The Exchanges

Q colleague doesn't think I'm a good listener and I go to them and I say, okay, I'm going to change my behavior. And do you have any ideas for what I can do? And they still are going to see the world through this. I could be a great listener for six months. And then that one time that I don't listen, they're gonna, they're gonna key in on this.

A Well, this is a very, very critical point. This is why follow-up is important. Take scenario A and scenario B. Scenario A, you get feedback. I'm going to pick a simple example, making destructive comments. I picked that because you couldn't get simpler. So I get the feedback. I make too many destructive comments. Okay, quit doing it. Just quit doing it. I go seven months and never make a destructive comment about anyone. Now back to your good point. Seven months later, I say, idiots in finance, stupid bean counters. How do you get anything done in a stupid company that's run by accountants? You hear me, your reaction is, he's never changed. Here's what happens, though, when you do follow-up. I come back immediately, and I have this conversation. You don't believe I'm going to change. You don't believe I'm going to change. You think, well, I went to this course, temporary religious experience. This will never last. What happens, though, two months later, when I come back and say, it's been two months, I want to do a great job of not making destructive comments, be a good team player, give me ideas. Now you think about it. You think, wait, you've done a good job. Four months. Good job. Six months. Good job. Seven months. Idiots in finance. You know what you would say then? You know, you've really worked hard. You went seven months without doing that. You shouldn't have said that.…

AI assessment note: “This is why follow-up is important. Take scenario A and scenario B.”

Q is, is how we, we give praise or sort of, uh, recognize people for their contributions in the sense of it used to be you'd run into somebody at the coffee machine or the water cooler, and you can say, Hey, you did a great job on this. And now it's more scheduled meetings and back to back and not everybody's in the office. How do you think about that?

A I'm going to make a couple of reflections on this, because you really want a couple of different issues. I'm going to give you, all your listeners, one suggestion on giving recognition. And it works just as well in a virtual environment as it does an in-person environment. And I've never seen it fail. One of my clients taught me this. He went from a six percentile and provided recognition to a 94 percentile in one year, six to 94. So what'd you do? It's not too complicated. He made a list of everyone that was important in his life, friends, family, direct reports, colleagues, twice a week, once on Wednesday, once on Friday, look at the page. Did anyone on this page do anything I should recognize? If they did, email, voicemail, say thank you, little note, nothing too fancy. If they did, if no one did anything, he didn't say anything. He didn't want to be a phony. One year, six to a 94. That's all he did. To me, you don't have to have fancy programs to recognize people. You need to have the discipline to ask yourself, should I be recognizing people? That's one thing. A second technique is start asking people a question. Tell me, what are you proud of? So when you ask people, what are they proud of? They often tell you great things you didn't even know. And it's another great way you can recognize people. So I, I think, you know, a couple of things on giving recognition. The other…

AI assessment note: “one suggestion on giving recognition. And it works just as well in a virtual environment”

Q Talk to me a little bit about how you go through that process with someone. Do you start with the belief? Do you start with the behavior? How do you get that earned confidence to sort of say that I can do this even though you haven't done it, or you don't believe that about yourself?

A Well, what I do is I give everyone confidential feedback. So every leader I work with gets confidential feedback from their colleagues. The average person I coach gets feedback from 18 people. So, you know, this is, and these reports are very, um, they're hard to hear sometimes because they're not used to getting honest feedback. And so they get feedback from a lot of people. These might be board members. They might be direct reports, peers, and then they get this feedback and they say, okay, I feel good about X. I want to get better at Y. I said, fine. Then they need to talk to, if they're not the CEO, they talk to the CEO. If they are the CEO, they talk to the board, say, all right, is this, are these the right behaviors and the right people? And they say, yes. And then the next thing is I teach people how to respond to feedback. They go back and talk to everybody and say, for example, you know, thank you so much for participating in this process. The first thing I want to say is, you know, how grateful I am. I don't know who said what. Many people said many things to try to help me. I have nothing to lose and much to gain. Second, much of my feedback is positive. Ethical, dedicated, hardworking. I care about the company and our customers and creative and getting results. And these are important things to me. I hope mine score high and did. I do not know who said what. I know…

AI assessment note: “what I do is I give everyone confidential feedback”

Q I think that's super important. Um, I want to end with, um, one final question here, Marshall. Thank you for your time. How do you define success?

