The Cost of the Winning Streak
Case Illustration
All names and identifying details in these case illustrations are fictional. They are composite sketches drawn from clinical and coaching experience, not accounts of real individuals.
Nobody telling him the truth.
Serge was an admired and successful CEO of the company he had founded and grown. The sight of him in fitness gear bustling into the building after his run was as routine as morning coffee. In a decade of highly successful acquisitions chosen entirely through his own instincts, he had built something that bore his particular stamp — and everyone around him knew it.
The latest acquisition, however, was not going well. It had become something of a white elephant — costly, unwieldy, resistant to the Midas touch that had made everything else work. Serge not only felt that his reputation depended on his streak of success continuing, he felt threatened by the prospect that the latest acquisition was rocking the ship. As if sensing his sensitivity, it was a rare individual willing to challenge his spin. Even the Board was walking on eggshells, collectively deciding that the company would better weather one bad acquisition than anything that might dent Serge’s confidence. Thus the problem sat in the room, heavy and ponderous, while the social and political energy of the organization bent itself around protecting one man’s self-image.
At some point, without much forethought, Serge brought in an Action Learning consultant to help the leadership team communicate more effectively. Action Learning follows a strict process in which participants can only speak in direct response to one individual — a structure that enables deeper listening and real communication, equalizing power, and surfacing for conversation truths that may be under the surface. It did not take long for the unspoken problem to get mentioned — and surprisingly, it was of considerable relief to Serge to have it talked about openly. Everybody’s effort to protect his confidence had created a strain he had not failed to notice, and which had only reinforced his own need to project optimism and invincibility. Once Serge and company could focus their efforts on the business problem, the rather exhausting arrangement of mutual pretense vanished.
On the Hazard of Invulnerability
The illusion of invulnerability is one of the more insidious traps available to a successful leader. It begins as a preference — understandable, given the scrutiny — for projecting strength. It hardens, gradually, into conviction: that invulnerability is required, and that any visible uncertainty represents failure. At that point the leader is no longer managing an impression. They are managing a performance that has begun to feel true.
The cost is double. First, the leader loses access to honest information — because the system around them learns, quickly, what can and cannot be said. The eggshell walk is not a failure of courage in the people around Serge. It is a rational response to clear signals. Second, the labor of maintaining the performance consumes resources that could go elsewhere — and eventually produces the very fragility it was designed to protect against. The performance becomes untenable precisely because it has been maintained too well.
What the Action Learning session offered Serge was not a strategy for managing the failing acquisition. It was a room in which the thing that could not be said was finally said. The relief was not Serge’s alone — it was the organization’s. Collective pretense is exhausting. Its release did not weaken the organization. It freed it.
The winning streak had been real. The hazard was not the streak itself, but what the streak had been allowed to become: a story that the organization had to maintain at all costs, including the cost of honesty. When that story was finally set down, there was room for the actual problem. And room for the actual problem is where solutions live.
See also: Leading Authentically — the cluster article that frames this territory.