What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There
How successful people become even more successful
by Marshall Goldsmith with Mark Reiter
ISBN-10: 1401301304 ISBN-13: 978-1401301309
Published by Hyperion (January 9, 2007)
I love the title, as the title alone makes you think already. This book has a lot to offer, both in insight about habits that may prevent you from being (more) successful, as in recognizing and understanding the behavior of your boss!
I found this book at San Francisco airport last January. When I took a closer look at it however, I almost discarded it. You really, really have to look through the overkill in shameless (self?) promotion. The first 6!! pages are testimonials. Alan Mulally in particular is obviously very important to the publishing company, as his testimonial is repeated three times (inside cover, back cover, and testimonial section). I’m glad that I could see through it all, as the book contains a lot of useful advice from Marshall’s many years of experience as a coach to successful managers, business leaders and CEO’s.
The trouble with success
The book starts with the belief system of successful people. These beliefs (the skills, confidence, motivation and free will to be successful) are necessary for your success, but they also make us superstitious; superstitious in the way that we tend to believe that we are successful because of our behavior. Marshall adds to this that a lot of the times we are successful in spite of our behavior, and we tend to defend our dysfunctional behavior, because we are successful. Pretty twisted, huh?
Nasty habits (about 20 of them)
It’s better to stop with habits that are holding you back (not always, but most of the time anyway). Changing habits takes time, and requires motivation. Marshall does an excellent job at proving why these 20 habits are as nasty as they are, and he provides plenty examples to spark an intrinsic motivation to change some of yours. I’ll go over some of the habits (that I feel connect well with this blog).
2. Adding too much value
Too much value? Can you add too much value? Marshall focuses on interpersonal interactions and the behavior associated with it. In interpersonal relationships you can add too much value! Have you ever been in a conversation where you were trying to get an idea across, but you kept being interrupted with remarks about how it would even be better? Up to the point where you felt that your idea was subject to a hostile takeover? That’s when someone’s adding too much value. They have the need to always add value to a conversation, when sometimes just listening is enough.
10. Failing to give proper recognition
Failing to give recognition deprives people from closure. If someone does a great job at something, but he or she does not get the recognition for it, they feel forgotten or ignored. I recognize how often this happens. If you’re goal-oriented and you put everything on achieving it, by yourself or as a team, recognition of important contributions is often omitted. It doesn’t bring us closer to where we want to be, so why waste time right? Wrong! And you probably know it. I know too, this is one I have to work on…
17. Failing to express gratitude
We express gratitude all day long, try counting the times we say Thank you. A lot of times they are mechanistic (someone hands you something, you say Thank you) and the rest consists mainly of accepting compliments. There are a lot of situations where Thank you would also be the best response. This is when people give you feedback or criticism. We usually start defending and arguing, when the best response would be simply “Thank you”.
You can probably remember a situation where you gave an honest feedback to someone (“Like the suit!”) and the response would undermine the feedback (“Nah, it’s a 10 year old one, my really good suits are at the drycleaner’s”). Worse still, when you give feedback based on sensitive emotions (“When you say to me to watch what I’m eating all the time, you make me feel insecure.”) and the person starts to argue with you (“No that’s not true, it doesn’t make you feel insecure…”). Don’t you just hate that? Wouldn’t “thank you” be a much better response on an interpersonal level?
20. An excessive need to be “me”
I liked this one. I think it’s important to be me; this blog about being authentic after all. What happens when this gets excessive though? It starts when we regard behavior (good or bad) to be part of our inalterable essence, part of ourselves. I had have this with being late at appointments, I have been late for as long as I can remember. I don’t like being late, I have had a lot of unpleasant situations due to being late, yet I’m always frigging late. It came to a point where I convinced myself and others, that this was just part of me, deal with it! This is the excessive need to be me… we regard habits or behavior to be part of our essence, and that’s plain wrong. You can change the habit. Don’t put yourself up as the excuse!
Changing for the better
Now you probably don’t need to change all 20 habits, so there are some guidelines as to how to discover what to change, how to change it, and how to measure if you’ve succeeded. To discover which habits are holding you back, your need to turn to your environment to solicit feedback. In the end, they will also determine whether you have been successful at changing. Dysfunctional behavior that nobody in your environment cares about doesn’t need to be changed as far as Marshall is concerned.
Summary
I learned a lot from this book. I could write a lot more about the good stuff that’s in there (like the rules of changing, the importance of apologizing and much more). It focuses on behavioral change, and provides a lot of insight in bad habits you didn’t even know existed. It does assume that you want to be successful (in my opinion a fair assumption).
Marshall writes in a conversational style that’s easy to read, and he provides a lot of examples. Not in the least from his own experiences (in trying and failing to change habits) which he describes in a way that’s filled with humor.
If you want to be more successful, and don’t mind examining your own behavior, this book is an excellent read. If reading is all you do with it, you’ll probably recognize the habits that your boss needs to be working on! And that in itself makes for some good conversation at the coffee machine.
Interested? Get it here from Amazon, or click the picture.
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