Book: What got you here won’t get you there

What got you here won’t get you there.
author:  Marshall Goldsmith

This book tackles a subject we don’t think about often.  How successful people can get to the next level – or why they don’t.

You are successful, your behaviors got you to where you are now, be it a team leader, director, technical guru, or just having landed that job over 500 other applicants.  But they may not get you to the next step.

Unbeknownst to us, our successful behaviors also exhibit flaws.  Flaws that can hold us back from the next level of success.  It could be the next promotion or simply the next challenge.  Maybe phase 1 of the project was ahead of schedule – but things are just heating up.

The review:

The book is divided in four sections.  The trouble with success, Twenty habits that hold you back, How we can change for the better, and Pulling out the stops.

I found section one illuminating, because it brings to mind something we don’t think about as we go from success to success.  I like the list of flaws in the second section, and the examples that helps us understand how they manifest themselves.

I did not know how to relate to section 3 and 4.  As a blueprint for behavior change, it is hard to imagine without a dedicated coach (which Goldsmith is).  But what it lack in direction, it gains in though provoking approaches to change.

Overall, I recommend this book not for its method – but for the insights it provides that are applicable to building high-performance teams.

* * * * * *

The trouble with success is that despite our successes there are still flaws in our behaviors.  Goldsmith makes the point by looking first at what successful people do:

“… choose to succeed: They have a high need for self-determination” (p.23)

“People who believe they can succeed see opportunities where others see threats” (p.20)

“[they]  have confidence… because they edit out their failures and choose instead to run the highlight reel of their successes.”(p.18)

But flaws exist within the successful behaviors, which can rob us of even more success, if not make our lives downright unhappy.

“The more we believe that our behavior is the results of our own choices and commitments, the less likely we are to want to change our behaviors.” (p.24)

Goldsmith explains that we confuse causality and correlation, thinking that all our behaviors help us succeed:

“I’m talking about the difference between success that happens because of our behavior and the success that happens in spite of our behavior.” (p.26)

Goldsmith provides examples of people whom he has coached; successful executives who swear that their less likable behaviors – such as not listening to people – are actually what make them successful.  I saw myself – and a few of my former colleagues – in some of these stories.

Now that we are ready to admit that there are flaws, Goldsmith list 20 of them. He provides plenty of examples on how these flaws manifest themselves at work.   Here are a few who struck my attention, as they fit very well in engineering teams:

• The need to win too much – which is a difficult one to deal with since, the urge to win drives success in the first place.
• Adding too much value, when our input is not that necessary
  (“you may have improved the content of my idea by 5%, but you’ve reduced my commitment to executing it by 50%” – p. 49)
• Passing judgment on everything that is presented to us
  (“the net result is that grading people’s answers – rather than just accepting them without comment – makes people hesitant and defensive”  – p.51)
• Making excuses
• Failing to express gratitude (at other people’s efforts)

The key to this section is recognizing that “as we advance in our careers, behavioral changes are the only significant changes we can make.” (p.44)

Goldsmith also introduces a 21^st flaw – which gets its own chapter.  He calls it Goal Obsession. Readers of my blog will undoubtedly recognize that we are often obsessed with meeting targets rather than clarifying objectives.  In the book, he gives it a special place because: “It’s not a flaw – it’s a creator of flaws” (p.101)

I found it interesting that all the 20 flaws are related to either information or emotion control.  Goldsmith introduces a process on how to correct this and change.  I was particularly interested by an aside he made:

“One aspect is to work on what to stop:”

“We don’t spend enough time teaching leaders what to stop.” (p. 35)

The recognition and reward systems in most organizations are totally geared to acknowledge the doing of something - (p.36)

Goldsmith shares the process for improving such flaws.  It starts with getting feedback from people – and he shows how to do so without making it personal.  It moves to apologizing for the behavior, then advertising to everybody that we plan to change, before following up to ensure that change occurs.

In the end, Goldsmith leaves us with methods that help us pull out all the stops, to reach out true potential.  Different readers will resonate with different methods. I found these interesting:

• “Stop acting as if you are managing you” (p.205) deals with the fact that people in the team are not clones of you. They don’t think like you or react like you.
• Recognize that we are often prejudiced about team members: “meaning that we harbor beliefs about people, that do not coincide with reality or how that group sees itself” (p. 212)

Goldsmith also provides an interesting improvement method, which in my opinion transcends the topic of improving oneself, or other successful people:

“Feedforward” is the opposite of feed-back. Rather than holding sessions to explain what happened in the past – thus providing feedback, Goldsmith advocates stating what we want to achieve and asking people to contribute their ideas on how we might do so – thus feed-forwarding.  This is very powerful because it removes emotions from feedback and 20-20 hindsight and yields an atmosphere of creativity.

In conclusion, if your purpose if to establish a clear program for change, this book may leave you wanting, if only because it is obvious that doing so without a coach is difficult.  However, it does a very good job of making us reflect on our current successes and provides many insights in what it takes to get to the next level.  Reading it in that spirit, it becomes a valuable tool to build successful, high-performance teams.

If you want the book:

Amazon USA: What got you here …- (ship in USA)

Amazon Canada: What got you here … – (ship in Canada)