What Got You Here Won't Get You There

Marshall Goldsmith & Mark Reiter

71 annotations • Mar 2023 • data

Chapter 4

It means letting go of our overwhelming need to win, to be right, to add value, to come out on top.
The troublemaking phrase I always look out for is, "I'm confused"—because it is so subtle and dishonest. Have you ever had this happen to you? You make a sincere suggestion to your boss: "Boss, have you ever considered . . . ?" The boss looks at you and says, "I'm confused by what you're telling me." The boss doesn't mean he's confused. He's saying you're confused—which is another way of saying, "You're wrong."
Punishing the messenger is like taking the worst elements of not giving recognition and hogging the credit and passing the buck and making destructive comments and not thanking or listening—and then adding anger to the mix.
huge potential benefit and costs absolutely nothing
Passing the buck is one of those terrifying hybrid flaws. Take a healthy dose of needing to win and making excuses. Mix it with refusing to apologize and failing to give proper recognition. Sprinkle in a faint hint of punish the messenger and getting angry. And what you end up with is passing the buck. Blaming others for our mistakes.
Passing the buck is the dark flip side of claiming credit that others deserve. Instead of depriving others of their rightful glory for a success, we wrongfully saddle them with the shame of our failure
Consumers judge a service business not so much when it does things right (consumers expect that) but rather by how the business behaves in correcting a foul-up
The simple answer is: We can't see in ourselves what we can see so clearly in others.
You're encouraging behavior that serves you, but not necessarily the best interests of the company. If everyone is fawning over the boss, who's getting work done? Worse, it tilts the field against the honest, principled employees who won't play along. This is a double hit of bad news. You're not only playing favorites but favoring the wrong people!
Leaders can stop encouraging this behavior by first admitting that we all have a tendency to favor those who favor us, even if we don't mean to.
What we're looking for is whether the correlation is stronger between one and three, or two and three. If we're honest with ourselves, our recognition of people may be linked to how much they seem to like us rather than how well they perform. That's the definition of playing favorites.
If love means, "I care about you and I'm happy about it," then an apology means, "I hurt you and I'm sorry about it."
"I can't change the past. All I can say is I'm sorry for what I did wrong. I'm sorry it hurt you. There's no excuse for it and I will try to do better in the future. I would like you to give me any ideas about how I can improve." That statement—an admission of guilt, an apology, and a plea for help

Chapter 5

If you examine it more closely, we're not really obsessed with hitting the ten percent growth; our true goal is pleasing our boss. The only problem is that we either don't see this or we refuse to admit it to ourselves. Is it any wonder our values get mixed up? Goal obsession has warped our sense of what is right or wrong.
They were chasing the spotlight. They were under pressure! They were in a hurry! They had deadlines! They were going to do something that they thought was important! Other people were depending upon them! These are the classic conditions that can lead to goal obsession. Great follow through. Terrific discipline. Awesome goal obsession. Short-sighted goal.

Preface

The journalist/novelist Tom Wolfe has a theory he calls information compulsion. He says that people have an overwhelming need to tell you something that you don't know, even when it's not in their best interest
Instruction is usually appropriate, to a point. It's the difference between someone giving you simple directions to their house and telling you every wrong turn you can make along the way. The latter is inappropriate. At some point, with too many details and red flags, you will get lost, confused, or wary of making the trip at all.

