There is a particular kind of workplace moment that no training programme can quite manufacture. An employee who rarely speaks in meetings takes charge when a crisis arrives. A technically brilliant colleague turns out to be unexpectedly good at bringing people together. Someone who has spent years doing one thing is asked to do something entirely different and discovers not only that they can do it, but that they enjoy it.
Such discoveries are rarely planned. They tend to arrive disguised as difficult assignments, unfamiliar responsibilities or problems nobody quite knows how to solve. They can be uncomfortable while they are happening. In retrospect, they often become the experiences through which people understand what they are actually capable of.
Three HR leaders reflect on the challenges that revealed strengths conventional work might never have uncovered.
When the challenge becomes the teacher
Vinod Rai, Group Head HR, Shahi Exports
In 2014, Vinod Rai was working with one of India’s largest automobile companies during a period of serious labour unrest. The organisation had lost a colleague and was navigating its recovery. Part of that effort involved rebuilding several HR processes, including hiring more than 5,000 employees across new locations within 60 days, without external consultants and with fortnightly updates to the Board.
Rai entrusted the assignment to a new joiner in his department. It was hardly a gentle introduction. The work required coordination across functions, managing stakeholders who were not always aligned and keeping an enormous hiring exercise moving under sustained pressure. His advice to the employee was pragmatic: not everyone would be satisfied, nor was that the objective. What mattered was directing the effort towards the right outcome and continuing to move.
The employee delivered. More importantly, the assignment revealed capabilities that routine work might have taken years to expose. He could operate under pressure, influence people towards a common goal and maintain momentum when circumstances became difficult. The scale of the challenge had created an unusually clear test, not merely of what he knew, but of how he responded when knowledge alone was insufficient.
For Rai, therein lies the value of such assignments. Development does not always require another course or carefully sequenced training intervention. Sometimes it requires somebody to entrust an employee with a consequential problem before that employee is entirely certain they are ready for it.
The career built from detours
Pankaj Lochan, Senior HR Leader
Pankaj Lochan’s career has moved through manufacturing, projects, total quality management, HR, research and development and eventually P&L leadership. At different points, each transition took him into territory where much of what had made him comfortable in the previous role was no longer enough.
Manufacturing taught him execution and the realities of the shop floor. Projects taught him how to build from scratch under constraints. TQM sharpened his approach to systems and problem-solving, while HR deepened his understanding of people and organisational dynamics. R&D brought experimentation and innovation into the mix. Viewed individually, the moves could have looked like a collection of detours. Across a career, they became parts of the same education.
That experience has shaped the question Lochan believes organisations should ask about development. Rather than always asking what training someone needs next, it may be more useful to ask what experience they need next. A cross-functional project, an unfamiliar responsibility, an improvement initiative or ownership of something the employee has never handled can develop capabilities that are difficult to acquire in a classroom because the learning and the consequences arrive together.
There is another effect that is harder to put on a competency framework. Once someone has come through one assignment they genuinely doubted they could handle, the next unfamiliar challenge looks different. Confidence is no longer based on encouragement from somebody else. It rests on personal evidence. The employee knows they have been out of their depth before and found a way through.
When there is no playbook
Sharad Verma, CHRO, Iris Software
Sharad Verma has watched a similar pattern play out with employees given assignments for which there is no obvious instruction manual. Complex initiatives involving multiple stakeholders, ambiguous briefs and uncertain outcomes have a way of revealing strengths that neither the employee nor the manager necessarily anticipated.
What people acquire from these experiences is not simply another accomplishment for the CV. Capability and confidence tend to develop together. Someone discovers that they can learn faster than expected, navigate ambiguity without becoming paralysed or recover from a setback without abandoning the objective. The assignment tests those qualities, but in doing so also provides evidence that they exist.
That does not mean throwing people into difficult situations and waiting to see who survives. For Verma, leaders have a responsibility beyond spotting potential and setting an ambitious challenge. Employees also need what he describes as “air cover”: the knowledge that somebody is available when the situation becomes genuinely difficult, without immediately taking the problem back from them. Too much intervention defeats the purpose of the stretch. Too little turns development into abandonment.
That balance matters because the most useful challenge sits somewhere between what an employee can already do comfortably and what they cannot realistically be expected to manage. Give people enough room within that space, backed by genuine trust, and they often produce thinking that smaller, safer assignments would never have required of them.
Just as importantly, they emerge with a different understanding of their own range.
What difficulty reveals
Not every such discovery requires a crisis or 5,000 hires in 60 days. The same dynamic can begin with asking a quiet employee to lead an important meeting, giving a technically strong person responsibility for coordinating across functions or putting a mid-level manager in charge of an improvement project that nobody has quite owned before. The purpose is not to manufacture difficulty for its own sake, but to introduce enough unfamiliarity for another side of the person to emerge.
What happens afterwards is often more interesting than the assignment itself. Someone who discovers they can handle pressure becomes less reluctant to take on the next difficult problem. A team member who finds their voice while leading a project may begin contributing differently in ordinary meetings. Someone who unexpectedly enjoys solving a commercial problem may start imagining a career they had never previously considered.
That is why the most formative assignments are so often remembered long after their details have ceased to matter. They leave behind something more durable than the completed project: evidence that the boundary of someone’s capability was not where they once thought it was.
What was the work challenge that revealed something about yourself you had not previously seen? Share it in the comments.