The Competence Trap: Why What Got You Here Won’t Get You to the CXO Level
I may indeed sound paradoxical when I say that your very core competence because of which you attained great heights in your professional life could turn out to be the deterrent to your future growth. But this is what I have seen while coaching senior leaders. It’s like an auto-immune condition, where your own system goes against you.
Many leaders scale higher ranks due to their extraordinary competence. They are the ‘all-knowing’. They have a thorough knowledge of their domain, people approach them with problems and they know how to fix it. And this fetches them good rewards till the middle level in their career.
“You are always on top of things.”
“You are our go-to person.”
These seemingly wonderful compliments can become a trap somewhere along the leadership journey. Because the leader begins to associate being needed with being valuable.
As Marshall Goldsmith famously captured in the title of his book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. At senior levels, the question is no longer:
How well can I do the work?
It increasingly becomes:
How can I ensure the work gets done exceptionally well without needing me to be involved in everything?
The Table Tennis Problem
I often describe operational leadership as a game of table tennis. A ball comes towards you. Someone needs a decision. You respond. Another ball. A client escalation. You resolve it. Another ball. Your team needs an approval. Done. Another ball. A delivery problem. Solved.
As you are a proficient player you keep returning the ball with absolute success. And this is the problem, ‘you continue to play table tennis all day.’
Strategic leadership requires you to occasionally put the bat down and ask:
Why are so many balls coming to me in the first place?
What can I change so that these problems don’t keep reaching me?
This would be the tuning point as the answer to this question would bring a significant shift from operational to strategic leadership.
Being Busy Is Not the Same as Being Strategic
Most of the senior leaders I work with have back-to-back meetings. Their calendars are booked solidly with reviews, approvals, escalations and firefighting. It feels rewarding and productive, but the big question that needs to be addressed here is:
How much of what I did today genuinely required someone at my level?
If you are a VP, SVP, functional head or CXO aspirant and most of your day is spent solving problems your team should eventually be capable of solving, you may be demonstrating tremendous competence while limiting your leadership impact. Your organization may not want you to play the role of a problem solver anymore. Instead, they would expect you to make your team competent enough to solve such problems on their own.
Operational Thinking vs. Strategic Thinking
| Operational Thinking | Strategic Thinking |
| Repeated client escalations would make an Operational leader ask: How do we find an answer to this? | While on the other hand a strategic leader would ask: What is the underlying cause of the repeated escalations and how can we prevent it? |
| An operational leader asks: How do we achieve this quarter’s target? | A strategic leader also asks: What capability should we build today to create significantly more value tomorrow? |
| An operational leader asks: How do we reduce this cost? | A strategic leader asks: Can we redesign the process altogether? |
Both kinds of thinking are important. The problem begins when senior leaders spend almost all their time in the first mode.
What Does “Being Strategic” Really Mean?
Many leaders get to hear a very common yet vague remark, “be more strategic”. So, what does it really mean?
Let me simplify it.
So, fundamentally it means to be able to look at the bigger picture, to make decisions which align with long-term goals, to be able to foresee the opportunities and risk and take decisions in such a way that there is a consistent improvement in all aspects.
Ask: How can I contribute directly or indirectly to increasing the top line or improving the bottom line?
When I think about strategy, I try to connect my work to the actual results of the business. Of course, Strategy is not restricted to revenue and profitability only. Customer experience, people, technology, innovation, risk and culture all matter.
For instance,
Skill development in employees can lead to increased productivity.
While, increased Cyber security can bring about multiple benefits like:
- Generate better revenue
- Protect business from financial setbacks
- Protect from credibility loss
- Provide stimulus to business continuity
Automation on the other hand can bring down the operating coast and at the same time enlarging the scale
Enhanced customer interaction can ensure loyalty and future revenue.
So, for me, the important question for a strategic leader is not simply, “What am I doing?” It is, “How does what I am doing contribute to a wider business outcome?” That connection between day-to-day work and business value is what makes an activity strategically important.
The Danger of Being Indispensable
To be ‘the person’ everyone seeks, definitely makes one feel good but that is the entry point to the trap. In your pursuit to solve every problem, you somehow miss out on one essential point which is significant for a senior leader. Rather than making yourself indispensable, you need to build up a team which can work as efficiently as you do, in your absence.
If you are indispensable, so much so that you must take every decision and every issue escalates to you than that raises a major question- Did you built the required decision making capabilities in your team?
An organisation wants a leader, who builds up a system and a team that can work independently with absolute confidence not a CXO who does everything on his own.
So according to me, the litmus test for a Senior leader is – Have I built up a team, system and decision-making capabilities that let the organization to keep working proficiently even in my absence?
Create Space to Become Strategic
Many leaders tell me:
“I know I need to think strategically, but I don’t have the time.”
This is absolutely the core issue.
They don’t have time because they are doing what others would have comfortably done. In fact, people wouldn’t have come to them in the first place if they would not have allowed it, by simply building the required capability in the team. But instead, they end up in this spiral of solving every problem, addressing every escalation, and taking every decision.
Breaking this spiral requires consciously creating leadership space—space to think, plan, improve, develop people, build strategic relationships, understand the wider business, and invest in yourself.
So, a useful way to examine your time is through three buckets:
Doing: Running today’s business.
Improving: Making today’s business work better.
Imagining: Creating tomorrow’s business.
Most leaders spend enormous time doing, some time improving, and very little time imagining.
As you grow, that balance has to change.
Your Calendar Reveals Your Leadership Level
Look at your calendar for the previous four weeks. Don’t look at your designation. Look at where your time actually went.
How much was spent firefighting?
How much developing people?
How much with customers?
How much building strategic relationships?
How much thinking about innovation and future opportunities?
How much understanding the P&L?
How much investing in your own development?
Your calendar often reveals your leadership level more accurately than your job title.
If your designation says SVP but your calendar looks like that of an excellent operational manager, there is a gap.
From Functional Leader to Business Leader
This transition becomes critical for leaders aspiring to CXO and CEO roles.
A CFO cannot think only about Finance.
A CHRO cannot think only about HR.
A CTO cannot think only about Technology.
A COO cannot think only about Operations.
At the CXO level, your function may remain your responsibility, but the business has to become your perspective.
Your technical competence still matters. Your domain expertise still matters. Your execution capability still matters.
But they are no longer enough.
Leadership growth requires moving:
From solving problems to building problem-solvers.
From being indispensable to creating capability.
From doing to improving and imagining.
From functional excellence to enterprise thinking.
From being busy to creating impact.
Sometimes, growth doesn’t require becoming even better at what made you successful. It requires having the courage to let go of some of it. And perhaps that is the real meaning of: What got you here won’t get you there.