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Welcome to The Leadership Edge, the space where ambitious professionals learn to step beyond performance and into impactful leadership.

This week, I want to talk about something few senior leaders ever admit — how experience, your greatest strength, can quietly turn against you.

You’ve earned your reputation. You’ve built credibility through years of results, tough calls, and hard lessons. You’ve carried the weight of decisions that shaped teams, careers, even entire business units. But there’s a subtle risk that comes with that level of experience: relying too much on what worked before.

Because the more certain you become of what works, the less space you leave for what’s possible.

You’ve seen it all. You’ve led through crises, transformations, restructures. You know what “good” looks like. But that same confidence can become a comfort zone. You stop asking questions because you already have the answers. You stop listening because you’ve heard it all before.

And without realising it, you start leading from the past.

The signs are rarely dramatic. They’re subtle, almost invisible at first. Your team stops challenging you. Meetings feel predictable. Innovation slows down — not because the ideas aren’t there, but because your people have stopped bringing them up.

No one tells you this part of senior leadership: the higher you climb, the easier it becomes to stop evolving.

There comes a point in senior leadership when experience can start getting in your own way. You’ve spent years earning your credibility — knowing the answers, solving the problems, being the steady hand everyone relies on. That certainty feels good. It’s what’s built your success.

But over time, that same certainty can start to close things off. You rely on what you know instead of what you might learn. You lead by telling rather than exploring and without meaning to, you stop inviting challenge because it feels easier — faster — to decide on your own.

One of my clients, a Managing Director at a global bank, recognised this pattern during our work together. He’d built an impressive career on being decisive, structured, and right. But lately, he’d noticed that his team had stopped bringing him ideas. Not because they didn’t have any, but because they’d learned that every idea would be met with a better one — his.

Through our coaching, we explored what might happen if he stopped leading with answers and started leading with curiosity. What might happen if he began to ask more questions, to hold space a little longer before responding, to invite others to shape the solution.

The impact was immediate. His team’s energy returned, conversations became more creative and collaborative, and the way others saw him began to change — from being the most experienced person in the room to being the one who brought out the best in everyone else.

Growth at senior levels doesn’t come from doing more — it comes from doing things differently. These three shifts can help you stay open, relevant, and impactful no matter how much experience you’ve built.

Experience is an incredible asset — but only when it’s balanced with curiosity. The leaders who continue to rise are the ones who stay open to new ideas, new people, and new ways of leading.

Leadership isn’t built overnight. It’s built in the choices you make every day.

Each week, The Leadership Edge brings you one step closer to leading with influence, presence, and impact. Keep leaning into the edge, that’s where growth happens.

See you in the next edition,

Tania Carvalho
Founder & Executive Coach