"What Got You Here Won't Get You There": Newly Promoted Executive Coaching

The behaviors that get you promoted are rarely the ones that make you successful once you're there.

I didn't come up with that line. Marshall Goldsmith did — "What Got You Here Won't Get You There" is the title of his 2007 book, and it's become one of the most quoted ideas in leadership development for a reason. Goldsmith spent decades coaching senior executives at the world's biggest companies and the core insight of his work is simple: the behaviors that get you promoted are rarely the ones that make you successful once you're there. I got to see this up close. Years ago, I was part of a small group of up-and-coming coaches Marshall mentored directly and that idea has stuck with me ever since — not as theory, but as something I watched play out over and over in corporate America.

Here's the pattern, and I'd bet money you've either lived it or watched someone else live it. A newer exec struggles in a role. Not because they're not smart, not because they don't work hard — they struggle because they've been successful up to this point and they assume that means they should keep doing the same things that got them here. That assumption is almost always wrong and almost nobody tells them so until it's already cost them something.

Think about it this way. A great financial analyst gets promoted to finance director. Now they've got a team. Suddenly the job isn't "build the best model" — it's "get five people to build good models together, on time, without killing each other." If that new director just goes under a rock and keeps grinding in Excel while the real issues on the team are interpersonal, they're solving yesterday's problem with today's job title. The formulas that got them promoted don't apply anymore. New dynamics are in play and they need to update accordingly.

Why smart people miss this

Past success is powerful evidence. "It worked last time, so it should work again" is a completely reasonable conclusion — in stable conditions. The problem is conditions rarely stay stable for long, especially once you've changed roles, taken on a bigger team, or moved up a level. The moment the conditions shift, past performance stops being predictive. But change feels risky and competence feels safe. So people keep doing the thing they're good at, mistake it for leadership, and quietly run their team or their function into the ground while telling themselves it's working.

So who's responsible for catching this? Honestly, both sides. Companies need to spot these transition traps and build in the training, coaching, and mentorship to help people navigate them — most don't, because it's easier to promote someone and assume they'll figure it out than to actually invest in the transition. But I'd put the bigger share of the responsibility on the individual. Blaming the company for not warning you is a convenient story. It's also not going to save your role. You have to go in with your eyes wide open and ask yourself the tough questions, because no one else is going to ask them for you — and if you wait for your boss to raise it, you'll hear about it in a performance review, which is roughly a year too late.

So how do you actually do it?

This is where most advice on this topic gets vague. Here's what's actually worked, both in my own career and with the leaders I coach:

Study the expectations of the role you're stepping into. Ask your boss what success looks like — and don't accept a vague answer. Make them describe it in painful detail and take notes. If you work in a matrix organization (most of us do), don't stop at your boss. Ask the other stakeholders who matter what a great job looks like to them too.

Study whoever had the role before you. What did they do well? Where did they struggle? What do they wish they'd done differently? No predecessor to study? Look outside your company — someone else has navigated this transition before.

Map your strengths and gaps honestly against what the role actually requires. A gap isn't disqualifying — it can be exactly what grows you into the next level. But you need to know where it is so you can lean in, ask for help, or get up to speed deliberately instead of hoping it works itself out. Tools like Gallup's CliftonStrengths or the PXT Select can help surface blind spots you might not see on your own.

Name the exact habit you're going to retire — not just the new one you're adding. This is the step almost everyone skips, and it's the one that actually matters. "Be more strategic" or "delegate more" is a nice sentiment that loses every time to "just fix the spreadsheet yourself, it's faster." Vague aspirations don't stand a chance against a familiar habit under pressure. So get specific about what you're going to stop: stop rebuilding your analyst's model instead of coaching them through it, stop taking the customer call yourself instead of sending your regional lead, stop being the smartest person answering the question instead of the person asking better ones. If you can't name the habit you're killing, you haven't actually changed anything — you've just added a slide to your self-improvement deck.

Watch yourself under pressure. This is where the old habit comes roaring back. In stressful moments, we default to what we've always done. If you were a doer and now you're a leader, stress will pull you right back into the weeds doing the work yourself instead of leading the team. Notice it. Better yet, ask your team to call it out when they see it — most won't volunteer that feedback unprompted, so you have to make it safe and expected.

Make your progress visible. If the role now demands something that doesn't come naturally — say, you're naturally quiet and the job now requires you to build relationships across the org — track it. Count the new connections you're making, the touchpoints you're having. Watch the number climb. Give yourself credit for the reps, even before the results show up.

Why Newly Promoted Executive Coaching Matters More Than Willpower

Here's the uncomfortable part: even with a perfect list, most people still won't catch themselves slipping. Not because they're not trying — because they're the worst-positioned person in the building to see it. You don't notice you've slid back into your old habits from inside the pressure that's causing it. Nobody wakes up and thinks "today I will regress." It just happens, quietly, and by the time it shows up in a 360 or a resignation letter, it's expensive.

That's the actual case for newly promoted executive coaching — not as a nice-to-have, but as the mechanism that closes the gap your own self-awareness can't.

What Newly Promoted Executive Coaching Actually Does

A good coach does a few things a boss or a book never will:

• Catches the regression in week three, not month six. Regular check-ins mean someone's watching for the slide back into old behavior in real time, not discovering it at the next performance review.

• Translates mush into a behavior you can actually practice. Stakeholders rarely say "stop doing X, start doing Y." They say you need more "presence" or you need to "delegate more." A coach's job is turning that vague feedback into something specific enough to act on.

• Gives you permission to be bad at something again. Senior people hate feeling like beginners, so they quietly avoid the discomfort by retreating to what they already do well. A coach makes it safe to say "I don't know how to do this yet" without that costing you credibility with your own team.

• Holds accountability your boss structurally can't. Your boss has skin in this quarter's number. A coach doesn't — which means the conversation is about whether you're actually growing, not whether you hit the number the easy way this time.

You don't need a coach because you're struggling. You need one because you're the last person who'll see it coming — which is exactly the gap newly promoted executive coaching exists to close, before the habit becomes the reason you're no longer in the role.

Where I learned this the hard way

Years ago, I moved from a senior finance role into becoming the CMO of a public company — the first CMO that company had ever had and the first time I'd worked in marketing at all. A lot of it I got right: building the team, getting close to customers, navigating the people who'd wanted the job and didn't get it. Relationships had always come easily to me, so that part felt natural.

Where I slipped was scope, and honestly, ego. I went from leading a finance function to suddenly owning a truly global commercial function, with customers worldwide who — shockingly — didn't all want the same thing, and sales teams who didn't either. I tried to be responsive to all of it, because saying yes to everyone was the habit that had always worked for me. I should have been far more selective, much earlier, about what we were actually going to prioritize and what we were going to say no to. We got there eventually. But we burned time and credibility we didn't have to spend, right when we needed both the most. That's the trap. Not incompetence — inertia dressed up as diligence. The habits that made you successful quietly become the habits that are quietly costing you, and you will not see it happening in real time, no matter how self-aware you think you are. The only way out is to go looking for it on purpose, or pay someone whose job it is to look for you.

So if you just got the promotion, the bigger title, the new team — congratulations, genuinely. Now do the less comfortable thing: go ask your boss what "great" actually looks like in painful detail, go find the one habit you're most likely to fall back on under pressure and name it out loud to someone who'll call you on it. The skills that got you the job are not a subscription that auto-renews. Nobody's going to check for you.

Let's talk.