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Leadership Development · The Competency Trap
Your Strengths Are Why You’re Stuck.
The competences that earned a senior leader their seat are the same ones quietly keeping them in it. On outsight, endings, and why growth at the top runs outside-in.
Every senior leader has a signature strength. The thing they are known for, rewarded for, promoted for. It is also, more often than anyone admits, the thing holding them in place.
The competence that got you here was never built to get you there. It was built to get you hier. And it is very, very good at keeping you here.
Two games, two strategies
Here is the nuance most strength-bashing misses. A senior leader is really playing two different games, and they reward opposite moves.
To get better at the job you have, apply your strength. Go deeper, sharpen it, lean in. This is exactly right. Mastery is built by doing more of what you are already good at.
To earn the job you want, do the opposite. The next role rewards the skills you do not have yet, not more of the ones you do. Advancement is built by becoming a beginner again, on purpose.
Careers stall when leaders run the first move against the second problem: they pour energy into a strength exactly when the next level is quietly asking for a capability they have not built. Getting better and getting ahead are not the same project.
The competency trap
There is a second danger, and it is subtler. A strength is not only the wrong tool for the next game. Used too much, it stops serving you even in the current one.
We gravitate to what we already do well. It feels productive. It earns applause. So we do more of it, and the new, clumsy, lower-status behaviours that would actually grow us get crowded out. The trap is not incompetence. It is competence, over-applied.
A leader known for operational rigour keeps reaching for rigour when the moment calls for vision. A brilliant closer keeps closing when the role now needs them to build others who can. The strength becomes a reflex, the reflex becomes a ceiling, and the ceiling is invisible precisely because it is made of things you are good at.
The Dutch lens: every quality has a pitfall
Daniel Ofman’s core quadrant makes the mechanism precise. Every core quality carries a pitfall: the same trait, overdone. Decisiveness, pushed too far, becomes steamrolling. Care becomes meddling. Drive becomes burnout. Rigour becomes nitpicking. The work is not to abandon the quality but to watch the dose. A strength rarely fails a leader by being too little. It fails them by being too much, and the one you lean on hardest is the one most likely to tip.
The theory: outsight, not insight
Herminia Ibarra named this in Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader. The conventional model says: change yourself by reflecting first, then acting. She inverts it. We grow into leaders by acting like one and earning outsight, the fresh, outside-in perspective that only new action and new people can supply. Insight, the introspective kind, tends to confirm the self you already are. Outsight disrupts it. You cannot think your way out of a competency trap. You act your way out, and let the new experience rewrite the thinking.
Before a new self, an ending
Here is the part leaders resist most. To step into the next version of yourself, you first have to let go of the identity built on your current strengths. And that identity is precisely the one that has been winning.
Loosening your grip on “the operator”, “the closer”, “the firefighter” feels like a loss of self before it feels like a gain. It is supposed to. That discomfort is not a sign you are doing it wrong. It is the sign you have finally started.
The theory: every transition begins with an ending
William Bridges drew the distinction between change and transition. Change is the external event. Transition is the inner reorientation it demands, and it begins not with a new beginning but with an ending: a loosening of the role and the self-image that came with it. Leaders who skip the ending, who try to bolt the new self on without releasing the old one, end up half-in and half-out, and stall there. The ending is not the obstacle to reinvention. It is the entrance.
What actually changes, and it changes outside-in
Outsight is not a mood you summon. It is the by-product of doing different things with different people. Ibarra points to three levers, and none of them start in your head:
Redefine the workTake on projects outside your proven lane, where your signature strength does not apply and you have to lead by something else. The discomfort is the point.
Reshape the networkYour current circle mirrors your current self back to you. New, more varied relationships are where outsight actually comes from. You borrow the next version of yourself from people who already live it.
Play with the selfTry provisional versions of the leader you might become, before you are certain. Reinvention is not declared. It is rehearsed.
The most sophisticated excuse
When a senior leader does not want to change, the most respectable reason they give is: “That just isn’t me.” Ibarra calls it the authenticity trap. Held too tightly, authenticity stops protecting who you are and starts preserving who you used to be. A growing leader treats identity as a draft, not a monument.
The leaders who plateau are rarely the ones who ran out of talent. They are the ones who kept spending the talent that already paid off. Growth at the top is seldom about adding a strength. It is about loosening your grip on the one you trust most, ending the version of you that was built around it, and acting your way into the next.
Watch next
The authenticity trap, in the words of the researcher who named it.
Herminia Ibarra, “The Authenticity Paradox” · TEDxLondonBusinessSchool
Sensing that your strongest card has become the one you can’t put down?
That is the conversation I have with senior leaders every week. Start yours at Salomons.Coach.
Further reading
, Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader (Harvard Business Review Press, 2015). The source of outsight and the competency trap, and the case for changing from the outside in.
, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career (Harvard Business School Press, 2003). Provisional selves and reinvention through action rather than introspection.
, Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes (Addison-Wesley, 1980). Why every reinvention starts with an ending.
, Core Qualities: A Gateway to Human Resources (the English edition of Bezieling en kwaliteit in organisaties). The core quadrant, and how every strength, overused, becomes a pitfall.
Jan Salomons, Executive Coach & Transformatie Consultant, Salomons.Coach. Lid, Harvard Business Review Advisory Council. 35+ jaar in leiderschap, 20+ jaar coacht C-suite leiders in 55+ landen.
