Why “You Always Hear…” Is Not Always Right
You've heard it. You've probably repeated it.
"The same person who got you from A to B isn't the person who will get you from B to C."
It gets nodded at in board meetings and leadership offsites like it's settled truth. And in some cases, it is. But it's one of the most challenging conversations I have with leaders. Not because it's uncomfortable, but because there's a fundamental flaw in the logic. After all, it is so widely repeated and so often acknowledged as settled… without debate. Or maybe they recognize it and choose to ignore it.
Because the topic of that conversation should never be the person.
It should be the skills, habits, knowledge, and abilities.
The Professor's Warning
When I was a student taking Quantitative Analysis, a professor said something that has stayed with me for decades:
"The quality of a solution is only as good as the accuracy of the variables. Otherwise you can't solve for precision, you can only solve for probabilities."
That's exactly what happens when leaders apply the A-to-B cliché.
They treat a person as a fixed variable. Capable of A and B. Assumed incapable of C. And once that value gets locked into the equation, everything downstream is built on an assumption that was never tested. The org chart, the hiring plan, the succession slate and presumed future success all based on assumptions that are either incomplete or faulty. The failure to see and address that blind spot can be a career-altering failure of leadership.
Where most leaders fail is following the generic playbook and believing that growth requires being intentional about turning over key staff. It feels decisive. It feels like leadership.
But if you're not assigning the correct value to the variables, your solution is flawed. You're not solving for growth. You're solving for churn and calling it strategy.
Start With the Skills, Not the Person
The right conversation isn't "Can this person get us to C?"
It's two much better questions:
What competencies will actually be required in the future state? Not the ones that worked last year. The ones the next stage of the business will demand. What is needed to succeed with different velocity, different scale, different complexity, different customers, different decisions.
Does this person HAVE (and not yet shown) or can they develop those competencies? Not "I haven’t seen them yet, so they must not have them," but why haven’t I seen them yet? Is the capacity, the motivation, and the trajectory there?
Those are answerable questions. They're evidence-based. And they replace a limiting belief with a data point.
Notice what changes when you frame it that way. You're no longer judging a person based on a visible, but limited data set. You're assessing a gap, and gaps can be closed, or they can't. Either answer is useful. Both are honest.
The Talent Review: Formalizing the Assessement
Gut feel is where limiting beliefs hide. That's why I work with clients to complete a comprehensive talent review process. A structured way to get accurate values into the equation.
The process formalizes the assessment and then maps out:
Development plans — targeted, specific, and tied to the competencies the future state requires
Succession plans — clear line of sight on who's ready now, who's ready with development, and where the real risk sits
Workforce planning — the roles and capabilities you'll need before you need them
Managing turnover — because sometimes the honest answer is that the gap can't be closed, and that needs to be handled deliberately and respectfully
That last one matters. This isn't about proving everyone can grow. Sometimes the cliché is true, and the right move is a difficult one. The point isn't to avoid that conclusion, it's to validate it. Maybe it’s just me, but I have always felt that just giving up on someone’s potential because of assumptions is a massive failure in leadership.
When the Cliché Gets It Wrong
Here's the risk nobody talks about.
The cliché is true in some cases (maybe even in the majority of cases). It's not true in all cases. And in some cases, it's flat-out wrong. It sends you chasing a solution that either slows your progress or causes an outright setback.
You lose institutional knowledge you can't replace. You lose trust and destabilize a team that was about to hit its stride. You spend twelve months and a search fee replacing someone who needed two quarters of focused development. And the whole time, you're convinced you made the tough, correct call.
That's the cost of an inaccurate variable.
Eliminating Assumptions
This is the heart of the work. When I'm working with clients, we don't start with a template or a rule of thumb. We work to eliminate assumptions and build a custom solution.
That means:
Defining the future competencies with precision, not generalities
Assessing people against those competencies and what they’ve demonstrated so far, not against a reputation or a memory
Separating "hasn't done it yet" from "can't do it"
Making the call, and then building the plan that follows from it
Limiting beliefs don't just hold individuals back. They hold organizations back, because they get baked into decisions that are expensive to reverse.
Solve for the right variables, and the solution takes care of itself.
Ready to replace assumptions with evidence? Let's talk about a talent review process built around where your business is going — not where it's been. Schedule a Discovery Call!