Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / The Ceiling You Built Yourself
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. It's not hype, not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled The Ceiling You Built Yourself. Here we go. Let's start with a question. What's the one thing about you as a leader that you're most proud of? the thing people mention when they describe you. Hold that thought, because by the end of this episode, I want you to look at it a little differently. There's a line from the executive coach, Marshall Goldsmith, that has stuck with me. He said, what got you here won't get you there. Simple sentence, it takes a while to actually feel the weight of it. Here's the leadership moment behind that line. Goldsmith spent his career coaching some of the most successful executives in the world, people who were already at the top. And what he found over and over was that the very behaviors that built their success were now the things holding them back. The intensity that got them promoted, the need to always be the smartest person in the room, the instinct to jump in and fix things themselves. Every one of those traits had a payoff once and every one of them had quietly turned into a ceiling. Here's where most people misread this idea. They hear, got you here won't get you there, and they assume it means their strengths were fake. That the hard work, the skill, the hours, none of it mattered. That's not it at all. The skill was real. The results were real. The misread is thinking that because something worked, that it will keep working forever, at every level, in every time. Strengths don't expire because they were weak. They expire because the job changed and they didn't. Here's a reframe. Growth is not about collecting more strengths. It is about noticing which ones you've outgrown. That is a much harder skill than building strengths in the first place because nobody claps for you when you let something go. Nobody gives you credit for the thing you stopped doing. But that's often exactly where the next level of leadership is hiding, behind the habit you were most praised for. Let give you a simple example. A leader who earns trust early by always having the answer. That's an asset when you're junior. People love working for someone decisive. Carry that same habit into a senior role and it starts to look different. Your team stops bringing you their thinking because they know you'll just tell them what to do. The very habit that built your reputation is now the reason that your people are not growing. Nothing about you changed. The room changed. and the room gets to decide which habits still serve it. This matters in any leadership environment at any point in history. But I'll say this for anyone leading today, especially if you're working alongside AI tools in your day-to-day life. Those tools are getting better every quarter. What impressed people 18 months ago isn't standard now. If your value as a leader is tied to information you hold or tasks you can personally execute, that value is shrinking fast. whether or not you're paying attention. The tools cannot replace judgment. They cannot replace knowing which of your own habits have quietly expired. That discernment is still entirely yours to develop, and it always was. Here's what I want you to carry forward. Go back to that thing that you're proud of, the one I asked you to hold onto at the start. Ask yourself honestly, is it still serving the leader I need to be right now? Not the leader I was five years ago. The one I need to be today. If the answer is yes, good. Keep it. If you're not sure, that uncertainty is worth sitting with. That's usually where the growth is. Remember this. Success is not a fixed formula you get to keep running forever. What got you here won't get you there. Not because you weren't good enough to get here, but because there is always a there. And getting there asks you to set something down Before you're fully sure what comes next, it's not a loss. That's what leading well actually looks like.