The Capabilities That Got You Here Are Exactly the Ones Holding You Back

The most dangerous moment in a senior leader’s development is not when they are struggling. It is when they are succeeding. Competence, earned through years of disciplined performance, creates patterns that become invisible to the person running them. The leader no longer examines what they are doing; they simply do it. For a long time, this is precisely what organisations reward, and what 360 feedback celebrates with phrases about “drive,” “decisiveness,” and “getting things done.” The trouble is not the competence. The trouble is the assumption that what produced success at one level will produce it at the next.

Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, in their foundational work on adult development, named this dynamic with clinical precision. Leaders are not typically held back by a lack of effort or intelligence. They are held back by COMPETING COMMITMENTS, hidden commitments that are invisibly served by remaining exactly as they are. Marshall Goldsmith arrived at a similar insight from a different direction. His observation, drawn from decades of coaching senior executives across every industry, is deceptively simple: what got you here won’t get you there. The phrasing is accessible. The implication is severe. The most effective leader at the next level is not the one who acquires more skills. It is the one who identifies what is no longer serving them and, with sustained and deliberate effort, dismantles it.

Strengths, when overused, become weaknesses. This is not a new observation, but it remains one of the most systematically underestimated facts in leadership development. The leader who succeeded by being decisive learns to make fast calls as a survival mechanism, and then cannot stop doing it even when the situation requires consultation. The leader who succeeded by producing results personally builds a habit of intervention that, at a senior level, translates directly into micromanagement, team disempowerment, and a dangerous concentration of single points of failure. The leader who succeeded by being the expert in the room begins to signal, in a hundred subtle ways, that challenge is unwelcome.

What makes this particularly difficult is that these patterns are not character flaws. They are, in most cases, genuine strengths that have been deployed without calibration. The decisive leader is often right. The results-producing leader is often highly capable. The expert is, in fact, frequently the most knowledgeable person in the room. The problem is not the behaviour in isolation. The problem is the CONTEXT INSENSITIVITY with which it is applied. Senior leadership requires knowing when to use a capability, when to restrain it, and when to replace it entirely with something that looks and feels less natural but produces better outcomes at scale.

This is the unlearning challenge. It is not about forgetting what you know. It is about decoupling a behaviour from its automatic deployment. It is about inserting a pause between stimulus and response, and in that pause, making a choice that the previous level of leadership never required. Kegan and Lahey describe this as moving from a “socialised mind” to a “self-authoring mind.” The language is academic. The requirement is practical and immediate. Senior leaders who cannot make this shift will plateau, derail, or produce teams that are technically functional and developmentally stunted.

Across several hundred senior leadership programmes facilitated by ProventusHR, certain unlearning patterns appear with striking regularity. The first is the HERO HABIT, the deep-seated tendency to solve rather than enable. Leaders who were recognised for their problem-solving ability arrive at senior roles still solving problems, often faster and more elegantly than their teams can. This feels productive. It is, in fact, deeply counterproductive. The team stops bringing problems once it learns that the leader will simply take them over. Initiative atrophies. Capability development stops. The leader becomes simultaneously the most valuable and most bottlenecking person in the system.

The second pattern is APPROVAL ORIENTATION, the need to be liked that was once a social lubricant but has become a brake on directness. Leaders who succeeded partly because people enjoyed working with them learn to manage relationships through agreement, through positive framing, through the soft landing rather than the clear message. At senior levels, this produces a culture in which difficult truths travel slowly, feedback is carefully softened into irrelevance, and accountability conversations are persistently deferred. The leader believes they are being kind. The team is, in fact, being deprived of the clarity they need to grow.

The third, and perhaps the most insidious, is TECHNICAL IDENTITY, the sense of self that remains attached to being the person who knows most about a particular domain. Technical identity is especially common in India’s engineering, finance, and consulting-derived senior leadership cohorts, where the route to leadership ran through expertise. The leader who identified as the best analyst, the best builder, the best risk-thinker, does not automatically release that identity when their role changes. They continue to lean into their expertise in settings where they would be better served by listening, questioning, and integrating the expertise of others. Their teams learn to rely on them as a super-specialist rather than developing their own technical independence.

It would be convenient to locate the unlearning challenge entirely within the individual. It is more accurate, and more useful, to recognise that organisations frequently conspire in the problem. Performance management systems in most Indian corporates are still designed to recognise individual contribution far more fluently than they recognise the quality of enabling, coaching, or multiplying others. A senior leader who solves ten problems this quarter is, in most reward architectures, more visible than one who built a team that solved fifty. This is a design problem. The metrics reinforce the hero habit, and then L&D is expected to interrupt it.

Leadership competency frameworks often compound this. They are written to describe what excellent leadership looks like in general, but are rarely calibrated to what is required at each specific level of the organisation. A framework that describes “drives results” as a senior leadership competency without distinguishing between driving results personally and creating the conditions in which others drive results is, inadvertently, ratifying the pattern it should be replacing. The leader reads the framework, recognises themselves in “drives results,” and receives external confirmation that what they are doing is right.