Chapter 6

Feedback generally doesn't break through to successful people even when we adopt the eminently sane guideline of depersonalizing the feedback. That is, talk about the task, not the person. This is easy in theory. But successful people's identities are often so closely connected to what they do that it's naive to assume they will not take it personally when receiving negative feedback about the most important activity in their lives.
Likewise, without feedback, we wouldn't have results. We couldn't keep score. We wouldn't know if we were getting better or worse. Just as salespeople need feedback on what's selling and leaders need feedback on how they are perceived by their subordinates, we all need feedback to see where we are, where we need to go, and to measure our progress.
change is not a one-way street. It involves two parties: the person who's changing and the people who notice it
The questions are simple. Does the executive in question: • Clearly communicate a vision. • Treat people with respect. • Solicit contrary opinions. • Encourage other people's ideas. • Listen to other people in meetings.
It's not like that with interpersonal behavior, which is vague, subjective, unquantifiable, and open to wildly variant interpretations. But that doesn't make it less important. It's my contention—and it's the bedrock thesis of this book—that interpersonal behavior is the difference-maker between being great and near-great, between getting the gold and settling for the bronze. (The higher you go, the more your "issues" are behavioral.)
This harks back to my big issue with negative feedback: We don't want to hear it and people don't want to give it. In my experience the best solicited feedback is confidential feedback. It's good because nobody gets embarrassed or defensive.
Semantic variations are permitted, such as, "What can I do to be a better partner at home?" or, "What can I do to be a better colleague at work?" or, "What can I do to be a better leader of this group?" It varies with the circumstances. But you get the idea. Pure unadulterated issue-free feedback that makes change possible has to (a) solicit advice rather than criticism, (b) be directed towards the future rather than obsessed with the negative past, and (c) be couched in a way that suggests you will act on it; that in fact you are trying to do better.
If we're lucky, every once in a while something or someone comes along who opens our eyes to our faults—and helps us strip away a delusion or two about ourselves. It doesn't happen often, but when it does, we should consider ourselves lucky and grateful.
As human beings we almost always suffer from the disconnect between the self we think we are and the self that the rest of the world sees in us
I heard a creativity teacher give her class the following assignment. She sent them out in the street and for one hour had them write down everything they observed people doing in a busy public place. At the end of the hour, each student had compiled more than 150 observations. Then she had them do it again for an hour, except they were only allowed to write down observations that they found interesting. The lists were considerably shorter. Suddenly, a man walking across the street wasn't interesting, but a man tossing away a candy wrapper on the pavement—i.e., committing the crime of littering—was. She was trying to make the point that there's a difference between observing and observing with judgment.
What's interesting about the sentence completion exercise is that as you get deeper into it the answers become less corporately correct and more personal. You start off by saying, "If I become better organized, the company will make more money . . . , my team will become more productive . . . , other people will enjoy their jobs more . . . , and so on." By the end, however, you're saying, "If I become more organized, I'll be a better parent . . . , a better spouse . . . , a better person."
In one of those odd bits of reverse psychology, it seems that the stuff people boast about as their strengths more often than not turn out to be their most egregious weaknesses. None of us is immune to this phenomenon. If it's true about our friends, it's probably true about us. Listen to yourself. What do you boast about? It's quite possible that if you assess this alleged "strength" as closely as your friends do, it's really a weakness. You shouldn't be bragging about it at all. In a perverse way, you've given yourself some of the most honest feedback of all. I don't want to twist this into knots of psychobabble, but the same lesson might be on display when you make self-deprecating remarks. When a colleague at a meeting starts off by saying, "Maybe I'm no expert on inventory control . . ." you can be sure that the comments that follow will suggest that he does think of himself as an expert on inventory control. When a friend launches into an argument by saying, "I probably wasn't paying attention . . ." you can be sure that he's planning to show you that he was paying closer attention than you ever suspected. The one that really perks up my ears is, "I don't have any ego invested in this." You know immediately that the issue is all about ego.
These five examples of observed feedback are stealth techniques to make you pay closer attention to the world around you. When you make a list of people's comments about you and rank them as negative or positive, you're tuning in the world with two new weapons: Judgment and purpose. When you turn off the sound, you're increasing your sensitivity to others by counterintuitively eliminating the precious sense of hearing. When you try the sentence completion technique, you're using retrograde analysis—that is, seeing the end result and then identifying the skill you'll need to achieve it. When you challenge the accuracy of your self-aggrandizing remarks, you're flipping your world upside down—and seeing that you're no different from anyone else. Finally, when you check out how your behavior is working at home, you realize not only what you need to change but why it matters so much.

