‘I’m not really sure what to talk about today. Things are going well,’ my client said.

‘I’m glad to hear that! But you shouldn’t need problems to have something to focus on. What are you trying to build toward?’ I responded.

‘I’m not really sure,’ she said.

And that was the issue.

Success can be achieved without the mindset and skills required to sustain it.

If you need scarcity and challenges to provide focus and motivation, you will always need problems in your life and business. And you’ll find ways to bring them in.

However, if you learn how to tap into motivation and create clear priorities when you are succeeding and have more than enough, you’ll be in a stronger position to sustain and grow that success. And, when the inevitable challenges come back, you won’t have lost your ability or ‘edge’ to manage them.

Limit-based vs. options-based decision making

When organizations are struggling for survival or to hold ground, there are limits, external and internal, that both create priorities for you and limit the choices you need to make.

When the business is struggling, many decisions, especially hard ones, are made for you.

You don’t have open-ended decisions about what to do with your money. You know you have to pay the bills.

You don’t have open-ended decisions about what to do with your time. If you’re down an employee today, you have to fill in.

This is stressful and frustrating, but it also creates focus. You just need to keep navigating the obstacles. In fact, survival becomes a skill. You get good at it.

But without change and practice, you don’t get good at success.

When you start to succeed, you don’t struggle as much. You have reliable business and options. You have fewer limits on the decisions you can make. You begin to have extra time and resources. Opportunities begin to seek you out.

Now you have to decide about investing in the business or leaving reserves, tax strategies or paying shareholders. Instead of trying to find opportunities you have to choose between them. Your ‘special sauce’ that brought customers in has to be translated into a recipe that others can repeat.

Different skills are needed.

And options reveal gaps or ambiguities in your vision: ‘Who do we want to be when we grow up? What do we want to accomplish? If we really can build whatever we want, what does that look like?’

Companies that are struggling to survive can afford a ridiculously large vision. No one (often including themselves) expects they’ll accomplish it. Once you have options and could accomplish your vision, you realize grand (but ambiguous) statements create confusion and make decisions more difficult, not easier.

Success increases options, which is another way of saying there are fewer right answers. It comes back to: What do you want to create?

Surprisingly, that is unsettling for many leaders instead of freeing.

Common responses to success

Once successful, some leaders shift into complacency. Usually, this looks like distraction. They step away from the business too completely or for too long when it isn’t ready yet. They start new businesses or chase hobbies or interests.

Businesses often collapse back. Not because it is impossible for the owner to step away, but because they weren’t built to allow the owner to step away. The owner didn’t know how to think or build that way.

Other leaders create new disasters. They don’t hold people accountable, or they take too long to make decisions, or they try to make everyone happy all the time. Problems almost predictably reemerge.

Sometimes they pick fights with people or get impatient with someone who is good enough but not perfect. They take the same ‘we must survive; everyone has to get it right’ pressure into a context where it isn’t needed.

These are all often avoidable problems.

So why do leaders create them?

Usually, these decisions make sense to the leader making them. They may be avoiding conflict, struggling to trust other people, or protecting an identity they’ve built around being needed. They aren’t trying to create problems. But ingrained perspectives lead to decisions and behaviors that tend to repeat the same problems.

Problems can serve us. They create focus and drive.

Many leaders feel like they always have to put out fires or jump back into the weeds. But this can be self-generated. For the white knight, swooping in to save the day, there always needs to be a day to save. There is always a damsel in distress and a dragon to vanquish.

Struggle tells them who to save and what to fight. It gives them focus and purpose. Crisis has its own energy, which makes self-discipline less necessary.

It’s not easy to get up and do the fifteen boring things that are needed to build the great thing you want.

Success is rarely about big, exciting moves or wins. It’s often about doing many mundane things consistently well, or at least good enough.

When the dragons are finally gone and the damsels take care of themselves just fine, thank you, that can be disorienting.

The importance of a clear sense of direction and vision

I frequently beat the drum: ‘You need to have clear values and vision.’ This isn’t just consulting talk.

Everyone ‘knows’ these are needed, the way we all know we should eat more vegetables and less ice cream. But very few organizations have either and also lead and manage to them.

When constraints disappear, the ‘right answer’ isn’t determined by today’s crisis or what will save it. It is determined by the future you want to create.

This forces the leadership and decision-making squarely back onto the leader.

If you don’t want the problems and you do want fewer constraints, you have to learn to make decisions and behave in ways that aren’t dependent on constraints.

This requires personal growth and self-discipline.

Personal growth means understanding and changing the parts of yourself, your identity, worldview, fears, habits, and assumptions, that keep generating the same decisions and behaviors.

Self-discipline means that once circumstances stop functioning as proxies for discipline, you have to provide it yourself. You have to consistently do the different things that lead to different results.

This is why I say that you can’t lead beyond who you are.

If you want true autonomy, if you don’t want crisis to provide leadership for you, you have to be able to lead and manage yourself.

I write about this in my book Train to Lead. If this seems relevant to you, buy the book. Take the self-assessment. Do the exercises. They’ll help you become the kind of leader who can build and sustain success.

Take good care,

Christian