The Recipe for Leadership: How to Turn Vague Advice Into Actionable Growth
Why "A Pinch of This" Doesn't Help Anyone LearnThe Mystery of My Mother's Kitchen
My mom taught me to cook the way many Indian mothers do—through a combination of intuition, tradition, and what can only be described as culinary telepathy. "Add a handful of this," she'd say, gesturing vaguely toward the spice cabinet. "A pinch of that," while somehow knowing exactly which "that" she meant from an array of nearly identical-looking powders. And the most mysterious instruction of all: "Add until it tastes right."
Armed with this cryptic guidance, I set out to recreate the magic of her kitchen. My first attempt at dal—a simple lentil dish that forms the backbone of Indian cuisine—resulted in what could generously be called yellow water. My second attempt? Basically turmeric soup with a few sad lentils floating around like lost ships in a golden sea.
I was frustrated, convinced that my mother was being deliberately vague or perhaps testing my dedication through culinary trial by fire. But then it hit me: she wasn't being mysterious on purpose. After thirty years of cooking the same dishes, measurements had become muscle memory. Her "pinch" was precisely calibrated by decades of experience, her "handful" was standardized by countless repetitions. What seemed intuitive to her was actually the result of systematic learning compressed into instinct.
The Leadership Translation Problem
This realization opened my eyes to something I'd been experiencing in my professional life without fully understanding it. Leadership advice often sounds remarkably similar to my mother's cooking instructions: vague, intuitive, and somehow both obvious and impossible to execute.
"Be more strategic."
"Think bigger picture."
"Take ownership."
"Show executive presence."
These phrases get thrown around in performance reviews, development conversations, and leadership training sessions as if they're self-explanatory.
But for someone who hasn't yet developed the muscle memory of leadership, they're as useful as being told to "add until it tastes right" when you've never cooked before.
The gap isn't in the quality of the advice—these are genuinely important leadership capabilities. The gap is in the translation from experienced intuition to actionable guidance. Senior leaders have internalized these concepts through years of practice, success, and failure. What feels like common sense to them represents the distillation of countless experiences into instinctual knowledge.
Breaking Down the "Pinches"
When I work with emerging leaders, I've learned to break down these leadership "pinches" into concrete, measurable steps. It's not enough to know what good leadership looks like—you need to understand how to build those capabilities systematically.
Take "be more strategic," one of the most common pieces of feedback given to high-potential leaders. To someone who's been operating tactically, this advice can feel overwhelming and abstract. But when we break it down:
"Be more strategic" translates to:
Define the specific outcome you're trying to achieve, not just the activities you're doing
Identify the three highest-leverage actions that will move you toward that outcome
Establish a 30-day review cadence to assess progress and adjust approach
Connect your work to broader organizational goals and communicate those connections
Similarly, "think bigger picture" becomes actionable when we specify:
Extend your planning horizon to 12-18 months instead of the current quarter
Map out the second and third-order effects of your decisions
Consider how your initiatives impact other departments and stakeholders
Regularly ask "What would success look like if we achieved 10x our current goal?"
And the nebulous "own it" becomes clearer when broken down into:
Clearly define decision rights for your area of responsibility
Identify and articulate the key risks you're managing
Commit to specific metrics and timelines for accountability
Take the first irreversible action that demonstrates your commitment
The Messy Middle Matters
One of the things my mother never shared was the messy middle of learning to cook—the burned rice, the oversalted vegetables, the experiments that didn't work. She showed me the final product, the perfected technique, but not the journey of getting there.
I've made the same mistake in leadership development. It's easy to share the polished frameworks and the success stories, but the real learning happens in the messy middle. The strategic initiatives that seemed brilliant in theory but fell apart in execution. The "bigger picture thinking" that was so big it lost sight of practical constraints. The attempts at ownership that crossed into micromanagement.
Effective leadership development requires being honest about these failures and near-misses. It means sharing not just what to do, but what it looks like when you're doing it wrong, what the common pitfalls are, and how to recognize when you're veering off track.
Teaching Others to Develop Their Own Instincts
The goal isn't to create leaders who can perfectly execute a prescribed set of behaviors. It's to help them develop their own leadership instincts—their own ability to know when to add a pinch more strategy or when the situation calls for a different approach entirely.
This requires moving beyond rigid frameworks to developing judgment. It means creating opportunities for emerging leaders to practice these skills in low-stakes environments, get feedback, adjust their approach, and gradually build their own muscle memory.
Just as my mother's "pinch" represented years of calibrated experience, effective leadership intuition develops through repeated practice with increasingly complex challenges. The key is providing enough structure and guidance so that people can learn from their experiences rather than just surviving them.
The Generational Transfer of Wisdom
Here's what moves me most about this parallel between cooking and leadership: the recognition that what feels ordinary to us can be extraordinary to someone we're teaching. My cooking will never match my mother's—I don't have her decades of experience or her intuitive understanding of spices and techniques. But for my daughters, my cooking is already becoming their baseline, their reference point for what "normal" tastes like.
The same is true in leadership development. The capabilities that feel routine to experienced leaders—the ability to see patterns, anticipate problems, influence without authority, navigate organizational dynamics—these represent extraordinary skills to someone just starting their leadership journey.
Our responsibility as leaders isn't just to exercise these capabilities effectively, but to break them down in ways that others can learn and build upon. To share not just our successes, but our learning process. To translate our "pinches" into actionable steps that others can practice and eventually internalize.
The Continuous Cycle of Learning and Teaching
Perhaps the most beautiful aspect of this parallel is that the learning never really stops. Even experienced cooks continue to refine their techniques, experiment with new combinations, and adapt their approach to different ingredients or occasions. The same is true for leadership.
The frameworks and approaches that work in one context may need adjustment in another. The leadership style that's effective with one team may require modification for a different group. The strategic thinking that serves you well in a stable environment may need to evolve during times of uncertainty.
This is why the best leaders remain curious about their own development even as they focus on developing others. They continue to seek feedback, experiment with new approaches, and refine their own leadership "recipes" based on changing circumstances and growing understanding.
The measure of our success as leaders isn't whether we can execute perfectly based on our years of experience—it's whether we can help others develop their own judgment, build their own capabilities, and eventually create their own leadership approach that works for their unique context and challenges.
After all, the goal isn't to create carbon copies of ourselves as leaders any more than my mother's goal was to turn me into an identical cook. It's to provide enough foundation, guidance, and support so that others can develop their own authentic leadership style—one that honors what they've learned while being uniquely their own.