Chapter 7

In Harvey Penick's Little Red Book, there is a brief story titled "The Magic Move." It's Penick's indelible description of the cornerstone of the golf swing—the weight transfer from left to right foot as we take the club back and then the transfer back to the left foot as we bring our right elbow down and swing the club through the ball. If you learn this, says Penick, "you will hit the ball as if by magic."
Dear Vince, As Vito Corleone said when he sat down with the Five Families, "How did it come to this?" I read your letter a few minutes ago and, in a first effort to change—i.e., being more responsive—I am writing to address the charges. As I see it, there are three. To the first count of not calling you back, you are right, absolutely right. It is rude. It is not how a friend, or even a solid citizen, behaves. I should know better. It sends an unfortunate and incorrect message that I don't care about you. (If it makes you feel better, I am democratic about this particular failing. I don't call back my mother, my brother, and my in-laws. My wife says, "Me too." This is hardly something to brag about—just a minuscule point of honor on my part to assure you that you are not in the bottom half of some imaginary call-back priority list. Apparently, I don't have one. I treat everyone equally—which is to say, rudely.) For this I apologize to you. And I will change that. To the second count of being a poor host when you were at my house, I certainly did not intend to ignore you or leave you out of the conversation. That said, what I remember is not the point. It's what you felt that matters, and this is especially pertinent when the issue is hospitality extended or withheld. As Boston Celtics coach Red Auerbach used to say about coaching his players, "It's not what you say, it's what they hear." You obviously didn't enjoy the evening, and for that I apologize. I like to think of myself as a decent and caring and generous host, and I will take your comments as a signal to do better. To the third count of my never initiating a phone call to friends, again you are right, absolutely right. Some people, as you say, like to work at friendship. Others don't. Of all the charges you level at me, the third is the one that pains me most—because it is true and because it is so easily fixed. You are not the first to point this out. I guess I could wander back into my childhood to figure out why I act this way, but looking backward, seeking out scapegoats, is a fool's errand. I'm 52 years old. I can't blame my mother or my upbringing or that lousy tuna sandwich in third grade. All I can do is promise to fix my behavior, one step at a time—by taking my cues from you, by doing the things you say a good friend does. Hopefully, my rehabilitation starts with you. The evidence notwithstanding, I do value our friendship. Tremendously. We have too many years of laughs and good times and neighboring and genuine caring for each other to let our friendship slip away because I am a schmuck in an area where you least value that kind of behavior. All I can ask is your forgiveness. If you can grant me that, I do not expect us to return to things the way they were. I think we should aim higher. I would want us to return to things as they should be, where I can aspire to the ideal of friendship that you have described in your honest, painfully honest, letter to me. Shall we discuss this over a bottle of red?