The manager relationship is the third systemic reinforcer. Many senior leaders in India are managed by even more senior leaders who exhibit the same patterns at greater intensity. The implicit modelling is powerful. When the MD walks into a review and takes over the presentation, the VP learns that this is how leadership looks at scale. When the CHRO resolves every conflict personally rather than coaching their HRBPs to do it, the HRBPs learn that resolution is not their job. The system teaches the patterns it has inherited, and each generation receives them as natural rather than constructed.

Genuine unlearning is not achieved through awareness alone. This is a critically important distinction, and one that most leadership development programmes fail to honour. Knowing that you micromanage does not stop you from micromanaging under pressure. Recognising your approval orientation does not produce directness in a difficult conversation. Understanding, intellectually, that your technical identity is limiting your team does not make it possible to sit comfortably while watching your team struggle with a problem you could solve in four minutes. The knowing-doing gap in leadership is wide, and it is widest precisely where the behaviour in question is longest established and most deeply rewarded.

What produces actual change, as Albert Bandura’s work on self-efficacy and Goldsmith’s Stakeholder Centred Coaching methodology both demonstrate, is a combination of named commitment, behavioural practice, and structured external feedback. The leader must name, specifically and publicly, what they are working to change. “Specifically” here means the precise behaviour, not the abstraction: not “I want to delegate more” but “When my team brings me a problem, I will ask them what they think before offering anything of my own.” “Publicly” means to the people who will observe and be affected by the change. This is the feedforward commitment, and it creates a social accountability structure that intellectual resolve alone cannot.

Practice then requires repetition across contexts that progressively increase the discomfort. The leader who is working on approval orientation needs to practise directness in low-stakes conversations first, not because the stakes are manageable but because the muscle needs to be built before it is tested. Design matters here: development programmes that provide a single “aha moment” of recognition without structured follow-through practice are providing insight without infrastructure. The insight fades. The behaviour resumes. The programme is evaluated positively, because participants leave feeling good, and the underlying pattern is untouched.

The design implications of all of this are significant. If unlearning is the core developmental task at senior level, and if unlearning requires specificity, practice, and external feedback rather than insight and inspiration, then the programme architecture must be built accordingly. This means that the most valuable time in a senior leadership programme is not the conceptual input. It is the practice-and-debrief cycle, the peer observation, the live coaching, and the structured commitment-making that creates accountability beyond the room. INPUT is necessary. It is not sufficient. The ratio of input to application in most corporate leadership programmes is inverted from what the science would recommend.

It also means that the role of the cohort is not social or logistical. The peer group, if designed correctly, is the primary engine of behavioural accountability. Peers who know each other’s specific unlearning commitments and who meet regularly with an obligation to give each other honest feedback are more powerful than any amount of content delivery. This is not a soft claim. It is evidenced in CCL longitudinal research on leadership behaviour change, in Goldsmith’s Stakeholder Centred Coaching outcomes data, and in ProventusHR’s own programme measurement across multi-cohort LEAP journeys. Behaviour changes when someone who matters sees it and responds to it. The cohort provides that structure in a way that a facilitator alone cannot.

Finally, organisations commissioning leadership development need to ask a harder question of their L&D partners: is this programme designed to produce a transformation in specific behaviours, or is it designed to produce a high satisfaction score? These are not the same goal, and they do not produce the same design choices. A programme that reliably produces high NPS will not reliably produce behavioural change. The two outcomes require different discomfort thresholds, different feedback cultures, and different measures of success. The most important conversations that ProventusHR has with L&D leaders are about measurement, not content, because measurement is where organisational intention becomes visible.

For the individual leader reading this, the question is not abstract. It is immediate and personal. The first task is honest self-inventory: which of your acknowledged strengths are being overused? Where do you step in when you should step back? Where do you soften when you should be direct? Where does your technical expertise substitute for the harder work of enabling others to develop theirs? These are not comfortable questions, and the discomfort is itself a signal. The patterns most worth examining are the ones most defended, the behaviours that feel most necessary, most natural, most “just how I am.”

The second task is to find the people who will tell you the truth. Not the ones who will validate your current assessment of yourself, but the ones who experience your leadership from the receiving end and have enough trust, or enough courage, to name what they observe. In India’s hierarchical organisational culture, this requires deliberate design. Honest feedback does not flow upward unless the conditions for it are explicitly created and consistently maintained. If you are a senior leader in an Indian organisation and you have not heard direct, unfiltered developmental feedback from the people who report to you within the last six months, it is worth asking whether that is because you have no developmental edges, or because the feedback culture around you does not permit it.

The third task is the hardest: committing to specific, observable change and making that commitment in front of the people who will see it. Goldsmith’s research demonstrates, with remarkable consistency, that leaders who announce their development commitments to their stakeholders improve significantly more than those who keep their commitments private. There is something in the social exposure, in the named vulnerability of saying “I am working on this,” that produces accountability no internal resolve can replicate. It is not weakness to name what you are unlearning. It is, in fact, the precise behaviour that distinguishes senior leaders who continue to grow from those who plateau inside the comfort of their accumulated competence.

RK

Founder & Principal Consultant, ProventusHR

RK holds the Master Certified Coach (MCC) credential from the ICF and is a Certified Practitioner of the Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centred Coaching methodology. He has facilitated over 400 leadership, culture, and coaching programmes across India’s most complex organisations.