This week’s election results have prompted plenty of arguments about what voters intended, what the winners should do next, and what the losers failed to understand. There will be no shortage of confident explanations. With Democrats winning control of both chambers of Congress, the immediate political consequences are substantial. But the leadership question that interests me applies just as much to the people celebrating as it does to those trying to explain their defeat.
What does a leader believe success has given them permission to do?
That question matters because winning can change how we interpret the people around us. Support for a particular direction begins to feel like confidence in our judgment generally. A difficult decision that worked out becomes evidence that our instincts deserve less scrutiny. After enough success, the habits that helped us earn trust can start to seem like unnecessary friction.
We become less patient with questions. We explain less because the results should speak for themselves. We make commitments before asking the people responsible for delivering them whether they have the capacity. We begin to regard disagreement as a failure to understand the opportunity rather than information that might improve the decision.
Hubris often develops through this gradual expansion of what we believe we have earned. A leader can continue to care deeply about the mission while becoming increasingly careless with the trust that makes the mission possible.
The Limits of a Mandate
Franklin Roosevelt’s experience after the 1936 election offers a useful example. He had won reelection in a landslide, and Democrats held overwhelming congressional majorities. The following February, he proposed legislation that could have added as many as six justices to the Supreme Court, whose decisions had blocked important parts of the New Deal. The proposal encountered fierce opposition, including from members of his own party. It was never enacted, and the fight cost Roosevelt political support.
Roosevelt had substantial public support and a serious policy objective. Those facts did not settle whether people would accept his proposed means of achieving it. The episode illustrates a distinction leaders regularly struggle to maintain: confidence in what we are trying to accomplish does not automatically extend to every use of authority along the way.
A victory leaves many questions unanswered. It cannot tell us how much disruption people are willing to absorb, which boundaries they expect us to respect, or whether the next idea is as sound as the last one. Those questions still require judgment, explanation and a willingness to hear something inconvenient.
What Success Hides from the Leader
The same problem develops inside organizations, usually without a dramatic confrontation.
Consider a company that has just completed a strong year. The team has worked through difficult conditions, customers are happy, and the financial results are encouraging. The leader sees an opportunity to accelerate. A new market looks promising. A technology project could improve operations. A reorganization might make the company more competitive.
Each idea may be reasonable on its own. The problem emerges when the leader treats the year’s success as evidence that the organization can absorb all of them at once.
The people doing the work are still finishing what was promised last quarter. They know which systems require manual correction, which customer relationships need attention, and which teams have been relying on extraordinary effort to meet ordinary expectations. From their perspective, success may have demonstrated how much they were willing to carry. From the leader’s perspective, it demonstrated how much more they could carry.
That difference can remain hidden for a surprisingly long time. Good people will often protect an organization from the consequences of its leader’s decisions. They work around unclear instructions, reconcile conflicting priorities and find ways to keep commitments that should never have been made without them. Their competence keeps the results respectable, which allows the leader to interpret the absence of visible failure as confirmation that the approach is working.
Eventually, the leader and the team are drawing opposite conclusions from the same performance.
This is one reason success deserves closer examination than we usually give it. We are quick to study failure because it demands an explanation. Success allows us to accept the explanation we prefer. We can attribute the outcome to our own judgment while overlooking the discipline, restraint and quiet intervention of other people.
When Enthusiasm Becomes an Obligation
I recognize the attraction of the next idea. I have written before about how easily a functioning organization can feel unexciting to someone who enjoys building and solving problems. There is always another opportunity to pursue. Staying engaged with work that is already underway requires a different kind of discipline, especially when the next project offers the satisfaction of a fresh beginning.
The danger is that our enthusiasm becomes an obligation everyone else must absorb.
A leader can leave a meeting energized by a new direction while the team leaves wondering which existing promise is now impossible to keep. If that happens repeatedly, people begin to discount what the leader says. They wait to see whether a priority will survive the next conversation. They become cautious about committing their own credibility to a plan that may change without warning.
Trust can weaken even while people continue to admire the leader’s intelligence, ambition or past achievements. Admiration does not solve the practical problem of trying to build dependable work around someone whose commitments keep moving.
The Repetition That Builds Trust
This is where the principle I teach as “Frequency Over Intensity” becomes especially important.
A grand moment is memorable. It can give people hope, create momentum and help an organization make a necessary change. But people have to decide whether they can rely on a leader long after the energy of that moment has passed. They make that decision through repeated experience.
They notice whether an unanswered question gets a response. They notice whether a concern raised privately is taken seriously. They notice whether the leader remembers a promise after the conversation becomes inconvenient, and whether the standards announced to the organization also apply to the person announcing them.
The value of frequency is that it gives people enough experience to recognize a pattern. A single considerate conversation can be dismissed as a good day. Consistent attention becomes something they can plan around. Over time, they become more willing to raise difficult issues, make commitments and take reasonable risks because they understand how their leader will respond.
Success can tempt us to reduce that contact precisely when our decisions begin to affect more people. We become busier, more insulated and more certain that everyone understands the direction. Yet the organization is becoming more complex, and the distance between what we intend and what people experience is growing. The need to listen has increased, even as we feel less need to do it.
Keeping Success Answerable
Humility becomes practical at that point. It requires creating opportunities for information to change our minds.
Before making another commitment, we can ask what remains unfinished. Before interpreting hesitation as resistance, we can find out what the person hesitating knows. Before celebrating a result, we can examine what it cost the people who delivered it and whether that cost can reasonably be repeated.
We also need to respond well when someone tells us the plan is too much. If the reward for candor is an argument, fewer people will offer it next time. A leader who wants honest advice has to demonstrate, repeatedly, that providing it is useful.
None of this removes the responsibility to make difficult decisions. Organizations need leaders who can act under uncertainty, pursue opportunities and challenge habits that no longer serve them. Those decisions become stronger when the leader remains answerable for their consequences. Ambition needs a clear understanding of capacity, and change needs an honest accounting of the commitments it displaces.
At B:Side, that is the standard I believe we have to keep returning to. Our mission gives us important work to do, but it also gives us people whose trust we are responsible for protecting. Small business owners, partners and colleagues experience our leadership through what we actually deliver. Their confidence has to remain grounded in that experience.
After a success, the most useful question may be what made people willing to trust us before the outcome was certain. Usually, the answer includes people we listened to, commitments we honored and limits we took seriously. Keeping those practices in place as our authority grows is how we give the next success a durable foundation.
Success tests a leader’s principles as surely as a crisis does. In Honor Under Pressure, I explore how to build a personal code that keeps judgment accountable when the pressure rises. If this essay prompted you to think about the commitments you want to hold as your authority grows, the book is a place to take that work further.