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. Not because they were wrong. Because the job changed and the leader didn't.

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.

It's not that the leader lacks the skill. It's that using a different skill feels like becoming a different person — and that is threatening in a way that a training program doesn't address.

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.