What Got You Here Won't Get You There

"The skills that got you to the top of one mountain will not necessarily get you to the top of the next."

Marshall Goldsmith, What Got You Here Won't Get You There (2007)

WHAT IT IS

Every leadership transition asks for something different. The behaviors that drove success at one level, individual expertise, decisive action, high personal standards, can actively undermine effectiveness at the next. These behaviors worked. Then the job changed, and the leader didn't change with it.

Executive coach Marshall Goldsmith identified this as one of the most consistent patterns in leadership development: past success creates habitual behaviors, and habitual behaviors resist updating. The leader keeps doing what worked, often harder and more confidently, while the people around them grow quietly frustrated.

WHAT WORKED

WHAT BECOMES A LIABILITY

Individual → Manager Being the best at the work. Solving problems faster than anyone.

Solving problems for your team instead of developing their ability to solve them.

Manager → Director Being close to the work. Knowing every detail. Driving execution personally.

Staying too operational. Unable to delegate judgment, only tasks.

Director → Executive Being decisive. Moving fast. High personal standards applied to everything.

Making unilateral calls that should be collective. Setting an intimidating standard no one can meet.

WHY THE UPDATE IS HARD

Stopping a successful behavior feels like self-sabotage. If being the expert got you here, becoming less of an expert feels dangerous. If decisive action drove results, slowing down to build consensus feels like weakness.

Harvard researchers Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey described this as an immunity to change: the way people unconsciously protect the beliefs and behaviors that feel essential to their identity, even when those behaviors are getting in the way.

The leader has the skill. The trouble is that using a different one feels like becoming a different person, and that's threatening in a way no training program touches.

WHAT IT COSTS

Laurence Peter observed that people in organizations tend to rise to their level of incompetence, promoted for what they did well until they reach a role where those same behaviors no longer serve them. The leader who was promoted for excellence at one level and struggles at the next isn't failing. They're succeeding at the wrong game.

The cost isn't just to the leader. The team inherits a set of behaviors calibrated for a job that no longer exists. They get managed the way the leader used to need to be led, not the way they actually need to be led now.

ONE THING TO PRACTICE

Ask what the role actually needs now.

Write down the three behaviors that most contributed to your success in your last role. Then ask honestly: Is each of these still an asset in my current role, or has it become something I need to use less of?

The goal isn't to abandon what worked. It's to hold it more lightly, to use it as a tool rather than an identity. The leader who can do that doesn't have to choose between who they've been and who the role needs them to become.

Common Questions

What does "what got you here won't get you there" mean?

It means that the skills, habits, and behaviors that produced your success at one level of leadership are often exactly the things that limit you at the next. You were promoted because you were decisive, always had an answer, pushed hard for the win, and knew the work better than anyone. Those are genuine strengths. The problem is that at a senior level, the same behaviors, needing to win every argument, adding your input to every idea, solving problems faster than your team can learn from them, start costing you more than they earn. Marshall Goldsmith, who coined the phrase, spent decades coaching some of the most successful executives in the world on this exact problem.

What behaviors hold successful leaders back from the next level?

Goldsmith identified twenty habits that show up repeatedly in high-achieving leaders who plateau. A few of the most common: needing to win too much, so you fight for your position even when it doesn't matter; adding too much value, where you take someone's good idea and "improve" it until it's yours and they've lost ownership of it; and an excessive need to be "me," using your personality or your history of success as a reason not to change. The thread connecting all of them is that they feel like strengths. They are strengths at a lower level. At a senior level, the same behaviors signal that you're optimizing for being right rather than for making the team right.

Why do the habits that made you successful become a problem at the senior level?

Because the job changes faster than the person does. As an individual contributor, your impact came directly from your own output and judgment. As a senior leader, your impact comes through other people, through what you create the conditions for, not what you do yourself. The leader who has to win every debate undermines the team's ownership. The leader who always has the answer trains the team to stop thinking. The leader who needs to be recognized for their contribution slowly erodes the people around them. None of this is intentional. It's the old skill set running on autopilot in a role that requires something different.

How do you identify which behaviors are holding you back?

Ask the people who work with you, not the ones who work for you. Your direct reports have learned to manage around your patterns. They've already adapted. The people who will give you the most useful signal are peers and colleagues who interact with you regularly and have no stake in softening the answer. Goldsmith's method was feedforward: instead of asking for feedback on what you've done wrong, ask for two suggestions about what you could do differently going forward. It's a small linguistic shift that makes the conversation much easier to have. The other route is a 360 assessment, where the aggregated, anonymous picture of how you're landing is usually both surprising and clarifying.