K7 Insights
You Are the Glass Ceiling
Part of San Diego Business Coaching
Key takeaways
- The ceiling in most businesses is the owner changing direction faster than any plan can work.
- Every pivot resets the clock on work your team already started. You feel momentum. They feel whiplash.
- Consistency beats intensity. The boring version of the plan, run all the way through, beats the exciting version you abandon in month two.
You think the thing holding your business back is out there. The economy, the hiring market, the client who left, the competitor down the 5 who undercuts everybody. Sometimes it is. Most of the time it’s you, and specifically it’s how often you change your mind. Plenty of the sharpest business owners in San Diego are stuck at the same revenue number three years running, and it isn’t because they’re short on ideas. It’s because they keep having new ones. Here’s why that happens, what it costs the people who work for you, and how to get out of your own way.
Why does your business keep stalling at the same size?
Because you keep restarting. Quitting would be easy to spot. Restarting looks like effort, which is what makes it so hard to catch in yourself.
The pattern goes like this. You commit to a plan in January. Six weeks in, the plan is in the awkward middle part where it costs something and hasn’t paid anything back yet. Then you go to a mixer downtown, or you get on a call with somebody whose numbers look better than yours, and you hear about the thing that’s working for them. Monday morning your team gets a new priority.
You didn’t fail at the plan. You never finished it. And a plan you never finish looks exactly like a plan that didn’t work, which is why you can run this loop for years and conclude that nothing works.
Ask yourself the uncomfortable version: what’s the last initiative your company completed, start to finish, the way it was drawn up? If you have to think hard about that one, you found your ceiling.
What does changing your mind actually cost the team?
It costs more than the project. It costs their belief that finishing matters.
Think about what a shift looks like from the other side of your desk. Someone on your team has spent five weeks on the thing you asked for. They’ve reorganized their week around it, told a client it’s coming, maybe pushed back on somebody else to protect the time. Then you walk in energized about the new direction and the five weeks evaporate. You feel momentum. They feel whiplash.
Do that three or four times and something worse happens: they stop starting. It’s rational, not spiteful. If the odds are decent that this priority gets replaced before it ships, the smart move is to go slow and wait for the direction to stabilize. Now you’ve got a team that looks unmotivated, and you’re the one who trained them.
I call this Shiny Object Syndrome with my clients, and the reason the name sticks is that everybody recognizes it instantly, usually in someone else first.
Why is consistency so hard for owners like us?
Because the same instinct that made you an owner is the one wrecking your plan.
You started a business because you saw something other people didn’t and moved before they did. That reflex is real and it’s an asset. It’s also the reason patience feels like negligence to you. Sitting still while a plan grinds through its boring middle registers in your body as falling behind, so you reach for the thing that feels like progress.
I had this exact conversation with an owner I coach who runs a facility services company with about 300 people. Sharp guy, moves fast, and he was frustrated that his leadership team wasn’t keeping up with him. Here’s what I told him:
You’re going to have to be patient, because you can move at a speed that will drown them. It’s like when you’re roping and you get caught up in the rope, and the bull starts pulling you and you get dragged around the arena. That’s literally what you’ll do to your team.
They have to find their own willpower and their own process, and it is always going to be slower than you want it to be. That pace is the price of having a company that runs on more than one person’s energy.
I’ve done the exact same thing, for the record. Idea on a Sunday, in front of the team Monday morning, and I read the quiet that followed as buy-in.
The research points the same boring direction. Angela Duckworth’s work on grit at the University of Pennsylvania is about passion and perseverance predicting achievement over the long haul (Duckworth, Grit, 2016), and the through-line of it lands where every owner I know hates landing: staying pointed at one thing tends to beat bursts of intensity that scatter. It won’t fit on a poster. It’s still the way to bet.
How do you get out of your own way?
You put friction between the idea and the org chart, not between the idea and your brain. That part isn’t fixable and shouldn’t be.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
- Give every idea a week in the parking lot. Write it down, date it, do nothing. Most of them die on their own and cost you nothing.
- Make the pivot name its price. If the new thing goes in, something comes out. Say out loud what stops, who tells the client, and what work gets thrown away. An idea that can’t survive that conversation was never a priority.
- Set one review date a quarter and hold it. Decide in advance when you’re allowed to change course. Between those dates, your job is to remove obstacles from the plan, not to replace it.
- Ask your second-in-command what they’ve stopped starting. Ask it exactly that way. The answer will be specific and it will sting.
That’s the whole discipline. It’s unglamorous and it works, which describes most things that work.
What owners do instead
The three most common substitutes, and what each one really is:
- They call it staying nimble. Nimble means responding to the market. Changing the plan because the plan got boring is a different thing wearing the same word.
- They pile on. The new priority lands on top of the old one and nothing comes off. Now the team has two half-finished projects and no chance at either.
- They blame execution. When the fourth initiative in a row stalls, the story becomes that the team can’t execute. Four different groups of people, same result, one common factor. You know where this is going.
Where this leaves you
Your company can’t be more consistent than you are. Every ceiling you’ve hit has your fingerprints on it, and that’s the good news, because it means the fix is available to you today and doesn’t require the market to cooperate.
If you want a number on this, the leadership maturity assessment scores how much of your leadership runs without you.
So go do this before you read anything else. Find the last three priorities you changed, and ask the person who owned each one what it cost them. Don’t defend yourself while they answer. Just write it down. Then pick one plan and leave it alone for a quarter. That’s the whole assignment, and it’s harder than it sounds, which is why so few people do it. When you want help building the operating rhythm that keeps you honest, here’s how San Diego owners get started.
- Isn't being able to pivot fast an advantage for a small business?
- It is, and that's exactly what makes it dangerous. The speed that lets you catch a real opportunity is the same speed that lets you abandon a good plan in week three. The skill is knowing which of the two you're actually doing.
- How do I tell a real opportunity from a shiny object?
- Put a week between the idea and the decision. A real opportunity is still there in a week and you can name what it costs to chase. A shiny object loses its shine the second you have to write down who stops doing what.
- My team never pushes back when I change direction. Doesn't that mean they're fine with it?
- No. It usually means they've learned that pushing back doesn't change anything. Silence from a team that used to argue with you is the loudest signal you'll get, and most owners read it as agreement.