Mojo

Transcript

Female interviewer: Marshall Goldsmith is one of the world’s most well known and well respected executive coaches. He has worked with some of the most influential leaders of recent times and has co-authored a number of books which have helped leaders and managers all over the world to become more effective.

In his 2010 book, Mojo: How to Get It, How to Keep It, How to Get It Back When You Lose It, Marshall explains how we can all become better at what we do by injecting meaning and happiness into our everyday lives.

Here we speak to Marshall about the key themes of Mojo and what it means for leaders and managers today. I began by asking Marshall, what is mojo and why is it so important?

Marshall Goldsmith: Mojo is defined as that positive spirit toward what you are doing now that starts from the inside and radiates to the outside and this is something we can all see as we journey through life. For example, I am constantly flying on the aeroplane. Well, I see two flight attendants, one is positive, motivated, upbeat, enthusiastic, gung-ho and dedicated, one is negative, bitter, angry and cynical. They both work for the same company, and they have the same uniform and the same package and the same boss, the same customers and the same everything. What’s the difference? The difference is not what is on the outside. The difference is what is on the inside.

I just went to a presentation at the National Academy of Human Resources, and they talked about employee engagement and they talked about the key factors of engagement, but all of these factors related to the company. In other words, what can we do to make you more engaged? And they were all good, things like training and recognition and money, but there was no focus on what can you do to help yourself be more engaged. And I think the key variable in employee engagement is not what goes on outside the employee, it is what is going on inside the employee. And my daughter Kelly and I are working on projects right now to focus on employee engagement to get the employees involved in their own engagement and the reason to do this is not just to impact performance at work, although that is a positive reason. It is also to help you have a more happy and meaningful life, because if you have to go to work and you are unhappy, if what you are doing is meaningless, that flight attendant may be producing a minor dip in performance for the company, that flight attendant is producing a huge dip in the quality of life for himself or herself.

Female interviewer: My next question is about how mojo affects our performance at work but something that struck me while reading the book is that it doesn’t just affect our performance, it affects all the people around us.

Marshall Goldsmith: Exactly. If you are a leader and you come to work and communicate, I am not happy, what’s the message? The message to the people around you is, ‘I don’t want to be here, being around you makes me miserable.’ If you communicate this job is meaningless, what’s the message? This is a joke. Well, why should anyone else be motivated if we aren’t? The message we send to people around us is incredibly important about our own dedication. The best thing leaders can do to make other people more motivated is demonstrate this motivation themselves. They need to come across as, ‘I am happy to be here’; they need to come across as, ‘This is meaningful’, and if that doesn’t come from inside them, it is highly unlikely it will come from inside the employees.

Female interviewer: What’s the difference between professional and personal mojo?

Marshall Goldsmith: Professional mojo is typically what you think about impacting performance. This is your motivation, your ability, your understanding, your level of confidence and authenticity. And that is what we think about achievement. That’s typically what we think about. One of the things that I have available, and you can go to www.mojothebook.com for the computer applications. One is called Mojo Scorecard and in the Mojo Scorecard you can calculate your professional mojo. But I also have a scorecard that looks at what I call your personal mojo, that is what is the job giving you, does it make you happy, do you find it meaningful, is it fulfilling for you, and it is an interesting take on the concepts of achievement and performance because it forces us to ask two questions – 1) what am I giving it and 2) what is it giving to me?

And when we start losing our mojo we have a choice in life. I call it a simple choice. I can either change me or change it. I can either make a difference in impacting the world around me and change that world or if I can’t change that world, then I have to really go back to acceptance and think, ‘Okay, well, how can I change myself?’

Female interviewer: Identity is a big part of what can lead us to having high levels of mojo. Can you tell us a bit about the role of identity?

Marshall Goldsmith: If we look at the concept of identity, we can see it as a function of the past and the future self and others and we can break identity up into four components.

The first, how do we know who we are, is our remembered identity. You have an identity that says I am a tennis player. Well, how do you know? You remember times in your life when you lost.

The second is our reflected identity. This is the identity that other people reflect back to us. For example, someone says I’m a bad listener, well, how do you know? People told me I was a bad listener.

