When excellence becomes a constraint
Since leaving my ‘corporate life’ and starting my own executive coaching business, I have had some precious time to think, read, and reflect. Now it’s time to share some of my learnings.
A pattern I’ve seen and fallen into myself, has been the cycle of working your socks off to get promoted, then when you’re in that new role, it feels like you’re wading through treacle. You were promoted because you were an excellent, top notch individual contributor and leader of people. You were the smart, fast, reliable one that could always deliver.
And then?
You find yourself working harder than ever, yet your impact feels… stunted.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: The strengths that earned your promotion can quietly limit your next level.
The shift no one prepares you for
Leadership transition research consistently shows that role shifts are amongst the highest-risk moments in a leader’s career. In The First 90 Days, Michael Watkins found that failure at a senior level rarely stems from lack of intelligence or work ethic but from misjudging what the new role truly requires.
It’s a strategic error, not a capability issue as the job changes fundamentally. You move from:
Delivering outcomes → Creating conditions for outcomes
Owning expertise → Orchestrating expertise
Being right → Enabling better decisions
Doing more → Deciding what not to do
It really is an identity shift.
Why high performers get stuck
Psychological research on identity threat suggests that when competence feels at risk, we instinctively retreat into our comfort zone. In other words, we double down on what has made us successful before, even when the context has changed. Whilst it may feel productive, it often isn’t. You can end up becoming a bottleneck, your team are not developing, and your peers see you as operational not as an enterprise leader. None of this leads to C-suite influence.
The enterprise leadership shift
If you want to expand your impact at a senior level, make these three shifts:
1. From answers to architecture
Your value is no longer in having all the answers, it’s in designing the environment where the right answers emerge. I saw this shift in practice when we adopted new agile ways of working. Some of the best ‘answers’ came from the most unsuspecting people, but it only happened as we embraced a new form of leadership. As leaders, we shaped decision forums, clarified trade-offs and managed the tension between competing priorities. It was less hero, more architect.
2. From control to leverage
Senior leadership is about leverage. Ask yourself, where does my involvement create disproportionate return and where does it reduce it? Every time you step into detail unnecessarily, you are running the risk of diluting value. I saw this first hand where senior leaders from across the business would be involved in status meetings. Not only did it mean their time was not being spent on the most strategic high-value work, it silently shut down people who then would feel unable to move without getting ‘approval’ on the most simple tasks.
3. Translate your thinking from function to enterprise
Research from McKinsey & Company and Korn Ferry consistently highlights enterprise thinking as being the ability to prioritise total business value over functional optimisation as a defining differentiator between senior leaders and C-Suite executives. It’s probably the thing that pushes most out of their comfort zone but being able to think beyond your team and at a total resource allocation level, understand risk and long-term value, is the operating model that gets you noticed. Functional excellent gets you promoted. Enterprise perspective gets you further.
A 30-Day Experiment
I challenge you to try this for a month:
Speak last in meetings
Replace answers with two strategic questions
Remove one low-leverage meeting from your calendar
Stop owning one decision you no longer need to.
Notice the discomfort. That’s the discomfort of pushing outside of your comfort zone into a new learning zone (The Fearless Organization, Amy Edmundson) and that’s where the magic of self-expansion happens.
The part no one says out loud
Stepping up often feels like getting worse before you get better. Suddenly, you are less fluent, less certain, less visibly competent. But that isn’t regression, it’s growth at an identity level.
The leaders who successfully move into enterprise roles don’t just work harder. They create space to think differently to create environments where people around them thrive. It rarely happens by accident; it’s by your own design.
The Provocation
A question to sit with. Where might you be over-relying on the strengths that built your reputation at the expense of the strengths your next level requires?
If this tension feels familiar, it may not require more effort. It may require better thinking. That’s the work.
If you’re navigating this shift, I’d love to hear what’s felt most surprising about stepping up.
Fueled by creativity. Focused on results. For leaders ready to expand their impact.
