MANAGEMENT SPECIAL................. Marshall Goldsmith

Marshall Goldsmith  
 

Always Be This Crazy

Marshall Goldsmith, Consultant, Author, Leadership Expert The time to make a positive change in your life is today, says Marshall Goldsmith — not tomorrow 

In his best selling book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, Marshall Goldsmith writes about a CXO he once coached who showed such remarkable improvement that he shortened the assignment from 18 months to 12. At the last session, the would-be CEO surprised the coach with an observation: “The key to your job, Marshall, is client selection. You qualify your clients to the point you almost can’t fail. The deck is totally stacked in your favour.” It was an insight, but then again, not a surprising one. Why would anyone want to place a sucker bet where the deck is totally stacked against them? “If you study successful people, you’ll discover their stories are not about overcoming enormous obstacles but rather about avoiding high-risk, low-reward situations and doing everything in their power to increase the odds in their favour,” says Goldsmith. It’s hard enough for people to change even when they want to, so Goldsmith doesn’t waste time trying to coach executives who don’t want to change. This is an easy policy to implement when the coaching is one-on-one, but it’s different in the case of workshops. Which is why Goldsmith usually starts his classes with the message that there’s a big difference between understanding and doing – “if buying diet books could make you thin, America would have the thinnest people in the world” – and ends with an invitation to stay in touch with his organization through email so that participants may actually implement positive change in their lives and monitor the effects. Why do we find it so difficult to achieve even the simplest change? Why do we fail every day to carry out the simplest of plans? Speaking at a workshop organized in Mumbai by Eruditus, Thinkers50 India and Tuck Executive Education at Dartmouth earlier this month, Goldsmith blamed it on our delusions: “When I ask people why they come to my class if they don’t intend to do anything to improve their lives, they tell me they didn’t get around to it because they’re over-committed, they’ve got too much on their plate just now. This is the ‘tomorrow will be different’ delusion. They believe it will be different in a few weeks, or month, once they’ve taken care of certain things. The truth is: it will always be this crazy.” Another factor that derails change is the ‘planner bias’ alternatively known as the ‘will power trap.’ A person usually makes diet plans when he is not hungry. But executing the plan when faced with a dessert buffet is another matter. In other words, the person making the plan and the person executing it are quite different. Then there’s the high probability of one of many low probability events occurring to derail the plans – falling sick, an unexpected guest, an external crisis. Even when they progress some way in implementing change, people often slip back into their old ways, negating the benefits. “They are under the delusion that the change will maintain itself, that it requires no more effort. Or they get de-motivated to hold on to the change because the environment doesn’t reward their new and improved selves in some away,” says Goldsmith. For individuals confronting change, it often boils down to the age-old philosophical debate between determinism and free will. Do we make our own choices or are they determined by the environment? Do hard work and dedication pay or do random chance and variables beyond our control determine where our lives are going? What about genetics and culture? “These things are deterministic,” says Goldsmith. “They are the cards we have been dealt. But how we play these cards is a matter of free will. We blame our culture and our parents for the way we are. We can change our attitudes if we let go of the past. All said and done, nobody is genetically programmed to be a bad listener or poor at giving recognition. These behaviors can be learnt.”

What Got You Here Won't Get You There Marshall Goldsmith with Mark Reiter The corporate world is filled with intelligent, skilled, charismatic people who have worked hard to reach top management, but only a handful will ever reach the pinnacle. Subtle nuances in behavior make all the difference

by Dibeyendu Ganguly CDET 140131