#047 What got you here won't get you there
"Half the leaders I have met don't need to learn what to do. They need to learn what to stop" - Peter Drucker
Hello,
Welcome to The Future Of Leadership, a monthly newsletter packed full of leadership wisdom for founders, CEOs and senior technology executives.
I’m Richard Hughes-Jones, an Executive Coach with over 20+ years consulting, operational and coaching experience. My clients are founders, CEOs and executives in high-growth technology businesses, the investment industry and progressive corporates, including FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 companies.
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Most of my work is with transitional leaders who want to move to the next stage in their leadership journey, or who have recently moved into more senior leadership positions and want to position themselves for the best chance of success.
I’ve clients across the scaleup, venture, private equity and corporate spectrum who all share the same thing in common. They’ve achieved great career success by being very good at what they do. Yet they find themselves struggling to progress into their next role, or they’re not growing into their new role as effectively as they would like. It’s confusing and frustrating.
Introducing leaders to Marshall Goldsmith’s concept of “what got you here won’t get you there” is often a lightbulb moment.
In his book of the same name, Goldsmith makes the powerful case that behavioural issues, not technical skills, are what leaders really need to address. This can be hard to get our heads around for various reasons:
We’ve been socialised - from school onwards - to believe that technical skill and ‘having the right answers’ are key to progression.
By the time we’ve reached senior leadership our technical abilities are taken for granted, not questioned. Yet it’s too easy to fall back on them for safety.
It’s also too easy to fall for the causality fallacy: "I behave this way, and I achieve results. Therefore, I must be achieving results because I behave this way".
He hangs the book off 21 habits that he encourages leaders to reflect on and address. Removing these negative behaviours, he says, often creates more impact than adding positive ones.
It’s a good book and the habits are insightful, though I’d argue that the concept itself is more powerful than the full read. With that in mind, I trawled my own notes to identify the top five challenges that have been holding back my clients:
Martyrdom and overwork - being an ‘insecure over-achiever’, taking ’extreme ownership’ too far, using it as justification for unsustainable work patterns. How do you stop being the hero and start building heroes?
Taking over tasks because “I can do it better” - one client developed a heuristic, which was to ask themselves: “can I achieve 5x+ better results? If no, delegate.”
Taking over during a crisis - which can feel like micromanagement, preventing team growth and creating dependency.
Getting lost in technical detail when the situation requires something more adaptive - hiding behind what you know and diving into technical details when what the situation really calls for is people leadership.
People-Pleasing to avoid hurt feelings - saying yes to too many ideas and team requests because you fear rejection or disappointing people.
As ever, there’s nuanced benefits and over-uses as it relates to all the habits above and strong psychological connections to our behaviours. Which means it’s never as straightforward as just telling people to ‘stop’ doing things. It’s only by bringing them to our attention that it’s possible to reflect on them and identify new ways forward, into the C-suite and beyond.
If all this resonates and you’d like to explore what habits might be holding you back, then check out my coaching services and get in touch.
Other resources I shared with clients this month:
How to Scale: Do Less, Lead More - “The challenge is that throughout our education and in most, if not all, of our early professional roles, we're rewarded for our effectiveness as doers, and when we achieve a more senior position we often assume that our effectiveness as leaders will rely upon the same skills and characteristics that have fuelled our success up to that point. But this can result in the illusion of effectiveness as a leader. We may believe that by working longer, harder, smarter - pick your superlative - than our team on a given set of tasks, we'll inspire by example. We just need to keep doing what we've been doing, albeit at a higher level.” Ed Batista says it best in one of my most shared articles with clients, particularly growth-stage leaders.
How to think strategically in your job - “Most strategy advice is not actionable because the concept is amorphous and dynamic. Ask for advice on how to “think more strategically” and you’ll get a hundred different answers. This isn’t anyone’s fault as there are many levels and definitions of strategy and everyone is answering the question from their own vantage point. Being strategic as a junior marketer in a year-old startup is a totally different ballgame to being strategic as Chairman of a Fortune 500.” TL;DR: Think one level up the food chain. Meaning, start thinking about your boss’s concerns.
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Until next month,