A I define success is as you go through life, you have alignment between one, your higher aspirations in life, two, what you're trying to achieve, and three, your enjoyment of the process of life itself, regardless of the outcomes. So as I journey through life, I've got a higher purpose. I'm doing my best to achieve stuff that's connected to that, and I enjoy the process of what I'm doing. I won. That's it. Now, let me finish now with my best advice for everybody. Are you ready? I want everybody listening to take a deep breath. Ah, imagine that you're 95 years old, and you're just getting ready to die. You're on that deathbed. Here comes your last breath. Right before you take the last breath, you're given a beautiful gift. The ability to go back in time and talk to the person who is listening to me right now. The ability to help that person be a better leader. Much more important, the ability to help the person have a better life. What advice would the wise, ninety-five-year-old you, who knows what mattered in life and what didn't and what was important and what wasn't, what advice would that wise old person have for the you that's listening to me right now? Whatever you're thinking now, do that. In terms of a performance appraisal, that's the only one that's going to matter. That old person says you did the right thing, you did the right thing. That old person says you made a m…

AI assessment note: “I define success is as you go through life, you have alignment”

Q Do we hold any sort of self-sabotaging beliefs about leadership?

A Yeah, I think we have a lot of self-limiting beliefs. And, um, the self-limiting beliefs, a lot of these come from inside us. Basically, I can't do this. I can't do that. Oh, this is just the way I am. One of the most common problems is this is just the way I am. As if we have some real, quote, real fixed identity that lives throughout time. And I have to really work on people to change that. Even smart people say things like this. You know, I can't listen. I can't listen. I've never been able to listen. I can't listen. Well, look in their ears. Why not? You got something stuck in there? Why can't you listen? Do you have an incurable genetic defect that is prohibiting you from listening? Well, you know, yeah, as long as we tell ourselves that's the way I am, two things happen, both bad. One, we inhibit the odds on ever getting better. Two, even if we do change our behavior, we don't seem authentic to ourselves. We feel like a phony because if the real me can't listen, And you say I'm a good listener. You know what I'm thinking? Well, that's not the real me. I'm just pretending to be a good listener because the real me is no good at that. So a lot of our beliefs are very self-limiting. And by the way, this is not limited to people at the bottom of the food chain. People I coach are at the top of the food chain and they still do this. That's just the way I am stuff.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, I think we have a lot of self-limiting beliefs.”

Q How important is it to the, to have people around you, to have good company around you while you're doing this?

A Well, you know, I think it can be very important. Let me, Give you the background of what I did over COVID, which led to my last book. That is this. We ended up with 50 or 60 amazing people, and I can mention their names. They're all in the book. One of them was Pau Gasol, who's a great basketball star. Curtis Martin, NFL all-star. Telly Leung, Broadway star. We had the head of the Olympic Committee, the head of Russell Investments, the head of Ancestry.com. We had all these CEOs, president of the World Bank, just an amazing, amazing group of people. And every weekend they talked about their lives. And every week they would say, here's what I feel good about in my life. And here's what I've done wrong. And please give me help. I just help me. And they try to help each other over and over and over and over again. Well, they loved it. Why? There's no saying it's lonely at the top. It used to be lonely at the top. Today it is lonelier at the top. People are lonely out there. People are lonely. And just having a group of people to talk to where nobody's going to put you on social media, make a fool of you, where you can just be a human. One person said, I get to be human one hour a week. It's a big deal. So I think having a support group is more important today than ever. Having people that help you, that try to, you know, you know, kind of support you. They're not trying to put yo…

AI assessment note: “I think having a support group is more important today than ever.”

Q How do we learn to be disagreeable then without, uh, or how do we learn to disagree without being disagreeable? Like this is a hardware default where we're saying this and we're having a thought we're thinking in real time and we're not taking a breath now, breathing, breathing, breathing.

