Notes and Takeaways from The Essentials Of Leadership
When I listened to it: September 2022
Why I listened to it: I’m working on a handbook for effective leadership, and this podcast with Marshall Goldsmith and Shane Parrish was perfect for my research.
Go to the podcast listing for the episode or scroll down for my notes.
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My notes
About Marshall Goldsmith
Dr. Marshall Goldsmith has been ranked as the World’s #1 Executive Coach and Top Ten Business Thinker for eight years. Marshall was chosen as the inaugural winner of the Lifetime Award for Leadership by the Harvard Institute of Coaching. Dr. Goldsmith is the author or editor of 41 books, which have sold over 2.5 million copies. His books, Triggers and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, were both recognized as being in the top 100 books ever written in their field.
About Shane Parrish
Shane Parrish is the founder of Farnam Street Media and the CEO of Syrus Partners, a private investment company. Shane is on the Board of Directors for WeCommerce ($we.v) Shane has an extensive background in Cyber Security, having worked for the Communications Security Establishment in various cybersecurity roles for over a decade.
Avoid semantic debates
There are many definitions of words. Don’t argue semantics. Define what you mean and leave it at that.
What is leadership?
Dr. Marshall Goldsmith defines leadership as “working with and through others to achieve objectives.” The key phrase is “through others.” Leadership is not about doing something by yourself. (This is one definition, not necessarily the right definition.)
How can leaders become more effective?
Anyone can be a leader, but not all leaders are effective. To become a more effective leader, eliminate your self-sabotaging beliefs. A lot of our beliefs are self-limiting. One common self-sabotaging belief is thinking you can’t change bad behavior. For example, you might say to yourself, “I can’t do this. This is just the way I am.” This is incorrect. A leader who is not good at listening might say, “I can’t listen. I’ve never been able to listen. And I will never be able to listen.” Yet, they have the same two ears as everyone else. You don’t have a fixed identity. You can change.
Why self-sabotage matters
When you sabotage yourself by saying, “this is just the way I am,” two bad things happen. First, you reduce the odds you will change. Second, if you do change, you don’t view your new behavior as authentic, and you feel like a fraud. When your self-identity conflicts with new behavior, it’s nearly impossible to maintain that behavior over the long term.
We can all change our behavior, but you can’t sustain behavior change without also changing your self-identity. If you want to become a more effective leader, start by identifying your self-sabotaging beliefs and changing them.
Honest feedback is critical to improving your leadership
As a leader, you need to get honest feedback, manage how you respond to it, and follow up on it. Leaders who don’t talk to people don’t get better. Leaders that do talk to people and follow up via a systematic process make huge improvements. According to Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, people don’t get better because of his coaching. They get better because of themselves and the people around them. He’s a facilitator more than he’s an expert.
First, get honest feedback. Most leaders aren’t used to getting honest feedback. When Dr. Marshall Goldsmith coaches a leader, he makes sure they receive confidential feedback from an average of 18 different colleagues.
Second, manage how you respond to the feedback. Be gracious. Thank the person who provided the feedback, and acknowledge that you know it’s intended to help. If the feedback was confidential, thank the group and reinforce the confidentiality. Thank people for their recognition of what you are doing well and provide examples. Then, acknowledge the areas for improvement and list examples. Apologize for failures in the past and ask people to accept your apologies. Then, focus on the future. Don’t ask for more feedback on the past. Ask for ideas about the future. Whatever the person says, sit there, shut up, listen, take notes, and say thank you. Don’t judge and don’t critique. Then, say thank you again. Reinforce that you cannot change the past and that you will change the future. Commit to getting better and make it clear you are going to involve the feedback givers, if they are willing, in helping you get better.
Third, focus on changing. Every two months, check in with the feedback givers and ask for more ideas based on your progress over the previous two months. It takes time to change people’s perceptions of you as a leader. When you follow up and check in every two months, it forces them to reevaluate you based on your progress instead of maintaining their historic views. If you don’t follow up, you might change your behavior, but you won’t change people’s perceptions. In leadership, perception beats reality.
How to improve communication
The best way to improve your communication is to ask the people you’re trying to communicate with for suggestions for improvement.
How do you improve your listening skills?