Chapter 8

"It's a lot harder to change people's perception of your behavior than it is to change your behavior. In fact, I calculate that you have to get 100% better in order to get 10% credit for it from your coworkers." The logic behind this is, as I've explained in Chapter 3, cognitive dissonance: To recap, we view people in a manner that is consistent with our previous existing stereotypes, whether it is positive or negative. If I think you're an arrogant jerk, everything you do will be filtered through that perception. If you do something wonderful and saintly, I will regard it as the exception to the rule; you're still an arrogant jerk. Within that framework it's almost impossible for us to be perceived as improving, no matter how hard we try. However, the odds improve considerably if you tell people that you are trying to change. Suddenly, your efforts are on their radar screen. You're beginning to chip away at their preconceptions. Your odds improve again if you tell everyone how hard you're trying, and repeat the message week after week. Your odds improve even more if you ask everyone for ideas to help you get better. Now your coworkers become invested in you; they pay attention to you to see if you're paying attention to their suggestions. Eventually the message sinks in and people start to accept the possibility of a new improved you. It's a little like the tree falling in the forest. If no one hears the thud, does it make a sound? The apology and the announcement that you're trying to change are your way of pointing everyone in the direction of the tree.
It's simple. You committed "one, two, three, seven." You failed to appreciate that every successful project goes through seven phases: The first is assessing the situation; the second is isolating the problem; the third is formulating. But there are three more phases before you get to the seventh, implementation. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't pay close attention to phases four, five, and six—the vital period when you approach your coworkers to secure the all-important political buy-in to your plans. In each phase you must target a different constituency. In phase 4, you woo up—to get your superiors to approve. In phase 5, you woo laterally—to get your peers to agree. In phase 6, you woo down—to get your direct reports to accept. These three phases are the sine qua non of getting things done. You cannot skip or skim over them. You have to give them as much, if not more, attention, as you do phases one, two, three, and seven. If you don't, you may as well be working alone in a locked room where no one sees you, hears you, or knows you exist. That's the guaranteed result of committing "one, two, three, seven."
It's no different when you're attempting to change. Like a politician making headlines for introducing new legislation, if you have a new initiative at work, you have to do something dramatic to announce it. (Reagan taught us that.) For sheer drama, apologizing fits the bill. What could be more theatrical than telling people that you're sorry for some transgression and you'll try to do better in the future, especially people who think you cannot change? Don't stop there. You can't just apologize and say you're trying to do better just once. You have to drill it into people repeatedly, until they've internalized the concept. It's the reason politicians in a hard election campaign run the same ads over and over again. Repeating their message—relentlessly—works; it sinks the message deeper into our brains.

Chapter 9

Whereas most people think of listening as something we do during those moments when we are not talking, Frances Hesselbine knows that listening is a two-part maneuver. There's the part where we actually listen. And there's the part where we speak. Speaking establishes how we are perceived as a listener. What we say is proof of how well we listen. They are two sides of the same coin.
Bill Clinton was the absolute master at this. My wife and I had several opportunities see the President in action in public forums. It didn't matter if you were a head of state or a bell clerk, when you were talking with Bill Clinton he acted as if you were the only person in the room. Every fiber of his being, from his eyes to his body language, communicated that he was locked into what you were saying. He conveyed how important you were, not how important he was.
He learned what Frances Hesselbein knew—that people's opinions of our listening ability are largely shaped by the decisions we make immediately after asking, "Is it worth it?" Do we speak or shut up? Do we argue or simply say, "Thank you"? Do we add our needless two cents or bite our tongue? Do we rate the comments or simply acknowledge them?
The implications of "Is it worth it?" are profound—and go beyond listening. In effect, you are taking the age-old question of self-interest, "What's in it for me?" one step further to ask, "What's in it for him?" That's a profound consequential leap of thought. Suddenly, you're seeing the bigger picture.
I ask them to close their eyes and count slowly to fifty with one simple goal: They cannot let another thought intrude into their mind. They must concentrate on maintaining the count.
Active in the sense that there's a purpose to your listening.

Chapter 10

The best thing about saying "Thank you" is that it creates closure in any potentially explosive discussion. What can you say after someone thanks you? You can't argue with them. You can't try to prove them wrong. You can't trump them or get angry or ignore them. The only response is to utter two of the most gracious, inviting, and sweet words in the language: "You're welcome."
This isn't just an exercise in making yourself and other people feel good (although that's a worthwhile therapeutic). Writing a thank you note forces you to confront the humbling fact that you have not achieved your success alone. You had help along the way.

