What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

Why Getting Promoted Doesn’t Make You A Leader

Hello friend.

Thank you for being here today. There is a bigger conversation taking place on how character leaders form True, Brave, Kind, and Curious communities that transform culture. Join us here.

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Leadership is a skill. I would call it the greatest of all human skills. And like every skill worth having, it has to be trained, learned, and practiced.

Yet most organizations treat leadership like a personality trait. Something a high performer either has or doesn’t. They take their best individual contributor—someone who puts numbers on the board, meets deadlines, exceeds on quality—and hand them a team. All of a sudden that executor needs entirely new skillsets, mindsets, and soulsets to emerge, ones that have very little to do with the attributes that got them promoted.

When that almost inevitably doesn’t happen, the high performer starts to lag behind, struggles to communicate or delegate, and, in the worst cases, completely fails the team.

You’ve probably heard of the Peter Principle: you rise to the level of your incompetence.

It’s not because the person isn’t capable, but the technical skills that make for competence are not the character qualities and communication habits that make healthy leaders.

Leadership is not about personality traits; it is about character qualities. Qualities that can be cultivated and emerge through every personality type.

Becoming a leader, then, can’t just be about bolting responsibility for others onto competency in a given skillset. It requires so much more—a different kind of preparation.

Healthy growth needs good soil. So, as you consider what it looks like to prepare yourself or a team member for the next level of influence, there are some “weeds” you’ll need to pull to get the soil ready.

Below are three weeds I see commonly in high performers making the move into a leadership position. You must address them or they’ll sabotage your growth.

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1. Unbridled Selfishness

The bedrock of leadership is trust. Your team has to trust you before they’ll follow you.

Trust consists of three parts:

• Credibility: Can you do what you say you can do?

• Dependability: Will you do what you say you’ll do?

• Relatability: Do you make the effort to know your people, and let them know you?

All three of these are vital for trust, but all three are also undermined by one thing: selfishness.

Your team will always sense whether you’re in this for them or only for yourself. They may not say it, but they will feel it. And that distrust will leak out into their performance.

High performers often arrive in leadership having spent years optimizing for their own personal output and their own personal gain. At that level, a sinister selfishness can look like healthy competitiveness. But leadership roles have a way of exposing what’s really in a person.

Pressure brings it out of you, and there are more eyeballs trained on you who will see it.

The weed of selfishness has to be pulled, and pulled ruthlessly, because it will be a blatant saboteur of trust with your team. They need to know you care and that you want them to win, not just yourself.

2. The Unexamined Life

High performers can go a long way on raw talent and caffeine.

Their unbalanced aggression makes them effective executors and terrible learners, listeners, and leaders.

They’re accustomed to moving too fast to communicate clearly. Too sure of themselves to stay Curious. Too reliant on their own killer instincts to listen to the wisdom of their team.

By all means, be Brave, bold, and chase big dreams. But to lead well is to inspire other people to come with you, and you cannot do that without listening to them, learning from them, and communicating well with them.

And you cannot do any of that without reflecting on the contents of your days consistently.

Leaders who don’t reflect on their mistakes are doomed to repeat them. Every lesson that goes unprocessed remains unlearned.

So take ten minutes at the end of your day to sit in the leadership space I call the Fire.

Ask yourself these three questions:

• What do I want to take with me?

• What do I need to leave behind?

• What do I need to get right in my relationships?

Take with. Leave behind. Get right. This simple ritual will surface what needs to be done, what needs to be discarded, and who needs your direct attention right now.

3. Untended Wounds

The fatal mistakes that take leaders down are almost never random; they are connected to something from your history.

With high-performers in particular, there are often emotional injuries from long ago that drive your desperation to prove yourself or earn approval. Being a builder is wonderful, but not if building is where you find your sense of self-worth.

You may have heard it said, “Never follow a leader without a limp.” I would add, “But don’t go anywhere near one with an open wound.”

If you refuse to address your past injuries, to face them, to tend to their healing, your unhealed wounds will bleed all over your team.

Your unprocessed pain leaks out of you in high-pressure moments. Your lack of self-awareness around your triggers will turn you into a walking landmine. You will undermine the psychological safety your team needs to communicate honestly, directly, and consistently with you.

This has all sorts of terrible downstream results: It kills innovation, collaboration, and motivation all at once.

Pay attention to where you’re operating from a wound, and do the work to address it. Because if you don’t, you will lead from it.

And leading from a wound leads nowhere good.

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A note for those of you who have the power to promote people…don’t wait until it’s time to promote someone to address these things.

What leaders don’t realize is that every single person in your organization should be a healthy leader. They should have all of the prerequisite qualities to lead well. For two reasons:

• Firstly, life requires us all to lead, even if just to lead ourselves. And the qualities required to lead yourself well are fractal—transferable to wider circles of leadership.

• Secondly, when you invest in a healthy leadership culture across your organization, you don’t run into succession problems or scenarios like the one I just mentioned. You’ve always got a stable full of talented people and promotable people.

If you tend the soil well, good things grow. If you don’t, they don’t. It actually is that simple. Not easy, but simple.

So ask yourself:

What do I need to unlearn right now?

And what do the people on my team or in my organization need to uproot to make room for good things to grow?

Sincerely,

Karl

P.S. If this was helpful—if you want to cultivate character and cultural health wherever you lead—I write about these concepts on Substack twice every month. Subscribe to get it in your inbox directly. And forward this to a high performer in your life who’s about to step into a new leadership role.