What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful!

Before we get to the author's tips for assessing and changing behavior patterns, let's look at what got him here – here meaning his status as celebrity executive coach and bestselling author. Goldsmith follows a straightforward plan for his executive clients.

First, he conducts extensive interviews with people who work closely with them. He sometimes even talks to their spouses and children in an extreme form of the 360 degree feedback technique.

Next, he gathers up the results and presents them to the clients bluntly. In essence, he tells the clients, "Here's what they think of you." Often, as you might expect, the news isn't pretty. Goldsmith then discusses with them how these perceptions are holding them back. The clients may be brilliant strategists, but if their peers find them rude and condescending, their division may have trouble retaining quality people. In today's labor market, few companies can afford to lose talent just because some brilliant manager can't be bothered to treat subordinates nicely.

Once clients have been confronted with a frank assessment of how others see them, Goldsmith urges them to apologize to all the people their behavior has offended or annoyed. From there, Goldsmith pushes his clients to set out on a very public campaign to modify their behavior. Let's say the client is an executive who's known around the company as someone who doesn't listen. Goldsmith will urge him to let everyone know that he plans to listen better. Next, the client must thank his associates for collaborating with him in his self-improvement process. Finally, Goldsmith will urge the client to engage in what he calls "follow-up," by which he means periodically checking in with his associates about his progress.

All of this may sound incredibly simple, but does it work? Evidently, it does. For one, Goldsmith himself is very confident in his methods. He doesn't get paid a penny unless the client's peers decide his behavior has indeed improved. And Goldsmith has earned praise in boardrooms throughout the world. Executives from top companies, including Boeing, Goldman Sachs, and Toyota, sing Goldsmith's praises at the start of the book.

Forbes Magazine has named him one of the "five most-respected executive coaches." Clearly Goldsmith has performed wonders when working one-on-one with top executives.

But can his magic translate to the pages of a book? Can it work outside of the boardroom? Stick around, and you'll hear about what might be called "habits of highly annoying people" – habits that tend to hold us back. You'll find out why your behavioral patterns may ultimately determine your level of success, and you'll be able to judge for yourself whether Goldsmith's coaching techniques work in the do-it-yourself form presented in this book.

The book opens with a section aptly called the "trouble with success." For the author, success can be dangerous because it makes people over-confident – sometimes comically so. The author says that when professionals are asked to rate themselves against their peers, 80% of them reckon they're in the top twenty percent of their peer group – and seventy percent place themselves in the top ten percent.

All of that confidence leaves many professionals blind to faults that are obvious to others. Such people sometimes even go so far as to cling to their faults, convinced that an annoying behavior is somehow critical to their success. The reasoning goes like this: A person thinks, "I am successful, and I behave this way. Therefore, I must be successful because I behave this way."

For the author, such thinking is a recipe for disaster. He likens it to the logic of gamblers. People who engage in serious gambling tend to think that success is a matter of pure luck and random chance. When they do win large amounts of money, the author writes, gamblers tend to make poor decisions. They fail to increase their wealth, and they often lose it outright.

Why? Because they relied on blind chance to gain their prosperity – and tend to cling to the same behavior when managing their newfound wealth. They squander it in games of chance.

According to the author, successful businesspeople often behave surprisingly like gamblers. They gain a measure of success despite certain bad behaviors, and then assume those same behaviors will help them attain even greater success, when actually the opposite is true.

And it gets even more interesting. The author makes a compelling case that the higher you rise on the corporate ladder, the more important it is to adopt the right behavior. Why? Because if you find yourself near the top, chances are that you and all of your peers and superiors are intelligent, highly skilled, and motivated. But the ones who manage to advance to the very top – these are the people who make their behavior work for themselves and for the company, not against.

Having established the importance of appropriate behavior, the author moves to a detailed discussion of behaviors to avoid. He lists twenty. You won't hear them all in this podcast, but talking through just a few of them will give you a broad idea of what he's talking about.

The list opens with a trait quite common in competitive business environments – the need to win at all costs, no matter what the situation. Clearly, a burning need to win is a useful characteristic, but only up to a point. It's easy to imagine winning-obsessed people blazing through university with top honors and then rising rapidly for the first several years of their careers. They meet all challenges with steely determination, and beat back anyone who dares try to outdo them.

Eventually, one of these rising stars may be considered to lead an important division within the company. The only serious competition is someone who's highly skilled at working with others, who knows how to marshal the talents of his peers for the company's benefit. Who wins now? Suddenly, the corporate warrior with the competitive drive to win at any cost finds himself at a competitive disadvantage. What once seemed like a great strength is suddenly looking like a liability.

Another damaging habit the author points to is the compulsive need to add value. People with this habit tend to be very clever. They've moved up the corporate ladder propelled by wave after wave of good ideas. It's not that they're rude. It's just that in any gathering, they always have to add their brilliant spin to any idea that comes up – whether it's an informal workplace get-together or a high-stakes meeting. Whenever someone offers an idea, people with the value-adding trait will always pipe in with what they think is a better one.

Often enough, their idea is actually better – the ability to generate great ideas is what's made them successful. But there's a major drawback, the author argues. By always adding a new twist to ideas, these compulsive value adders take ownership of those ideas from the people around them. And when people lose ownership of an idea, their commitment level drops.