A What did you just say? This is hardwired as if somehow this is a genetic, unchangeable variable. Don't think that way. It's not hardwired. This can change. Anybody can change. As long as you say it's hardwired, why even bother? If it's genetic, there's nothing you're going to do about it. If it's hardwired, you can't change it. We can all change. So don't think hardwired or in the DNA or any of those phrases. We can all change. Now, I'm going to teach you something that Peter Drucker taught me, and you can share this, what I'm sharing with everyone who's listening. If you learn nothing from me but this one little thing, you're going to have a happier life, you're going to deal with differences better, and you're going to be better at influencing the world. Are you ready for this great learning point from Peter Drucker? Are we ready? Number one, Our mission in life is to make a positive difference, not to prove we're smart and not to prove we're right. We are not here on earth to prove how smart we are. We are not here on earth to prove how right we are. We are here to make a positive difference in life. If we do not make a positive difference, it is absolutely irrelevant how smart or right we are. Number two, every decision in life is made by the person who has the power to make the decision. Make peace with that. Not the smartest person, the best person, a fair person, a logic…

AI assessment note: “Our mission in life is to make a positive difference, not to prove we're smart”

Q the other points you made about leadership was, uh, working through others. And I think that's really interesting because often we transition into leadership. I mean, formal leadership in terms of running a team or an organization or a department. And we're, we're going from a job where we're a high achiever, but that achievement is often individual. So how do we transition from being an achiever to a leader?

A Well, it's very, what you've just said is one of the biggest challenges of all, of going into leadership, because we're used to doing it ourselves. Now, you have to learn to quit being right all the time, and quit being smart all the time, and quit thinking this is a contest about how smart you are and how right you are, and realize that I'm here to make a positive difference in the world. And me being smart and me being right is probably no longer the way to do that. See, when you're in school, you take test after test after test after test. You have to prove you're smart over and over. Thousands of times you have to prove you're smart. It's very difficult to stop. We're, we're programmed to prove we're smart, and it's hard to stop. So I was interviewed in the Harvard Business Review and asked a question related to your question. What's the number one problem of all the successful people you've coached over the years? My answer, winning too much. What does that mean? If it's important, we want to win. If it's meaningful, we want to win. If it's critical, we want to win. If it's trivial, we want to win. If it's not worth it, We want to win anyway. Winners love winning. It's very hard for winners not to constantly win. I'm going to give you a case study of winning too much that almost all of my clients fail. You will probably fail, and almost all the listeners will fail. Case st…

AI assessment note: “you have to learn to quit being right all the time, and quit being smart”

Q Can we teach people this or does it have to be learned?

A Yeah. And, and the way you do it is you love the process of what you're doing. You do your best. It's connected to a higher purpose. And you achieve what you achieve. You win, you win. If you lose, you lose. I tell a story, the golfer in the beer can. So there's a golfer going to his little country club. He's playing for the club championship, right? Last hole. Noisy people in front of him drinking beer. Oh, very annoying, but he concentrates. He hits a drive, almost perfect. Somehow the ball goes over into it, into the rough, a terrible lie. What happened? He walks up to the ball. A beer can. The idiots in front of him left a beer can on the fairway. He is so angry. What does a golfer need to do? Forget about the drive. Forget about the beer can. Forget about the idiots. Come up with a strategy. Breathe. Focus on the process. Hit the shot in front of you. Hit the shot in front of you. That's it. Let all that other stuff go. It's just a distraction. Don't think about winning the tournament. That's a distraction. Don't think about the results. Hit the shot. And the other thing is, forgive the other people for being who they are, and forgive yourself for wishing they were somebody else. Let it go. Don't make yourself miserable because people in front of you are idiots.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. And, and the way you do it is you love the process”

Q There's an enormous amount of research and overwhelming amount of advice for leaders out there on how to motivate other people. What do you want leaders to know about motivation?

A Well, let me give you advice for coaching. Now, I'm not going to speak about all leadership, because I'm going to speak just about coaching. Okay, you ready? In my coaching for years, I didn't get paid if my clients didn't get better. Better is not judged by me or them, it's judged by everyone around them. Now, there's a great way to test if someone believes what they're saying, ask them a question. You want to bet on it? Do you want to bet on it? Now, they say, I believe it, but I wouldn't bet on it. You know what you just learned? They don't believe it. They don't believe it. If they believe it, they bet on it. Here's the money. I bet on it. Well, when you get paid for results, you learn humility. The client I coached that I spent the most amount of time with did not improve at all, and he did not get paid. The client I coached I spent the least amount of time with improved more than anyone I've ever coached. 200 people got better, and I did get paid. A very humbling lesson. I made a chart. On one dimension, it was called time spent with executive coach Marshall Goldsmith. The other dimension was called improvement. There was a clear negative correlation between spending time with me and getting better. Well, I thought this is troubling, so I go talk to my client who improved the most, Who I spent the least amount of time with. By the way, I spent hours with him. He's a great…

AI assessment note: “Now, I'm not going to speak about all leadership, because I'm going to speak just about coaching.”

