Climbing the corporate ladder faster by doing less
David Buirs is a Leadership & Executive Coach based in Amsterdam, working with managers, directors and senior leaders. This article describes two routes up in an organisation: one that runs on fear and ego, and one that builds credit with the people around you. Readers learn which four habits quietly hollow out character, and which behaviour leads to promotion and influence over the long run.
There are two ways of climbing the corporate ladder faster. One costs you your character. The other builds it. Both take you up. One of them drops you somewhere you never wanted to be.
You probably know someone who got far by making life harder for everyone around them. And you have wondered how that happened.
The more uncomfortable question comes next. Could it happen to you?
How Character Quietly Drains Away
I see the same thing over and over. In my own career, and in the stories of the leaders I coach.
It starts with pressure. A brutal quarter. A reorg nobody saw coming. A colleague going for the same promotion.
And then something changes. So slowly that you only spot it in hindsight.
They cancel their 1-on-1s because there is a board deck that has to shine. Just this once. Then again. Emails from above get answered within ten minutes. Emails from their own team sit there for three days.
They get short with people who need something and have nothing to give back. They walk past reception without saying hello. Then a director walks in and the lights come on.
They start performing importance. In how they talk, in how long they wait before replying, in who gets their time.
I have seen manipulation and I have seen bullying. And what strikes me every time is that the person doing it is acting out of fear. Afraid of losing power. Reputation. Money. The things they somewhere along the way started putting above everything else.
People who end up here, sinking into corporate politics, slide into it slowly. It is never a conscious choice. It happens because it feels like survival.
The Two Routes Up
Most of us do this on autopilot. Your brain picks a target. Make senior. Get the promotion. Hit the number.
You hit it. Brief rush. And then the feeling is gone, and your head goes looking for the next one.
There are two routes up.
On the first route you run on fear and ego. You protect your status. You chase titles. You stack up money as proof that you are worth something.
The second route draws less attention and is worth far more. You build a good career and you do good things for the people around you while you do it. You grow. You learn. You leave people better than you found them.
Both can take you a long way. They just end up somewhere else.
Sit with the question of why you actually want that promotion. Go past the answer you usually give. Find the real one.
What People Regret at the End
Bronnie Ware spent years in palliative care. She sat beside people in their final weeks and wrote down what they told her.
One thing kept coming back. They wished they had found the courage to live a life that was truly their own. They wished they had let themselves be happier. They wished they had worked less. Her observations are here.
That second one sticks with me. Letting yourself be happier. As though the happiness had been lying there all along, with something always in front of it.
Usually that something was fear. Fear of being too little. Fear of losing what they had built. Fear of what other people would think.
Nobody in that bed said they wished they had made VP.
It Happens Piece by Piece
There is no day where you make a decision. There are dozens of moments where you let something go.
You stay quiet in a meeting while someone gets treated badly. You take the credit, because the opening was there. You push your 1-on-1s aside for a deck that makes you look good. You leave a request for help sitting because there is little in it for you.
And every time you promise yourself you will be different once you are one level up.
Then you get there. Same person, fuller calendar.
Four habits do most of the draining.
The first is taking credit that belongs to someone else. Short term you gain ground. Meanwhile you make enemies with long memories.
The second is being warm upwards and cool downwards. People see it. They always see it.
The third is holding information back to protect your position. It feels clever. It wrecks trust in a way that takes years to repair.
The fourth is the slowest. You stop asking people how they are doing. Curiosity costs time, and that time now goes to visibility.
What Actually Works
Ask for feedback. Often. From different people, at different levels. Tasha Eurich studied self-awareness and found that around 95 percent of us believe we are self-aware. In reality something like 10 to 15 percent meet the criteria. Your blind spots are probably no secret at all to the people around you.
Be specific with your manager about what success looks like in their eyes. Have a real conversation about it. Ask what needs to have happened by December for them to say you did well.
Be proactive. See problems coming and bring a proposal. Do it visibly, with your manager, rather than around them. Robert Greene once wrote that you should never outshine the person above you. There is more in that than you would like to admit.
Build credit with people who give you nothing right now. That is the investment with the longest return.
And guard your recovery. Four weeks of grinding turns anyone into a shorter, harder version of themselves. Character erodes fastest when you are spent.
The Trap in the Step Into Leadership
In a new leadership role you want to prove you deserve it. Work harder than everyone. Know everything. Be in every room.
But the step from expert to leader asks for something else. Do less yourself. Make more possible. Give fewer answers. Ask better questions.
Whoever works that out early grows faster than whoever spends years trying to stay the best operator. Hence the title. You get further by doing less and carrying more weight.
Higher up, the trap changes shape. There it becomes influence without formal power, decisions made on half the information, and the weight of a call that touches hundreds of people. For leaders at director level who want to keep climbing the corporate ladder faster in a way that is good for the people around them, executive coaching is where that work usually happens.
One Question to Take With You
Think of someone you genuinely admire. Someone who got far and stayed warm along the way. Someone you would call a good person without hesitating.
You probably have someone in mind already.
Ask yourself what makes that person different. I would bet it has very little to do with a job title.
That is the second route. Climbing the corporate ladder faster and being able to look yourself in the eye go together fine, as long as you choose deliberately. On autopilot they come apart.
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