Your Lid Is Dictating Who Stays and Who Goes

Issue 14

By Debbie Lawrence

Read Time: 8 minutes

We were on a regular call, the two of us, the way we did every few weeks. He was in another province. We were both in the Atlantic region and in sales at IBM, both early in our careers, both figuring things out.

But this call felt different from the start.

Ron was one of those salespeople you recognize immediately. Creative, competitive, and hungry. He could walk into a room and come out with a relationship the organization couldn’t have built any other way. He was the kind of person who made the whole team better just by being on it.

We were part of the regional sales team for Atlantic Canada but reported to our respective provincial branch managers. When it came to Ron, he had a manager who played very small.

I’d been hearing about it for months. Every time Ron brought a different approach or a fresh idea to one of his branch meetings, something happened to it. The manager would redirect or minimize the possible impact. He’d slow it down until the momentum was gone. The ideas were great but they required something the manager either couldn’t visualize or wasn’t willing to reach for.

On this particular call, I immediately noticed how Ron didn’t sound frustrated anymore. Instead, he sounded matter of fact and decisive.

“I’ve got some news,” he said. “I just can’t stay here any longer. I love everything else about being here but as long as I report to him as my manager, I recognize that there will never be opportunity for me. I don’t know if he’s threatened by me or doesn’t get me or he’s not very ambitious but the man plays way too small for someone like me who’s ready to take on the world.”

He left not long after that.

I never forgot it.

What I didn’t understand then

At the time I filed it away as a bad-fit story. The wrong manager with the right person in an unfortunate situation. That’s how I made sense of it.

What I understand now is that it was a lid story.

He left the ceiling. The company was just where it happened to be located. And the ceiling had a name: his manager’s leadership capacity.

John Maxwell calls it the Law of the Lid. The idea is this: your leadership ability sets the ceiling on everything below it. Your team can’t outperform your lid. In addition to that, your own results can’t rise past it and the people on your team who carry the most potential are always the first to feel it, because they’re the ones pressing hardest against the top.

The pattern I’ve come to recognize

In my coaching experience with women who lead, this pattern shows up in two directions.

The first is the one Ron experienced: a woman whose own growth is being capped by the person above her. She’s sharp, resourceful, and willing to do the work. She brings ideas and they stall. She tries to grow and the ceiling holds. She doesn’t always have language for what she’s feeling, but she knows something is stuck. Eventually she does the math.

The second direction is harder to examine. It’s the lid we are for the people below us.

I worked with a senior director a couple of years ago who had a strong team. She cared about them deeply, knew their families, and created a culture where people felt genuinely supported. What she couldn’t see was that she’d stopped investing in her own development. She was running on what she’d built years ago. Her quest for more professional development had slowed down. The challenging conversations had thinned out. She was holding things together, which looked, from the inside, a lot like leading well.

Her team felt it before she did.

The best ones started leaving. They left the way people leave when they’ve quietly run out of room. They weren’t angry. They were just tired of being held back just like my friend Ron.

This is what makes the lid so difficult to see. From where you’re standing inside it, things look stable. The systems are running well and the team seems fine. What you can’t see from that vantage point is the gap between where you currently are and what the people around you are capable of becoming.

The Law of the Lid

Maxwell uses the McDonald brothers to explain this concept of the Law of the Lid in leadership.

Dick and Maurice McDonald were exceptional operators. They built something genuinely well-run: efficient systems, consistent food, and a model that worked. They wanted to grow but the business could only go as far as they could lead it, and their leadership capacity held it at a certain level.

Then Ray Kroc walked in. He was a salesman who saw the same operation and understood what it could become at a scale the McDonald brothers hadn’t reached for. Kroc’s leadership capacity was different. He could see the global version, recruit the people to build it, and make decisions that required a higher lid than either of the McDonald brothers had alone as well as together. What Kroc built has become the McDonald’s of today.

Same restaurant. Different lid.

