The invisible trap of success: why executive teams get stuck at the top

Why strong results can quietly stall a top team—and the dual lens, results performance and renewal performance, that shows the stall before performance ever dips.

Picture a top team. The company is growing, profit targets are met, the board is pleased, everyone owns their area. From the outside there is no problem. Look a little closer at the meetings, though, and a different picture appears: the same people speak, the same assumptions are taken as given, decisions follow familiar patterns. No one makes a big mistake—but no one learns anything new either. The Center for Creative Leadership calls this the plateau of senior teams: results are still strong while the team’s capacity to learn, question and renew has stalled. I read that plateau through two performances: results performance and renewal performance.

Results performance is how well the company hits its targets today. Renewal performance is whether the team updates the assumptions, decisions and behaviors behind those results. Strong on the first and weak on the second looks successful in the short run while accumulating risk—a risk boards rarely measure.