How Your Habits Could Be Holding You Back

Marshall Goldsmith spent his career coaching senior executives, and he built his most well known book around a single observation. The habits that get someone promoted are rarely the habits that serve them once they arrive. Success creates a kind of momentum that convinces people to keep doing more of whatever worked. The problem is that what worked at one level often becomes the exact thing that stalls someone at the next one, and almost nobody points this out directly.

This idea applies broadly, but it plays out in a specific and predictable way for women in consulting, where the climb from analyst to partner requires a different person at nearly every rung.

The Trap of Doing What Already Worked

Early in a consulting career, the formula is fairly clear. Say yes. Be the person who delivers under pressure. Know the answer before anyone asks the question. Add value in every meeting by having a sharp point ready. These behaviors get rewarded quickly and visibly. Performance reviews reflect them. Staffing partners remember them. Promotions follow them.

The trouble is that none of these behaviors were ever really about the work itself. They were about proving something, that you belong, that you can be trusted, that you are willing to outwork any doubt someone might have about you. That proving instinct is useful when you are new and unproven. It becomes a liability once you have nothing left to prove and everything to delegate.

Goldsmith’s core argument is that people rarely examine whether a habit is still serving them because the habit is tied to an identity that already produced results. Undoing it feels like undoing the version of yourself that succeeded. That emotional attachment is exactly why so many capable people plateau. Not because they stopped being good at the work, but because they kept optimizing for the wrong level.

How This Shows Up at Manager and Above

By the time a woman reaches manager or senior manager, the job has already changed underneath her, even if nobody said so directly. The work is no longer about being the smartest person executing the task. It is about building a team that can execute without her, developing relationships that generate future work, and being visible enough that leadership knows what she is driving without her having to over explain it.

Yet many women keep running the consultant playbook. They keep saying yes to work they should be delegating, because saying no still feels like it might cost them credibility. They keep proving their technical value in the room, because being the smartest person in the room is the habit that got them this far. They keep quietly over-performing instead of building the kind of visibility that gets someone remembered when staffing decisions or promotion conversations happen without them in the room.

None of this is a character flaw. It is a habit that was rational at one point and has simply outlived its usefulness. The problem is that the cost of the outdated habit tends to show up as exhaustion, frustration, or a sense that the environment itself is unfair, when sometimes the more accurate explanation is narrower and more fixable than that.

The Specific Habits Worth Examining

A few patterns show up often enough in this population that they are worth naming directly.

The instinct to add value in every conversation, even when the better move is to let someone else’s idea stand without a caveat or an addition, is one of the most common. It was useful once. At senior levels it can read as an inability to trust the people around you, including the people you are supposed to be developing.

The instinct to over function on a team, picking up slack rather than confronting a performance gap directly, is another. It protects the deliverable in the short term and quietly signals to leadership that the team does not need additional support, which becomes a problem when headcount and staffing decisions get made based on what looks fine on paper.

The instinct to wait to be noticed rather than making it easy for the right people to know what you are leading is a third. Great work that nobody above you understands you are driving does not accumulate into a case for promotion. It just accumulates.

Why This Matters More at Senior Levels

The stakes of an outdated habit compound as someone rises. A habit that costs a manager a bit of extra time costs a director political capital, and it costs a partner the trust of an entire team. The skills that make someone excellent at delivering work are not the same skills that make someone excellent at building a practice, developing people, or being the person clients call directly. Nobody automatically develops the second skill set just because they were good at the first one.

This is part of why so many high performing women reach a point where the trajectory that felt inevitable for a decade suddenly does not. It is rarely because the talent disappeared. It is more often because the habits that built the first ten years were never replaced with the habits the next ten required, and nobody built in a moment to notice the shift needed to happen.

The Real Work

Goldsmith’s larger point, and the one that applies most directly here, is that changing these habits is not really about willpower or discipline. It is about first being willing to notice that a behavior which used to be an asset has quietly become a liability, and then being honest about what specifically needs to change, rather than assuming the discomfort means something is wrong with the environment or the person.

That kind of clarity rarely comes from inside the situation. It usually takes someone outside the day to day, someone who can see the pattern instead of just the most recent frustrating instance of it, to name what is actually happening and help build a different way forward.

Reach out if you want help figuring out which habits are still working for you and which ones you have quietly outgrown.