Q Let's switch subjects a little bit and talk about environment, which affects our unconscious mind and creates sort of invisible defaults in a way. If we don't create or control it, it controls us. How do you think about people's environment when creating the best position for success?

A Well, I wrote a book about this one called triggers. Triggers. Now, by the way, I, this book I'm just doing now, The Earned Life, is number 49, and I've done six bestsellers, three New York Times bestsellers, one mega-big bestseller, and I have also, though, I have published 42 books that were purchased only by my mother, my father, and my relatives, so hopefully this one will get purchased by a few people. So I've sold about two and a half million books, so somebody bought a lot of them, but a lot, most of them nobody bought, but this book triggers, I talk about that. As we go through life, there's an argument. I control it, or it controls me. That's the great existential debate of life. Two schools of thought. When we look at two dimensions, one dimension is the environment controls me. I am controlled by triggers in my environment. And what is a trigger? Any stimulus may impact our behavior. It could be a sight, a sound, a person, a thought. Any stimulus impacts my behavior is called a trigger. So one school of thought is we are controlled by our environment. B.F. Skinner, the brilliant Harvard psychologist, thought that. The other school of thought is we control it. So let's talk about four dimensions. Dimension one is low on, low on control by others, low on control by self, chaos theory. And you know, some smart people believe life is basically random chaos. Number two is…

AI assessment note: “I wrote a book about this one called triggers. Triggers.”

Q How do you think about the difference between managing and leading?

A Very interesting question. Now, I just wrote an article in Chief Executive Magazine about this very question, and what did I say? Feedback on leaders is worse and worse and worse than it's ever been. Behavior of leaders is better and better and better than it's ever been. Leaders today are more effective than any time in history. I mean, people say, are leaders bullies today compared to the past? Hello, did you ever read a history book? Wake up. We used to have things like slaves. And we used to have people building pyramids, and we used to have kings who would chop your head off for no reason. That was the world we were brought up in. Were leaders worse then? Of course they were. Were they bullies then? They didn't, there was no question about being a bully. How about negative feedback? Did you give them negative feedback? What happened? They chopped your head off, you gave them negative feedback. Leaders today are much better. Here's the problem. The standards are much different. As leaders' behavior has actually improved, The expectations of leaders has actually gone up far faster than their behavior change. So today, companies can't tolerate bad leaders because employees won't put up with them. In the old days, nobody liked being managed by a bully. Nobody liked a bad leader. Nobody likes being talked down to, treated like an idiot, but they had to put up with it. Name a ch…

AI assessment note: “I just wrote an article in Chief Executive Magazine about this very question”

Q Is the nature of how we communicate with people, I mean, the tools that we're using has changed, but where do leaders go wrong with communication in person and over Zoom? And what are the ways that we can correct that?

A Well, I think the best way to improve our communication with people is not to ask me for suggestions, but to ask them. So let's say you want to do a better job of communicating with Mary. You know, the best person in the world to help you that might be, it might actually be Mary. Ask them. You know, I can give you generic answers, but that may or may not fit your issues. Ask the real people that you work with. Now, one thing I talk about in the new book is empathy. And it's related to this concept. Empathy is an interesting thing. Up until a couple of years ago, I just saw empathy is a good thing. Sounds good. Fuzzy, warm. He has lots of empathy. I thought, well, that sounds good. And I started studying empathy. I realized it's sometimes good, but too much empathy can be a disaster. So I talk about four types of empathy, and it's good to look at all four, and it's back to your question about others and connected to them. The first type of empathy is called the empathy of understanding. Now, empathy simply means putting yourself in the other person's frame of mind and understanding the world from their perspective. Well, or feeling the world the way they feel it or all that. The first empathy is the empathy of understanding. Understand you. Understand why you feel the way you do. Well, that's good, you think. Very positive. Could be good. Could be bad. It could be used to help y…

AI assessment note: “Now, one thing I talk about in the new book is empathy.”