What got you here won’t get you there

I first heard the expression “What got you here won’t get you there” in conversation with a respected MSP owner as we were discussing setting up a benchmarking peer group.

The expression really struck a chord with me. It’s so true for the MSP industry as owners travel the journey from hands-on tech entrepreneur to business leader. Solving issues hands-on in a small company is one challenge, but enabling a larger organisation to deliver customer excellence at scale whilst preserving culture, morale and quality is a completely different ballgame. This requires owners to adapt their whole approach, look to new horizons and, moreover, have a deep understanding of self: what about themselves still serves the business well, and what behaviours, that were previously valuable, are now inadvertently working against their goals.

I started using the expression “What got you here won’t get you there” before I even realised that it was a book. As soon as I did realise, I immediately ordered a copy, and I would recommend it to others.

As such, it’s a professional courtesy now to acknowledge the excellent work of Marshall Goldsmith. One of America’s top executive coaches, he has been named one of the “Fifty great thinkers and business leaders who have impacted the field of management” by the American Management Association.

The book in a nutshell

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful was published in 2007, written by Goldsmith with Mark Reiter. Its central idea is simple and slightly uncomfortable: the higher you climb, the more your problems are about behaviour rather than skill.

Goldsmith calls the trap the success delusion. Successful people look back at their track record and conclude that everything they did contributed to it. In reality, many succeeded in spite of some of their habits, not because of them. Because the results have been good, those habits never get challenged, and they become harder to change the more successful we are.

The book is not about learning what to do. It’s about identifying what to stop doing. Most leaders have a long to-do list. Very few have a stop-doing list, and that’s where Goldsmith suggests the biggest gains lie.

The 20 habits that hold leaders back

Goldsmith identifies 20 interpersonal habits that he has seen derail successful people time and again. Most of us will recognise several of them in ourselves, and they look remarkably familiar inside a growing MSP.

1. Winning too much. Needing to come out on top, even when it doesn’t matter.
2. Adding too much value. Improving every idea your team brings you, so it stops being theirs.
3. Passing judgment. Scoring every idea instead of simply thanking people for it.
4. Making destructive comments. The throwaway put-down that lingers long after you’ve forgotten it.
5. Starting with “No”, “But” or “However”. Telling people they’re wrong before they’ve finished.
6. Telling the world how smart we are. Needing people to know you were already ahead of them.
7. Speaking when angry. Losing your temper, and the trust that goes with it.
8. Negativity. “Let me explain why that won’t work”, before anyone asked.
9. Withholding information. Holding back information, so people have to come to you.
10. Failing to give proper recognition. Letting good work go unnoticed.
11. Claiming credit that we don’t deserve. Taking the glory for the team’s success.
12. Making excuses. Explaining away behaviour as “just the way I am”.
13. Clinging to the past. Using the past to explain away the present.
14. Playing favourites. Treating some people better than others, often without realising.
15. Refusing to express regret. Finding it hard to say sorry.
16. Not listening. Half-listening while you plan your reply.
17. Failing to express gratitude. Forgetting the simplest courtesy of all: thank you.
18. Punishing the messenger. Attacking the person who brings bad news, so nobody brings it again.
19. Passing the buck. Letting others carry the blame for your decisions.
20. An excessive need to be “me”. Defending our flaws as simply part of who we are.

Goldsmith also describes goal obsession, the root cause behind many of these. It’s the drive to hit a target so single-mindedly that we lose sight of the bigger mission, and of the people we need to get there.

Why this matters so much in an MSP

Read that list again through the eyes of an MSP founder. Many of these habits started life as strengths.

In the early years, the owner is usually the best engineer in the building. Adding value to every solution, having the answer to every question and being the ultimate point of escalation is exactly what customers needed and what built the business’s reputation. Winning the argument about the right technical approach mattered, because getting it wrong meant a customer outage.

At £1m in revenue, those heroics work. At £3m, with a service desk, a projects team, account managers and a sales function, the same behaviours start to cost you. Every decision flows back to the founder. Managers stop bringing ideas because they’ll be “improved”. Bad news arrives late, or not at all. The business can only grow as fast as one person can think.

None of this is a skills problem. Most MSP owners I meet are highly capable. It’s a behaviour problem, and behaviour is the hardest thing to see in yourself.

How Goldsmith suggests we change

The second half of the book sets out a practical process for changing behaviour, and it relies heavily on other people:

• Feedback. Ask the people around you what you do that gets in the way. You can’t fix what you can’t see.
• Apologise. Acknowledge the impact your behaviour has had, without excuses.
• Advertise. Tell people what you’re working on, so they notice the change.
• Listen. Properly, without preparing your reply.
• Thank. Make gratitude a habit, not an afterthought.
• Follow up. Regularly check in with the people affected and ask how you’re doing.
• Feedforward. Ask for suggestions for the future, rather than critiques of the past.

The common thread is that change doesn’t happen in isolation. You need people who will tell you the truth, and someone to hold you to account for acting on it.

Who’s marking your homework?

This is where I think many MSP owners fall short, through no fault of their own. Peer groups and communities are brilliant for sharing best practice and benchmarking. But a peer group only sees what you choose to show it, and between meetings nobody is checking whether anything changed.

Goldsmith’s process works because someone is close enough to see the behaviour, honest enough to name it and consistent enough to follow up. In a small business, that’s rarely the team: it’s hard to tell the owner they’re the bottleneck. It’s also why the best leaders I’ve worked with have someone independent in their corner, whether that’s a coach, a mentor or a board advisor, who looks inside the business and marks their homework every month.

The habits that got you here deserve respect. They built your business. But if you want to get to the next stage, it’s worth asking honestly which of them still serve you, and which you need to put down.

If that question resonates, let’s talk. Book a discovery call and we’ll find out what will get you there.