When What Got You Here Stops Working
There is a difficult moment in the life of a successful business when nothing is obviously wrong, yet something no longer feels quite right. The business is still performing, customers are buying, your people are busy, the numbers may be respectable and from the outside, there may be little reason for concern.
Yet you can feel it.
The energy required to make progress is increasing, while the progress itself is becoming harder to see. Decisions take longer. The same issues return to the table. Opportunities appear, get discussed and somehow fail to become action.
You find yourself more involved, not less and somewhere in the middle of all that activity sits an uncomfortable thought.
What got us here may not get us where we want to go next.
That is particularly difficult for a Founder, CEO, Managing Director or Business Owner because what got you here is rarely something you regard as a problem.
Quite the opposite.
Your judgement helped build the business
Your determination got it through difficult periods
Your relationships opened doors
Your standards shaped the culture.
Your willingness to step in when something needed doing became part of how the business succeeded.
These things worked and some of them may still work extremely well.
The difficulty comes when something that was once a strength quietly begins to interfere with what the business now needs.
The founder who could once make every important decision becomes the person every important decision waits for.
The standards that created quality become the reason others hesitate to take responsibility.
The loyalty that held the business together makes a difficult conversation harder to have.
The instinct that served you brilliantly for twenty years becomes harder to question precisely because it has been right so many times before.
None of this means you were wrong, it just means the game has changed.
High-performance athletes encounter the same problem. The training, habits and approach that created one level of performance do not automatically unlock the next. At some point, doing more of what already worked simply produces more of what you already have.
Greater performance requires something different and that is where this becomes personal, because changing the strategy is often considerably easier than questioning your own part in it.
It is easier to restructure the team than ask whether you are allowing them to lead.
Easier to set another target than ask what is really preventing the existing one from being achieved.
Easier to ask what the business needs to change than to ask what it might now need from you.
Which leaves three questions worth sitting with.
What am I still doing because it has always worked?
What does the business need from me now that it did not need from me before?
What might become possible if I stopped being the answer to everything?
Those are not questions that need quick answers.
They need space.
Space to think without defending what has gone before. To challenge assumptions without diminishing what they helped you achieve. To say something out loud before deciding whether you even believe it yourself.
Sometimes that conversation belongs with your Senior Leadership Team.
Sometimes it cannot happen there yet.
Sometimes you need to sit with people who understand the responsibility because they carry it too; people with no agenda, no hierarchy and no need to tell you what to do.
Simply equals around the table, helping one another see what can be remarkably difficult to see alone, because progress does not always require you to add something.
Sometimes it begins with recognising what you no longer need to carry.
What got you here deserves respect.
It helped create everything you have today.
It just does not automatically earn the right to determine what happens tomorrow.
Perhaps one of the hardest acts of leadership is recognising when something that once helped you perform is now standing between your potential and what comes next.
That is where greater performance begins.
Alan Branagh,
The Alchemists & The Alchemists Circle (Your Personal Board.)
When the pressure is high.
When the game has changed.
When the next decisions matter.