Recently my hometown of Toronto, on what should have been a bright summer’s day, disappeared under smoke from the forest fires burning up north. The real cost of those fires belongs to the communities losing homes and to the people fighting them, and that deserves saying before anything else. What the haze made me notice is how far lost visibility travels. It settles on the people around you, on the ground you’re trying to read, and on your own capacity to stay clear-headed.
In leadership, the haze usually comes from the inside: from what you already know, held so firmly that it quietly edits what you’re able to see.
The Reputation You Built on Getting It Done
There’s a pattern I’ve watched emerge in my coaching conversations, especially with leaders moving into a more senior role. You’ve built a career on a specific kind of excellence: you are the person who solves the problem. You identify what’s wrong, hit the number, and execute. Your track record is undeniable, and you trust the reputation you built on it.
Then the new role starts, and what was once easy becomes incredibly challenging. Frustration builds and confidence starts to erode. You thought you saw the lay of the land, but important pieces stay obscured. The need to stretch outside the familiar, to operate in disruption, and to do it while everyone looks to you for certainty settles on you like a haze.
When that strength stops paying off, the instinct is to apply more of it: tighten the execution, add another layer of process, push harder. You keep solving the problems yourself. It feels faster than building someone else’s ability to do it as well as you would. Every problem gets fixed, and yet nothing changes. You’re cutting the dandelion off at the top and leaving the roots in the ground. The dandelion comes back, and you get better and better at cutting.
Beyond the Hammer
There’s a great saying that if all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. Leading through rapid disruption asks for more than just a hammer. Ronald Heifetz built the adaptive leadership framework around exactly this. (I was so fortunate to have him as one of my professors while doing my Master’s at Harvard, and his course planted deep seeds in the work I do today.)
He created a framework that distinguishes between technical problems versus adaptive ones. A technical problem asks: how do we fix this? You know what’s wrong and existing methods resolve it. An adaptive one asks: what keeps producing this, and what are we willing to change about how we work? You’ve long proven you can solve at the technical level. The real work now is understanding the system that grows the problem.
Inventory your toolkit against an adaptive challenge and you’ll find gaps, because these issues have no clear-cut answers. They call for different tools, responses, and mindsets, plus a tolerance for discomfort. Those have to be built on purpose.
Three Shifts That Close the Gap
The move to greater responsibility comes down to three essential shifts. Each one clears a different part of the haze: what you’re still carrying, what you’re able to see, and where you’re standing.
From learning to unlearning
For most of your career, getting better meant adding: more knowledge, more frameworks, more input. Picture trying to catch a ball with your arms already full of the ones you caught twenty years ago. You can’t take hold of what’s coming while your hands are full of what you already know.
The Adaptability Quotient Assessment I use with leaders defines unlearning as the ability to intentionally let go of previous knowledge and reassess based on new and old data. It’s one of the capabilities that contribute to building adaptability when you’re dealing with change and uncertainty. Think of it as turning on the air purifier: identify the old habits clouding the room, and release them.
Question: What am I still treating as useful that needs to be unlearned, so I meet this moment clearly instead of through an old lens?
From certainty to curiosity
The expertise that earned you the role is real, and also the thing most likely to make you miss what’s new. Held too tightly, a “been there, done that” mindset closes the door before the question is fully in the room.
Curiosity keeps it open. Ask more of the people around you, surface different perspectives, and stay patient through the discomfort of opposing data and competing priorities. Curiosity lets the situation, and the people grappling with it alongside you, teach you before you decide.
Question: What can I ask today to stay curious and meet this situation with a beginner’s mind?
From zooming in to zooming out
Operational excellence rewards zooming in: find the problem, fix the problem. Heifetz calls this the dance floor, where the day-to-day lives and where your existing skill set was mastered.
Leading in complexity asks you to get on the balcony. From up there you have the perspective needed to read the whole system: the patterns and dynamics moving through a team, where the roots of the problem live, and what the whole needs beyond your part of it.
Question: Right now, am I on the balcony or the dance floor, and where does this moment need me to be?
Where to Start
The capability you spent twenty years building still matters. It’s simply no longer the whole job. So start small: pick one recurring problem you keep solving, and ask what you’d have to unlearn, get curious about, or zoom out from, for it to stop coming back. The smoke clears on its own schedule. What you’ve set down by then is up to you.
If this article describes a gap you’ve been feeling, this is the exact territory of my Executive Coaching work: one-to-one, built around the real decisions in front of you. Click here to learn more.