Chapter 11

For example, that first client who had a problem sharing and including his peers went to each colleague and said the following: "Last month I told you that I would try to get better at being more inclusive. You gave me some ideas and I would like to know if you think I have effectively put them into practice." That question forces his colleagues to stop what they're doing and, once again, think about his efforts to change, mentally gauge his progress, and keep him focused on continued improvement.
By repeating the question—turning "How'm I doing" into his personal slogan—Koch was imprinting his efforts in the citizens' minds and reminding them that improving New York City was an ongoing process, not an overnight miracle (which helps explain why he was New York's last three-term mayor).
Follow-up is how you measure your progress. Follow-up is how we remind people that we're making an effort to change, and that they are helping us. Follow-up is how our efforts eventually get imprinted on our colleagues' minds. Follow-up is how we erase our coworkers' skepticism that we can change. Follow-up is how we acknowledge to ourselves and others that getting better is an ongoing process, not a temporary religious conversion. More than anything, follow-up makes us do it. It gives us the momentum, even the courage, to go beyond understanding what we need to do to change and actually do it, because in engaging in the follow-up process, we are changing.
This taught me a second lesson: There is an enormous disconnect between understanding and doing. Most leadership development revolves around one huge false assumption: If people understand, then they will do. That's not true. Most of us understand, we just don't do. For example, we all understand that being grossly overweight is bad for our health, but not all of us actually do anything to change our condition.
My conclusion was swift and unequivocal: People don't get better without follow-up. That was lesson three. In hindsight, it makes perfect sense—and echoes the Peter Drucker prediction that "the leader of the future will be a person who knows how to ask." If nothing else, these studies show that leaders who ask for input on a regular basis are seen as increasing in effectiveness. Leaders who don't follow up are not necessarily bad leaders. They are just not perceived as getting better.
The Hawthorne Effect posits that productivity tends to increase when workers believe that their bosses are showing a greater interest and involvement in their work. In its most elemental form, it's the reason employees are more alert at their job when they know the boss is watching. In its more subtle forms, it's the reason entire factory floors work harder with greater morale when they see that their bosses care about their welfare.
an event. Historically, much of executive development has focused on the importance of an event—whether it's in the form of a training program, a motivational speech, or an intense executive retreat. My experience with the eight companies proves that real leadership development involves a process that takes time. It doesn't happen in a day. Nor can you "get it" in the form of a nitroglycerin tablet.

Chapter 12

In my scheme of things, feedforward is a dramatic improvement on what we traditionally think of as feedback. It grew out of a discussion I had with Jon Katzenbach in the early 1990s. We were frustrated with the limitations of the usual corporate feedback mechanisms to find out areas of improvement in an organization, such as the questionnaires that forced people to relive the past over and over again—the discussions among colleagues that descended into nightmarish arguments about who did what to whom way back when. As I hope I made clear in my brief history of feedback in Chapter 6, feedback has its virtues. It's a great tool for determining what happened in the past and what's going on in an organization. It's no different than reading history, which teaches us how we all arrived here right now in this moment. Like reading history, it provides us with facts about the past but not necessarily ideas for the future
It works because helping people be "right" is more productive than proving them "wrong." Unlike feedback, which often introduces a discussion of mistakes and shortfalls, feedforward focuses on solutions, not problems.
The concept really is as simple as it sounds. Instead of rehashing a past that cannot be changed, feedforward encourages you to spend time creating a future by (a) asking for suggestions for the future, (b) listening to ideas, and (c) just saying thank you. Its strongest element, by far, is that it doesn't permit you to bring up the past—ever. It forces you to let go of the past.