To be a better listener and be more open-minded, never start a sentence with three words: no, but, or however. It disregards whatever the person said and shuts the conversation down.
Transitioning from a high individual achiever to an effective leader
When you get promoted to leadership due to strong individual performance, you face a huge challenge. You’re used to doing it yourself, but now you have to learn to quit being right all the time and being the smartest person in the room. High achievers are programmed to prove they’re smart, and it’s hard to stop.
Stop trying to add value all the time. When people bring ideas, rather than just saying, “great idea,” we tend to try to improve them. When you try to improve someone’s idea, their commitment to execute it goes down, and the difficulty of execution goes up.
When you’re a leader, your suggestions become orders. Before you speak, breathe and question whether it’s worth it to provide a suggestion. “Is my comment going to improve this person’s commitment? Is my comment going to improve my relationship with this person?” Sometimes it will, but sometimes you should just need to swallow your advice and shut up. It’s sometimes good to add value, just not all the time. If you just stop and think, you’re probably going to come up with a pretty good answer.
What do you want leaders to know about motivation?
Pick great people to lead. How great you are as a leader depends on the people you lead! Don’t waste your time with people who don’t care. Put your time in with people who care. They’re the ones who will get better.
When you’re evaluating people for your team, be clear about your expectations upfront and make it clear you won’t work with people who can’t meet them. For example, say, “If I work with you, you will do the following. You will get feedback. You will talk to people. You will follow up. You will work hard. If there’s any of that you don’t want to do, it’s okay. I just won’t work with you.”
Leadership is not about you. It’s about the people you lead.
Never make leadership about yourself and your own ego and how smart you think you are. Make it about those great people you work with and how proud you are of them.
The definition of success
Dr. Marshall Goldsmith defines success as having alignment between your aspirations, ambitions, and activities while enjoying the journey regardless of your outcomes. You want to have a higher purpose, focus on stuff connected to that purpose, and enjoy the process of what you’re doing day-to-day.
What does it take to have a great life?
The measure of a great life is not how much money you have or how much status you have. To live a great life, you first have to cover the basics. You need to have good health, a middle-class income, and great relationships with the people you love. Once the basics are in place, happiness is about three things: aspirations, ambitions, and activities. Aspirations are your whys or reasons for existence that go beyond just getting things done. Ambitions are the achievements that you have. And activities are the life you’re living every day. If those three things are aligned, you’re probably going to have a great life. But getting them aligned is hard. Some people feel stuck in their activities and are too busy to dream. Some people are lost in their aspirations with lofty ideas and dreams, but they don’t get anything done. Super successful people get lost in achievement.
Never make your value as a human based on the results of what you’re trying to achieve. That’s foolish because, one, you don’t control the outcomes, and two, achievement doesn’t create lasting satisfaction. We have been taught that achievement is good. Achieve more and delay gratification, and everything will be okay. Michael Phelps won 25 gold medals. What does he think about doing if he wins fewer medals? Killing himself. It’s great to try to achieve things, but don’t become fixated on the outcomes.
Happiness and achievement are independent variables. You can achieve a lot and be happy. You achieve a lot and be miserable. You can achieve nothing and be happy. You can achieve nothing and be miserable.
You can be happy without dependency upon the next achievement. The way you do it is you love the process of what you’re doing, you do your best to achieve your ambitions, and you make sure what you do is connected to a higher purpose.
Three ways to minimize regret.
Be happy now, don’t wait until something happens. Life is short, so have fun.
Do whatever you can to help people, especially the people you love.
If you have a dream, go for it. We seldom regret the risk we take and fail. We usually regret the risk we failed to take.
Don’t live in the past.
Don’t live in the past and beat yourself up for things the previous versions of you did. We all change. When you live in the past, you’re living someone else’s life. You’re living what you used to be. We’re not the same person we were 10 years ago. Let go of the past and be the person you need to be today. You can’t hang on to yesterday’s wins or yesterday’s losses, you just need to go forward. Forgive yourself for whatever happened yesterday, make peace, and move on.
Focus on the process, not the results. UCLA basketball coach John Wooden never focused on results. He focused on the process and made sure everyone did their best. If you do your best, be proud. If you don’t do your best, you have nothing to be proud of.
