2 Copyright 2002 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.

F o r e t h o u g h t

Whats the most common behavior

problem youve found in the executives

youve worked with?

An obsession with winning and this isnt justCEOs. Its common in most highly successfulpeople, including me. When the issue is impor-tant, naturally we all want to win. But if its triv-ial, we still want to win. Even if its not worth ourtime, or its to our disadvantage, we often try towin anyway.

Whats wrong with winning?

Heres an example I use with clients: You wantto go to dinner at Restaurant X. Your spousewants to go to dinner at Restaurant Y. You havea heated debate. You go to Restaurant Y, thoughits not your choice. The foods bad; the serviceis awful. Now, youve got two options. Option A:Critique the food, and point out to your spousehow wrong he or she was and how this deba-cle could have been avoided if he or she had lis-tened to you. Option B: Be quiet, eat the food,and try to have a nice evening.

What do 75% of my executive clients say theywould do in this situation? Critique the food.What do they agree they should do? Shut up. If

they do a cost-benet analysis, they realize thattheir marriage is more important than winningthe argument. So I tell my clients, Before youget into any conict, take a deep breath and askyourself, Is it worth it? What do I have to gain bywinning? What do I have to lose?

A related problem is what I call adding toomuch value. Imagine youre the CEO. I come toyou with an idea that you think is very good, butrather than just say,Great idea!your tendency,because you have to win, is to say, Good idea,but do it this way.Well, you may have improvedthe quality of my idea by 5%, but youve reducedmy commitment to executing it by 30% becauseyou took away my ownership. The higher up youget on the corporate ladder, the more you needto make other people winners, and not makeit about winning yourself. One of my clientswhos now a CEO at a major company said thatonce he got into the habit of taking a breath before he talked, he realized that about half ofwhat he was going to say wasnt worth saying.Even though he thought he was right, he real-ized he had more to gain by not winning.

What should an executive ask rst in

evaluating a coach?

Thats easy. What do you specialize in? Whatare you best at?Ive been to a lot of conferencesin my eld, and I often hear,A great coach doesthis, and a great coach does that, as if theressome generic perfect coach for all situations.I dont believe that. Executive coaching is a veryprimitive eld. Too many coaches will say theycan address whatever problem you have whenthey really have no business trying to x prob-lems they dont know anything about. Goodcoaches specialize. Some focus on career plan-ning, some do organization and time manage-ment, some transitions or strategy. Get the rightcoach for the specic problem.

c o n v e r s at i o n

Behave YourselfChanging how people see you is as important as changing how you act.

Like many executive coaches, Marshall Goldsmith helps business-

people with behavior problems. Unlike most, though, he was re-

cently proled in the New Yorker and was ranked among the topten executive educators by the Wall Street Journal. Goldsmith hasworked with more than 50 CEOs to ne-tune their styles. With de-

grees in math, business, and organizational behavior and 25 years

of experience, he has the credentials of an elite consultant. But his ap-

proach is informal and down-to-earth, even a little eccentric. And

Goldsmiths message to executives is, if you really want to change,

leave your past behind. Following are excerpts, edited for clarity, of

Goldsmiths recent conversation with HBRs Gardiner Morse.

october 2002 3

Whats the biggest mistake the executive

client can make in working with a coach?

There are two. The rst, as Ive said, is gettingthe wrong coach. The second is to expect that itsthe coachs responsibility to make you change.Its not the coachs job. Its yours. Too many peo-ple think that a celebrity coach will solve theirproblems. Thats like thinking youll get in shapeif you have the worlds best personal trainer.A good trainer will help, obviously, but in theend the only way youll get in shape is if youwork out. I think it was Arnold Schwarzeneggerwho said,Nobody got muscles by watching melift weights.

You have a track record for helping

executives change. What are you doing

thats different?

A key thing is, I really dont hold myself up as coach as expert. Im much more coach asfacilitator. Most of what my clients learn aboutthemselves they dont learn from me. They learnfrom their friends and colleagues and family.Anybody around you can help you change yourbehavior, and they can help you more than anexecutive coach can. Lets say you want to do abetter job of listening. Well, rather than havingsome coach explain to you how to be a great listener, what you need to do is ask the peoplearound you, What are some ways I can do a better job of listening to you? Theyre going togive you specic, concrete ideas that relate tothem how they perceive you as a listener notthe generic ideas a coach would give. Eventhough theyre not experts on the topic of lis-tening, they actually know more about how youlisten, or dont, than you do, or certainly than a coach does.

What I generally teach people is, the real coachisnt me; its the people around you. If you wantto have a better relationship with your custom-ers,who needs to be your coach? Your customers.If you want to have a better relationship withyour coworkers, who needs to be the coach? Yourcoworkers.

Do your clients really change?

The outcome I measure is the perception ofchange. How do my clients colleagues think heor she is doing? Its much harder to change peo-ples perceptions of someones behavior than toactually change that persons behavior. Thats

because we tend to perceive people in ways con-sistent with our preexisting ideas about them,not their current behavior.

So, lets say the behavioral problem you wantto x is that you make too many destructivecomments. Scenario A: Naively, you might as-sume the way to x that is to tell people youregoing to change and that youll quit makingdestructive comments. But the reaction will beskepticism. No one believes youre going tochange. And if you have one slipup six monthslater you call some guy in nance an incom-petent bean counter it will conrm your col-leagues perception of you.

Scenario B: You tell people youre going tochange, you quit making destructive comments,and you follow up. After two months, you askyour colleagues,How am I doing at not makingdestructive comments? And theyll say, Gee,I dont think Ive heard any. Their skepticismgoes down a notch. You check in at four months,then six months. Each time, they conrm youre doing better. Not only has your behaviorchanged; most important, their perception ofyour behavior has changed. So now if you slipup with the guy in nance, your colleagues will likely see it as a temporary lapse, a momen-tary falling off the wagon, and will give you the benet of the doubt as long as you dont do it again.

Your approach is to simply target a problem

behavior and change it, without evaluating

its cause. Some critics would say thats a

awedeven dangerousapproach because

it ignores the possibly deep psychological

bases of behavior.

I dont agree with that. Therapy is certainly valu-able for some types of problems, but it generallyisnt relevant for the behavioral issues I workwith. Virtually everybody I coach has reasonsthat are not their fault,that make them behavethe way they do. I just tell them, Let that go.Focus on what you can change, not on what youcant. When youre over 50, blaming mom anddad is weak. Can you imagine a CEO sittingdown with people and saying,You know, I maketoo many destructive comments, and I analyzedwhy. Its because of my father. Forget it. Themessage is, youre an adult. Grow up. Take re-sponsibility for your behavior.

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