Maxwell’s argument is sharper than it might sound. The constraint was never the product or the team. It was the leader’s capacity to take it further. And when that’s the ceiling, the only real solution is to raise it.

Maxwell puts it this way: if you rate your own leadership ability at a 7 out of 10, the people you lead can only function at a 6 or lower. Your lid is their ceiling. On average, a team performs at about 80% of the leader’s capacity, which means the gap between a 7 and a 9 isn’t two points. It’s the difference between what your team can become and what it’s currently being held to.

Nobody thinks they’re the lid. That’s the part that makes this hard because from the inside, being the lid just feels like being in charge.

The Law of Progress

Maxwell pairs the Law of the Lid with a second law that governs at the same foundational level of leadership: the Law of Progress.

The Law of Progress says that every leader needs to be engaged in a daily practice of developing herself as a leader. I want to stay on the word daily for a moment. Attending a workshop once in a while doesn’t move the lid. Reading a few chapters from a business book while on vacation doesn’t move the lid. Daily does.

I ask every cohort the same question: what are you doing every single day to develop your leadership skills?

What are you reading? Whose ideas are you sitting with? What conversations are you having about leadership, the kind where you leave thinking differently than when you arrived?

Growing up, there was a saying in our community: “You are who you do be with.” It’s another way of saying you are a reflection of the company you keep. I’ve returned to that saying many times in my work, because it describes what the Law of Progress is actually asking you to do.

Your leadership capacity is a direct reflection of what you’re taking in. Which books. Whose ideas. What podcasts. The tables you sit at. The rooms you’re willing to walk into when you’re the least experienced person there. The colleagues you’re having real conversations with, not shop talk, but the kind where you’re comparing how you see leadership and where you want to go.

You are who you do be with.

The piece I press on in every cohort is discernment. Calling something leadership development doesn’t make it worth your time alone. Your responsibility as a leader is to be intentional, with a clear picture of who you’re modeling your leadership after and in what direction you’re growing.

Who are you aspiring to? Whose thinking, when you read it, makes you say yes, that’s the kind of leader I want to become?

The Law of Progress is asking for that clarity. And it’s a daily, chosen practice.

What I do to help leaders assess their lid

A few months into my role as a Vice President I started asking myself a question I didn’t love.

Which of the people I’m working with are bumping against my ceiling?

It’s uncomfortable because the honest answer requires admitting that the constraint might be me. My range. My thinking. What I haven’t yet learned or been willing to challenge in myself.

What I changed was how I stopped treating my own development as something I’d get around to. I made it the work and I’ve never stopped. I hold myself to the same standard of discernment I bring to my coaching work and teaching, because I know my clients and students are taking in whatever I’m bringing in.

The edge of your capacity isn’t always a comfortable place to spend time. But the alternative is staying put while the people you most want to keep, quietly run the numbers and decide they’ve grown as far as you can take them.

Ron did that math. So did my senior director’s best people. They weren’t calculating disloyalty. They were calculating ceiling and once a talented person can see the ceiling clearly, if it’s too low leaving becomes a matter of timing.

Your turn

Think about your team this week.

Who’s bringing ideas that you’re not sure what to do with? Who’s been quieter lately in a way that feels different? Who’s growing at a pace that’s starting to outrun the room you’ve built for them?

Those are the people bumping against your lid.

Being a good leader and having a leadership capacity that’s large enough for what your people need to become are two different things. Both matter. Only one of them keeps your best people in the room.

Raising the lid is the work. It’s also, I think, the most generous thing a leader can do for her team.

This week, ask yourself honestly: where have I stopped growing? What have I been running on that I built a long time ago that needs to be up-leveled?

Comment below and tell me: is there someone on your team who’s outgrowing the space you’ve created? What does that look like from where you’re standing?

I read and reply to every response. And I love hearing from you.

You can also listen to this issue on The Compassionate Leader School podcast episode, which drops the same day on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major platforms. Click here to explore all the episodes.