You have to catch yourself out before you can correct yourself.

Seneca, Moral Letters, 28.9

Have you ever noticed how some leaders become one-dimensional? They have this one thing that brought them success, and they keep playing that game over and over, even when it’s stopped working. They’re living the paradigm of “when your only tool is a hammer, every problem is a nail”. When that happens, careers stall and discontent begins. It also saps team performance, as everyone else spends a disproportionate amount of time and energy adapting to work with their style.

It’s a problem in every business, and the challenge for the leader is always to expand and grow, finding new ways and resources to perform more effectively. It’s easy enough to see in someone else. Far harder to see in yourself, which is exactly the problem. Getting out of it requires you to confront what you’ve been avoiding, to break the pattern of what you’ve always done and so avoid the outcomes you don’t want but will continue to get unless you do something different. It’s a hurdle I come up against personally all too often.

Of course, it’s hard to do something different. Change takes effort and focus. When the pressure is on, your immediate impulse is to do what you’ve always done. It feels like the safest option and it’s certainly the easiest. Ironically, leaning into your strength can become your biggest weakness. The better option is to do what’s uncomfortable and uncommon. To run toward the cannons rather than away from them.

Here’s an example.

I’ve worked with a lot of founders. Invariably they’ve had incredible drive and been great with people. Selling a vision to their team and their investors was easy peasy, and so it was no surprise they ended up running their own successful business. But for some of those founders, there was a common problem. An unwillingness to do the things that, while critical for their business success, they found boring or tedious or simply uncomfortable.

The impact of that avoidance was often demoralising for their teams and occasionally disastrous. They covered for it in ways that looked reasonable at the time. Some hired an expensive specialist to take the whole thing off their hands, then sacked them a year later for not delivering what the founder wanted but had never actually articulated. Others ignored a problem until it got ugly, then exploded into action (the dreaded seagull approach to leadership) when it could no longer be avoided. Another changed direction to chase what looked like a more exciting opportunity, and in doing so made redundant months of work by people who’d been giving it everything.

Doing any of that once or twice is a great learning opportunity. The problems arrive when it happens over and over again.

In a sense, we are all founders

I know, not everyone is literally a founder. But perhaps, in a sense, we all are. Every executive, senior leader and founder I’ve ever worked with has had drive, determination, technical skill and a bucketload of personal exposure to hard choices. All of them, at some stage, felt uncertain or challenged or exhausted and found it hard to see a way forward. The difference with founders is that often their personal assets are at risk and their runway for success is shorter. Those circumstances increase the intensity of the work environment and the pace of decisions, good and bad. But it’s still the same pattern that causes the trouble, whether you started the business or joined it nineteen years ago. Doing what you’ve always done, even when it’s no longer getting the results you want.

The capability that got you here does not stop working. It never will. The problem is that it will eventually get you results you don’t want. I’d say that pattern is what sits underneath the Peter Principle—the inability to:

• stop doing the things you like doing but which are making you ineffective; and
• start doing the things that will make you more effective but which you’ve avoided because they’re uncomfortable.

The challenge here is not to become someone else. The more senior you are the more you’ll get headhunted because of who you are, as opposed to what you know. Your style is what people are looking for. The challenge is to become more rounded, to build a greater emotional and operational capability. We can all do it. But it requires honesty and focus and a willingness to be vulnerable.

“But I know someone who’s ridden one horse for thirty years”

You do. So do I. This is the irony of business. If the unhealthy edge of your personality just happens to achieve results, you’re likely to get rewarded for it. Some people get away with it, no matter how many relationships they burn.

But not forever, and that’s the first reason I’m not a fan. We all have a breaking point, a time when continued avoidance of what we’d rather not do has massive consequences. Control freaks drown in decisions and responsibility. People pleasers exhaust themselves with action. Confrontational types find others teaming up against them and relationships disintegrate. Technical gurus are overwhelmed by people issues. Doubters become paralysed by their own uncertainty.

The horse doesn’t stop. The ground runs out.

The second reason is about the job itself. Reflect on the role of leadership. One of its key aims is to create leaders, another is to bring out the best in those around you. As the saying goes, before you become a leader it’s all about you, but once you cross the threshold, it’s about everyone else. One trick doesn’t cover that.

And there’s one other thing (a bit more esoteric, so take it or leave it). What’s the purpose of a working life beyond survival and achievement? Is that all there is? Go to work, make money, buy stuff, have a family and then die? For me, work is simply part of life, an opportunity to discover and express the best of who you are. And you are way more than the one or two things you’ve discovered are easy and effective for you at work.

So where do you start?

The first step is to become aware of what your go-to pattern is. The Enneagram is fantastic for getting clarity on that.

For example, when the kitchen gets hot, a Seven will generate more ideas, faster. A One might tighten the standards and become more critical. A Three may get more polished and more covertly competitive. An Eight will very likely get more direct and demanding.

The irony is that in each case it’s likely your personality is pressing harder on the accelerator that’s driving you off the road.

Knowing this is useful, but stopping it is harder. That’s why the second step is critical. Come to understand why you do what you do. Why? Because then you can begin to make real change, discover greater resourcefulness and make different choices. This process is uncomfortable, as self-reflection and honesty always is. That’s why most people don’t bother to change until they have no other choice.

What makes you tick?

It’s an age-old question. Suffice to say that what sits underneath all of it, your way of seeing the world and making your way through it, is older than your career. It was laid down long before you had any say in the matter, and it’s been quietly steering the ship ever since.

Seneca had it two thousand years ago, when he said you have to catch yourself out before you can correct yourself. But that’s only the beginning. The magic comes when you do something about it.

And what you get back is bigger than a better quarter. You get the rest of yourself, the parts that never made it into the job description. Only you know when you’ll go looking for them.