What Got You Here Won't Get You There:

How Successful People Become Even More Successful

by Marshall Goldsmith with Mark Reiter

These four drills in observed feedback are stealth techniques to make you pay closer attention to the world around you. The logic behind them is simple: if you can see your world in a new way, perhaps you can see yourself anew as well. If I were an orthopedic surgeon, feedback would be like an MRI, which shows deep-tissue damage and identifies what’s broken. Similarly, these drills will identify the main problems in your workplace behavior. Once you know what you need to fix, I’ll show you how to perform the operation and what kind of diligent rehabilitation you can use to heal yourself permanently.

1. Make a list of people’s casual remarks about you. For one whole day, write down all the comments that you hear people make to you about you. For example, “That was really smart, Marshall.” Or, “You’re late, Marshall.” Or, “Are you listening to me, Marshall?” Write down any remark that, however remotely, concerns you or your behavior. At the end of the day, review the list and rate each comment as positive or negative. If you look at the negatives, some patterns will emerge. Perhaps a number of remarks will focus on your tardiness or your inattention or your lack of follow up. That’s the beginning of a feedback moment: you’re learning something about yourself without soliciting it, which means that the comment is agenda-free.

Do this again the next day and the next. Do it at home too, if you want. Eventually, you’ll compile enough data about yourself—without any of your friends and family members being aware that they’re giving you feedback—to establish your challenge. When a friend of mine tried this for a week, the remark that popped up most often on his negative list was, “Yes, you said that.” In effect people were telling him, “I heard you the first time,” which suggested that people found his chronic repetition annoying. An easy issue to fix, but he might never have learned it if he hadn’t kept the list and searched for a persisting negative. If you have the courage to face the truth, you can do the same.

2. Look homeward. Remember Gordon Gekko, the rude, larcenous wheeler-dealer Michael Douglas played in Wall Street? I worked with a real-life investment banker who could have inspired the Gekko character. The man I coached—let’s call him Mike—wasn’t amoral and unethical like Gekko, but he had some competitive fires burning within his soul that made him treat people like gravel in a driveway. They were the pebbles; he was the SUV. When I gave Mike’s colleagues a survey about his interpersonal skills, his score for treating direct reports and colleagues with respect was an astounding 0.1 percent. That is, out of one thousand managers rated, he was dead last.

But Mike put up equally astounding numbers with his trades. He contributed such vast profits to the firm that the CEO promoted him to the firm’s management committee. This should have been the apex of Mike’s young career, but it exposed his bad side as well. The firm’s leaders, who had been insulated from Mike’s behavior, were suddenly in a position to get a firsthand dose of his “lead, follow, or get out of the way” style. In meetings they saw that there was no tollbooth between Mike’s brain and mouth. He was surly and offensive to everyone. He would even mouth off to the CEO (his biggest supporter) in meetings. The CEO called me in to “fix” him.

The most obvious thing about Mike when I met him was his delight in his success. He was making more than $4 million a year, so professional validation was coursing through his veins like jet fuel. I suspected that breaking through to Mike by challenging his performance at work would be tough. He was producing and he knew it. So, the first thing I did was sit him down and tell him, “I can’t help you make more money. You’re already making a lot. But let’s talk about your ego. How do you treat people at home?” He said he was totally different at home, a great husband and father. “I don’t bring my work home,” he assured me. “I’m a warrior on Wall Street, but a pussycat at home.”

“That’s interesting,” I said. “Is your wife home right now? Let’s call her and see how different she thinks you are at home.”

We called his wife. When she finally stopped laughing at her husband’s statement, she concurred that Mike was a jerk at home, too. Then we got his two kids on the line, and they agreed with their mother. I said, “I’m beginning to see a pattern here. As I told you, I can’t help you make more money. But I can get you you to confront this question: Do you really want to have a funeral where you’re the featured attraction and the only attendees are people who came to make sure you’re dead? Basically that’s where you’re headed.”

For the first time, Mike looked stricken. “They’re going to fire me, aren’t they?” he asked.