Third is our programmed identity. That’s the important programming other people give to us impacts our lives, for example, my father had a gas station, my mother went to college for two years. When I was born almost she told me, ‘Marshall, you are smart, you are very smart, you are extremely smart’, and she said, ‘You have no mechanical skills and you will never have any mechanical skills for the rest of your life.’ Well, this programming carried on throughout my life and I finally realised I had no mechanical skills because I had been told this and believed it and it became part of the way I defined myself. And by the way, I see this in leaders all the time. We talk about ourselves as if we have these incurable genetic defects and just getting over that is a great boost to mojo.

And the final mojo element is what I call the created identity. In the book I use the example of Bono the rock star who used to be a regular guy, then he was a rock and roll fan, then he was a musician, then he became a rock star and now he is a humanitarian. Well, he is not a fake humanitarian, he has just created an entire new identify for himself and it is who he is. And I pointed out that we can change our identity and it doesn’t have to limit who you are as we travel on our path through life.

Female interviewer: Mojo isn’t just about acting positive, is it?

Marshall Goldsmith: No it is about being positive. And that has to come from the inside. And I think, you know, that is, part of that becomes acceptance again. Peter Drucker said, he taught me a great lesson, every decision in the world is made by the person who has the power to make the decision, make peace with that, not the best person or the right person or the smartest person, it is made by that person and once you have made peace with that, your life is going to be a lot better and you are going to make a whole lot more difference in the world. Very few people in life ever deeply understand this lesson. Many people go through life being constantly angry and bitter because of “them” talking about decision-makers who do allegedly strange or irrational things as opposed to saying, ‘They are the decision-makers; it is not their job to influence me, it is my job to influence them.’

Female interviewer: And how do we know when we have high levels of mojo? Can we measure it?

Marshall Goldsmith: Well yes, and again I have a couple of ways. One is the mojo meter which is the simplest one. That’s where you actually at the end of each activity measure your happiness that you experienced during that hour and the meaning that occurs during that hour.

And by the way, no one has high mojo all the time for everything. Mojo is not only just a function of the person, it is a function of a person and the activity in time. So as we go through the day our mojo changes constantly. We are doing different things in the day. At some part of the time the mojo scores could be very high and other times quite low for the same person, or even the same person at the same activity at different parts of the day could go up or down. So that’s why I like the idea of measuring it and a simple case study I use with the mojo meter is, imagine you have to go to a meeting, you don’t want to go, you are in a foul mood, but then you know at the end of that meeting you have to evaluate yourself on two questions, how happy was I and how meaningful is this?

Well, my theory is you act different in that meeting, you come up with creative ideas to increase your happiness and meaning and just become aware that the reason you are doing this is not for the company or anybody else, the reason you are doing this is to have a better life for yourself. And I have asked thousands of people around the world to come up with creative ideas when they are going to such a meeting. They come up with all kinds of interesting things. You know, pick a person in the room that would really be important for me to get to know or understand the deeper reasoning behind the presentations and I think as we go through life it is very important to break the spell of inertia. My three favourite lines in the book “our default reaction in life is not to experience happiness”, “our default reaction in life is not to experience meaning”, “our default reaction in life is to experience inertia”. We all tend to go where we have been going, do what we have been doing and say what we have been saying. It is incredibly difficult to break the spell of inertia and just by going through the day becoming aware of our own sense of happiness, our own sense of motivation, our own sense of meaning, we can start breaking the spell of inertia that if we are not careful can follow us everywhere.

Female interviewer: How can we make sure that we keep pulling ourselves out of that feeling of inertia?

Marshall Goldsmith: I’ll finish with my favourite coaching exercise. Imagine you are 95 years old. What advice would that wise old person have for the you that is listening to me now? I ask people to think about the answer to that question from two dimensions. One is personal advice.

That old person wants you to have a great life. And two, professional life, that old person wants you to have a great career.

Well, a friend of mine interviewed old people who were dying and got to ask them this question. Three themes came up. On the personal side. Theme number 1, three words – be happy now, not next week, not next month, not next year. Point number 2, friends and family, kind of important. And number 3, if you have a dream go for it. Business advice isn’t much different. Number 1, have fun, life is short. Number 2 is people, do whatever you can to help people, and by the way the reason to do that is not to get ahead or make money, it is the 95 year old’s view it will be disappointing if you don’t. Number 3, is go for it. Old people almost never regret the risks they took and failed. They almost always regret the risks they failed to take.

So, any time I suggest my clients are kind of wondering how they can determine what they should be doing, how they can get their mojo up, just take a deep breath, imagine you are that 95 year old person, say, what advice would that person have for you? And their advice is almost always the same and almost always works.