📅 The Weekly Edge

— The Behaviors That Built Your Success Are Limiting Your Future

Rule: Stop doing what doesn’t work.

Source: What Got You Here Won’t Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith

Success has a shadow side. It makes you confident in the behaviors that produced it, even when those behaviors have stopped working.

Marshall Goldsmith spent decades coaching senior executives and identified something precise: the habits and behaviors that drove leaders to the top are often the same ones preventing them from reaching the next level.

The executive who succeeded by being the smartest person in the room often becomes the leader who doesn’t listen. The founder who succeeded by making every decision often becomes the CEO who can’t delegate. The operator who succeeded by relentless intensity often becomes the executive who burns out every team below them.

The instinct to keep doing what worked is natural and, in many contexts, sensible. But the business environment changes. The scale of the organization changes. The leadership challenges change. What got you here is not a reliable guide to where you need to go next.

This requires a specific kind of honesty that is rare in high achievers: the willingness to look clearly at which behaviors are serving the organization and which are serving the image you have of yourself as a leader.

Stop doing what doesn’t work is part of The Executives’ Institute’s core principles. Not as a criticism, but as a discipline of honest evaluation.

The best leaders are the ones who can look at themselves with the same clarity they bring to the businesses they’re analyzing.