“Not only are they going to fire you,” I said, “but everyone will be dancing in the halls when you go!”

Mike thought a minute, and then said, “I’m going to change, and the reason I’m going to change has nothing to do with money and it has nothing to do with this firm. I’m going to change because I have two sons, and if they were receiving this same feedback from you in twenty years, I’d be ashamed.”

Within a year, his scores in terms of treating people with respect shot up past the 50th percentile—meaning that he was above the already-high company norm. He also doubled his income, although I cannot claim a direct cause-effect connection for that. The lesson: Your flaws at work don’t vanish when you walk through the front door at home. The moral: Anybody can change, but they have to want to change, and sometimes you can deliver that message by reaching people where they live, not where they work.

The action plan: If you really want to know how your behavior is coming across with your colleagues and clients, stop looking in the mirror and admiring yourself. Let your colleagues hold the mirror and tell you what they see. If youdon’t believe them, go home. Pose the same question to your loved ones and friends—the people in your life who are most likely to be agenda-free and who truly want you to succeed.

3. Turn the sound off. When my clients get bored in meetings, I ask them to pretend they’re watching a movie with the sound off. They can’t hear what anyone is saying. It’s an exercise in sensitizing themselves to their colleagues’ behavior. One of the first things they see is no different than what they hear with the sound on: people are promoting themselves. Only with this newfound sensitization, they see how people physically maneuver and gesture to gain primacy in a group setting. They lean forward toward the dominant authority figure. They turn away from people with diminished power. They cut rivals off with hand and arm gestures. It’s no different than what people are doing with the sound on excerpt that it’s even more obvious.

You can do the same for yourself and treat it as a feedback moment: turn the sound off and observe how people physically deal with you. Do they lean toward you or away? Do they listen when you have the floor or are they drumming their fingers waiting for you to finish? Are they trying to impress you or are they barely aware of your presence? This won’t reveal your specific challenge, but if the indicators are more negative than positive, you’ll know you aren’t making the right impression on your colleagues. A variation on this drill is being first to arrive at a group meeting. Turn the sound off and observe how people respond to you as they enter. What they do is a clue about what they think of you. Do they smile when they see you and pull up a chair next to you? Do they barely acknowledge your presence and sit across the room? If the majority shy away from you, you have some serious work ahead.

4. Complete the Sentence. The eminent psychologist Nathaniel Brandon taught me how to apply his sentence completion technique to helping people change. Pick one thing you want to get better at. It could be anything that matters to you from getting in shape to giving more recognition to lowering your golf handicap. Then list the positive benefits that will accrue to you and the world if you achieve your goal. For example, “I want to get in better shape. If I get in shape, one benefit to me is that . . .” And then you complete the sentence. “If I get in shape, I will . . . live longer.” That’s one benefit. Then keep doing it. “If I get in shape, I’ll feel better about myself.” That’s two. Keep going until you exhaust the benefits.

As you get deeper into your list, 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 …” and so on. By the end, however, you’re saying, “If I become better organized, I’ll be a better parent … a better spouse …a better person.” I employed this exercise once with a general in the U.S. Marine Corps. He was a typical hard-nosed Marine who resisted the exercise at first. Eventually he relented and played along, saying he wanted to “become less judgmental.” He completed the first sentence with a cynical crack about “If I become less judgmental, I won’t have so much trouble dealing with the clowns at headquarters.” The second sentence was another sarcastic comment. The third time was less sarcastic. By the sixth sentence, I could see tears in his eyes. “If I become less judgmental,” he said, “maybe my children will talk to me again.”

This may seem like a loopy, backward way of giving yourself good feedback: you start with the suggestion and then determine if it’s important. But it works. As the benefits you list become less expected and more meaningful to you, you realize you’ve hit on an interpersonal skill that you really want and need to improve.

Adapted from What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful! by Marshall Goldsmith with Mark Reiter (Hyperion, January 2007).

To arrange an interview with Marshall Goldsmith,
please contact:

Allison McGeehon
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