Leaders today are more effective than at any time in history.
Leaders today are much better, but the standards are much different. Feedback on leaders is worse than it’s ever been, but leader behavior is better than it has ever been. We used to have things like slaves, and kings would chop your head off for no reason.
Companies can’t tolerate bad leaders because employees won’t put up with them. Employees have a lot more power than they used to have.
How to improve your recognition of people
You don’t have to have fancy programs to recognize people. You just need the regular discipline to ask yourself, “Should I be recognizing people?”
One technique is to make a list of everyone that is important in your life: friends, family, direct reports, and colleagues. Twice a week, look at the page and ask yourself, “did anyone on this page do anything I should recognize?” If they did, contact them and say thank you. It could be an email or a voicemail. Make it a little note, nothing too fancy. If no one did anything you should recognize, don’t say anything.
A second technique is start asking people what they’re proud of. They’ll tell you great things you didn’t even know.
Empathy isn’t always a good thing
Too much empathy can be a disaster.
Empathy refers to putting yourself in another person’s frame of mind and understanding the world from their perspective. According to Dr. Goldsmith, there are four types of empathy.
The empathy of understanding is about understanding why someone feels the way they do. This could be used to help them or manipulate them.
The empathy of feeling is about feeling what someone feels. This could be used to help build connections, but it can also create misery.
The empathy of caring is about caring about others as humans. This can be positive or negative. Sometimes it’s better not to care. There’s a reason surgeons don’t operate on family members.
The empathy of doing is about doing something to help someone. This could be helpful, but it can also create unhealthy long-term dependencies.
With empathy, be who you need to be for the person you are with. Great leaders can do this. It takes a lot of discipline.
Disagreeing without being disagreeable
Make peace with the fact that every decision in life is made by the person who has the power to make the decision.
According to Peter Drucker, a leader’s mission in life is to make a positive difference, not to prove they’re smart or right. If we do not make a positive difference, it is irrelevant how smart or right we are. When you disagree with someone, the default reaction is to try to prove you’re right. But decisions are rarely binary. If there’s an 80 percent chance you’re way is better, there’s still a 20 percent chance another way is better.
If you don’t have the power to make the decision, all you can do is influence it to make a positive difference. Sell what you can and change what you can. Then, let it go and make peace.
If you do have the power to make the decision and someone proposes an idea you disagree with. First, decide whether to disagree. If it’s a close call, go with the other person’s way. If it’s not a close call, ask them to do it your way, but don’t make it about you being right. Acknowledge that you may be wrong. Reinforce your respect for them and your value of their opinion. Communicate your decision and ask them to execute it the best they can. Ask them to escalate any challenges they run into so you can help them work through them.
Six daily questions for a better life
Life is easy to talk about and difficult to live. Most of the time, we’re not engaged or present. Use rituals to calm down and get focused on the present. Athletes do this before serving in tennis, pitching in baseball, shooting free throws in basketball, and putting in golf. It works.
According to Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, if you grade yourself on these six questions every day, you’ll have a better life:
Did I do my best to set clear goals?
Did I do my best to make progress toward achieving my goals?
Did I do my best to find meaning?
Did I do my best to be happy?
Did I do my best to build positive relationships?
Did I do my best to be fully engaged and present?
Random anecdotes:
There’s a great way to test if someone believes what they’re saying. Ask them if they want to bet on it. If they believe it, they’ll bet on it.
As a leader, your least important task of the day is often someone else’s most important task.
Effective leadership is not glamorous, and it can be boring. You often know what others are going to say before they say it, but you need to be upbeat, positive, and appear interested. It’s hard.
To increase your chances of hitting home runs, increase your at-bats. As of 2022, Marshall Goldsmith has published 49 books. According to him, six were bestsellers, and 42 were only purchased by his mother, his father, and his relatives. A few got bought by lots of people, but most of them, nobody bought.
The more we’re open to the fact that we can be manipulated by our environment, the less likely we are to be controlled by our environment. The more we deny the fact that we can be controlled by the environment, the more likely we will be controlled by it.
We are not disciplined enough to make significant behavior change by ourselves. We all need help. Willpower is overrated. How many of the top ten tennis players in the world have a coach? Ten.