavior. But development also requires periods in which we stop doing and allow experience to catch up with us.
The pause is part of development.
Self-reflection creates space to notice the tension in the body before converting it into an explanation. The emotion beneath the irritation. The impulse to interrupt. The moment curiosity disappears and defense takes over. It allows us to ask:
- What actually happened?
- What did I assume?
- Why did I respond that way?
- What was my impact on other people?
- What does this experience ask me to learn?
A series of studies by Giada Di Stefano, Francesca Gino, Gary Pisano and Bradley Staats found that experience combined with deliberate reflection produced more learning than simply accumulating additional experience. Sometimes we learn more when we stop long enough to understand what the experience is teaching us, and this is what we call reflective leadership.
Reflective leaders connect experience with learning and learning with a more conscious response.
This practice has been associated with greater awareness of behavior, situations and their consequences, as well as an improved capacity to learn and make better decisions. The opposite of reflective leadership is reactive leadership: acting from pressure, familiar assumptions and automatic patterns before learning has had time to occur.
One Hour Might Be a Magic Number
I do not believe that precisely sixty minutes contains some mystical developmental property.
But it can be a challenge, a boundary and a diagnostic.
It asks whether there is any part of your day in which you are not performing a role. Any space in which you are not a leader, parent, partner, problem-solver, content consumer or personal development project. Any moment in which your experience is allowed to exist before you decide what to do with it.
The point is not to become excellent at doing nothing :) If we measure the hour, optimize it and demand that it produce three insights before breakfast, we have simply brought the old identity into a quieter room.
The purpose is to remain present long enough for something unplanned to enter awareness.
If you want better performance, clearer goals, or faster execution, say so. These are legitimate reasons for coaching, and they may produce relatively quick results. But if you are asking for development, something else is required…
- Development may slow you down before it makes you faster.
- It may make you less certain before it gives you a clearer direction.
- It may challenge the identity that produced your success before helping you build the capacity for whatever comes next.
So, the next time you feel that something needs to shift, ask yourself:
Am I looking for better results from the way I already operate or am I ready to question the way I operate?
And if it is the latter
Have I created enough space in my life for that development to happen?
Written by Pedja Jovanović
Pedja Jovanović is the Founder of Atria Group International and Co-creator of My Identity Journey and My Leadership Journey. He works internationally with senior leaders, founders, and executive teams navigating growth, complexity, and transformation, combining cognitive, embodied, and intuitive approaches to leadership development.
