Success after success, promotion after promotion. You must be doing something right, right? You must have a knack for making good decisions.
The people above you clearly noticed it; that’s why they keep promoting you. So why can’t the people who report up to you see how brilliant you are?
That’s the dangerous question that gets many senior leaders in trouble.
After enough successes, lucky breaks, and right decisions, it’s easy to start believing your own press. It’s tempting to trust in your track record of solving complicated problems.
But the higher you go in leadership, the more you’re not solving problems but balancing tensions and managing paradoxes. Success stops being about finding right answers, and concentrates on capitalizing on the collective strengths of others and their relationships with each other.
At this point in your career, expecting that you’ll continue to personally figure out the right answer will eventually lead you to overlook important inputs and override the wisdom of the people around you. And that arrogance becomes the beginning of the end of an otherwise successful career.
If you find yourself in repeated conflict with those you work with and you want to learn how to better balance tensions and manage paradoxes, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to start the conversation.
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