In short, by not properly gaging when to step in to improve an idea, people with the value-adding trait can seriously damage company morale. They may improve the content of a colleague's idea by five percent, the author writes, but in doing so they risk reducing the colleague's commitment to the idea by half. It's a case of not knowing when to let that jumping bean mind rest long enough to simply say, "What a great idea!"

So now you know what kind of traits the author finds troubling. But how does he suggest we address them?

Earlier, you heard that the author is an executive coach with a long track record of achieving results for some of the world's most successful businesspeople. And you'll remember that his main technique is personally to interview his clients' close associates – often including family. The author probes the client's associates to find out what they really think of him – and then delivers a frank assessment.

And here is where we reach a key point in the book: can the author translate such a hands-on approach to the page? After all, the technique relies on the work of a skilled professional. Can it be transformed into a do-it-yourself guide to self-improvement?

The author himself acknowledges that it's tough. In his own interviews with a client's associates, the conversations are held in strict confidence. The author will frankly tell an executive that his subordinates find him insensitive, but he won't tell him which subordinates said what. If the author didn't promise confidentiality, few people would speak to him.

So how do you go about getting the kind of honest feedback the author says you'll need to figure out if your behavior is working? The problem is especially difficult when the power relationship is uneven. When dealing directly with a subordinate, it's probably useless to ask, "How do you feel about me?" As the author puts it, people won't tell the truth if they think it will come back to haunt them. And even when the interviewee is a direct peer, "How do you feel about me?" is still a bad question. For one, it might lead to a focus on past dysfunction, not future improvement. Second, giving negative feedback even to a peer is difficult. Likely as not, the interviewee will respond by saying something like, "I feel fine about you," just to avoid an awkward exchange.

So rather than ask, "How do you feel about me?", the author suggests asking, "How can I do better?" This, he tells us, is the "only question that works" in personal feedback solicitation. Rather than asking for criticism, "How can I do better?" solicits advice. It turns interviewer and interviewee into collaborators, not adversaries. And it looks forward to a future of improvement, not backward to a past full of questionable behavior.

From there, the author looks at two more passive ways people sometimes receive honest feedback. The first is through what he calls a "blindside event," which involves feedback you never saw coming until it hit you. In a blindside event, someone who knows you well delivers a frank assessment of your behavior. The author says his own life changed dramatically in his university days when a professor accused him of speaking in class merely to impress. By seeing himself through the eyes of the annoyed professor, the author gained insights into his tendency to show off.

The other passive way to receive feedback is through direct observation. Don't simply listen in an interaction; the author suggests you should also watch closely. In meetings, is there someone who can't seem to look at you – who averts his eyes when you're talking, and never seems to meet your gaze when he's talking? You've probably offended him somehow – and that poor relationship might be adversely affecting your career.

Now, these self-directed information-gathering techniques seem unlikely to replace a skilled interviewer, but they do seem capable of gathering a reasonable amount of feedback. But once you've got that feedback, what do you do with it?

According to the author, it's time to apologize, which he calls the "most magical, healing, restorative gesture human beings can make." While he may be right about the value of saying "I'm sorry," the leap from self-generated feedback to apology seems abrupt.

The author very thoroughly describes how you might generate feedback from your peers, but doesn't have much to say about how to analyze it. Does every exercise in feedback automatically result in apologies? If not, how, precisely, do we figure out who we should apologize to?

The author's failure to give us tools for analyzing our feedback seems like something of a flaw. However, it's by no means a fatal one – especially for readers who tend toward aggressive behavior at work. As long as they regard their feedback honestly, they'll probably be able to figure out who needs an apology.

From there, the book moves briskly through the author's program we discussed earlier. After apologizing, readers are urged to advertise their plan for change throughout the company, and then to recommit to listening carefully to feedback in the future. He emphasizes the process of "following up" – the ongoing process of checking in with colleagues and subordinates to make sure you haven't slipped back into old bad habits or developed new ones.

The author claims that without diligent follow-up, the value of his program completely evaporates. He says he tracked executives at several large companies for many years after he'd worked with them. In each case, peers and colleagues had reported dramatic immediate changes in the executives' behavior. But after a couple of years, some executives had managed to maintain their performance ratings, while for others, performance had dropped back to old levels.

Across the board, he says, the difference was follow-up. Executives who consistently checked in with peers and subordinates continued to do well; those who didn't, despite their initial improvement, eventually returned to their old dysfunctional ways. In effect, they had wasted their own time and their companies' money.

The author acknowledges that follow-up is the most difficult part of the program. Simply put, successful people tend to be very busy, and even when they can be convinced to invest time and effort into changing their behavior, they find it hard to maintain that commitment once the program ends. The key, the author concludes, is to make the task of checking in with your peers a central part of your routine. And that's something that not even a high-priced executive coach can do for you.

Overall, What Got You Here Won't Get You There is a well-organized book that will prove quite useful to high achievers who, for one reason or another, can't quite get over the final barrier to obtaining the job they want. Of course it can't deliver the benefits of a one-on-one relationship with a top-rank executive coach, but it offers plenty of value at a fraction of the price.

What Got You Here Won't Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith with Mark Reiter is published in hardback by Hyperion.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Click here to buy the book from Amazon.