Chapter 13

I make it easy on myself. I don't place sucker bets. I only work with clients who have an extremely high potential of succeeding. Why would anyone want to operate any other way?
If you study successful people, you'll discover that their stories are not so much about overcoming enormous obstacles and handicaps but rather about avoiding high-risk, low-reward situations and doing everything in their power to increase the odds in their favor
You have to be careful with feedback. Conducted properly, feedback is not deceptive. It reveals what's on people's minds. But it can be misinterpreted (you see only what you want to see) or misread (you see something that isn't there).
Keep this in mind. Sometimes feedback reveals a symptom, not a disease. A symptom is a headache; give it time and it goes away. A brain tumor, on the other hand, can't be ignored. It needs treatment.
"If you want something done right, give it to a busy person."
In golf, for example, it is common wisdom that 70 percent of all shots take place within 100 yards of the pin. It's called the short game, and it involves pitching, chipping, hitting out of sand traps, and putting. If you want to lower your score, focus on fixing your short game; it represents at least 70 percent of your score. Yet if you go to a golf course you'll see very few people practicing their short game.
The numbers don't lie, and yet even the most avid golfers hide from the truth and refuse to fix what really needs fixing. (My hunch is that hitting balls out of sand traps all day is simply not as much fun as taking big swipes at the ball off the tee. But who am I to judge?) If golfers really wanted to stack the deck in their favor, they'd spend three hours on their short game for every hour they spend trying to hit the ball a mile. Still few do. It would take a stern golf teacher standing over them every day to enforce the practice routines they know they should be pursuing.
They mistakenly estimate: • Time: It takes a lot longer than they expected. They don't have time to do it. • Effort: It's harder than they expected. It's not worth all the effort. • Distractions: They do not expect a "crisis" to emerge that will prevent them from staying with the program. • Rewards: After they see some improvement, they don't get the response from others that they expected. People don't immediately love the new improved person they've become. • Maintenance: Once they hit their goal, people forget how hard it is to stay in shape. Not expecting that they'll have to stick with the program for life, they slowly backslide or give up completely.
People commonly fear that if they get better at X they'll get worse at Y—as if improvement is a zero-sum game. Not true

Chapter 14

In effect, he's instructing the audience on how to deal with him.
I'm good with people and even better with ideas. If clients have a problem, it's my job to come up with a creative solution. I'm bad at everything else. I hate paperwork. I find it hard to perform the usual courtesies that clients expect of a personal services business. I don't follow up with thank you notes. I don't remember birthdays. I dread picking up the phone, because it's always someone with a problem, never someone calling to say that a huge check is on its way to me or that I've won the lottery. You need to know this about me. I have a pretty good idea how the business is doing, but I don't like budgets and expense reports and projections. People think I'm an unmade bed as a manager, and they're right. I'm not bragging or being self-deprecating. It's the truth.
On the personal side, I'm a decent, polite human being. I'll never yell at you. When things are going well and we've pulled off a few miracles in a row, I begin to think I'm one of the funniest, most charming people on earth. You may find my humor caustic at these times. Please don't take it personally. Better yet, tell me I'm out of line. I have a relaxed laissez-faire personality, and the more hectic things get, the calmer I get. That's my peculiar reflex to pressure. Don't misinterpret this cool demeanor to mean that I don't care. I care a lot. I only expect one thing of you: I want you to do as much of my job as you can handle. The less I have to do the better. Do that and we will succeed magnificently together.
Remember this the next time you find yourself trapped by a needy, demanding staff. If they need too much of your time, you can't just tell them to stop bothering you. You have to wean them away and make it seem like it's their idea. Let them figure out what they should be doing on their own. Let them tell you where you're not needed. There's a fine line between legitimate face time and get-out-of-my-face time. It's up to you as boss to make the troops face that.
These transformations require time to take hold with the people assessing you. As I say, you have to change 100 percent to get 10 percent credit for it
the failure of managers to see the enormous disconnect between understanding and doing
Most leadership development revolves around one huge false assumption—that if people understand then they will do. That's not true. Most of us understand, we just don't do
The shelf life of knowledge, especially technical knowledge, is continuously shrinking. And so free agents respond by moving on to new challenges that enhance their knowledge and let them outpace the shrinking value of their experience—and in turn reward them with more satisfaction and, quite possibly, more money.
Casey Stengel liked to point out that on any baseball team, one third of the players loved the manager, one third hated him, and one third were undecided. "The secret to managing a ballclub," said Stengel, "was to keep the third who hated you from getting together with the third who were undecided."