Success Secrets and Stories
To share management leadership concepts that actually work.
You are responsible for your development as a leader. Don't expect the boss to invest the training budget in your career. Consider this podcast as an investment of time in your career, with a bit of management humor added at the same time.
Success Secrets and Stories
Crafting Leadership Success with Intentional Actions
Unlock the secrets of effective leadership with insights from the acclaimed executive coach, Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, as we unpack his renowned methodologies on behavioral change and external triggers. Journey with us through the concepts from John Wondolowski’s newly released audiobook, "Building Your Leadership Toolbox," and discover how Goldsmith’s book "Triggers" emphasizes the profound impact of understanding both positive and negative stimuli on personal and professional growth. We share a humorous anecdote on managing competitive instincts, shedding light on the importance of conscious decision-making and how it can shape better interpersonal relationships.
Gain practical strategies to refine your leadership skills as we delve into the art of mastering conscious choices for success. Explore how eliminating unnecessary commitments and embracing accountability can elevate your effectiveness. Dr. Goldsmith's teachings guide us with six active questions designed to assess personal engagement and progress, such as happiness and relationship-building. Discover how regularly evaluating these areas can boost employee engagement and personal fulfillment. We've packed this episode with tools and strategies to help you and your team maintain focus and commitment, setting you on a path to enduring success.
Presented by John Wandolowski and Greg Powell
Well, hello everyone and welcome to our next podcast of Success, big Listen Stories. I'm your host, john Wondolowski. I'm here with my co-host and friend, greg Powell. Greg hey, everybody. Yeah, and today we want to talk about coaching and explore a little bit about coaching.
Speaker 2:But before that, I want to talk about my new book, which is actually a second edition of the book called Building your Leadership Toolbox, and the subtitle is Tools for Success, called Building your Leadership Toolbox, and the subtitle is Tools for Success, and I really wanted to redo the book because I wanted to create a little bit better flow and, for those of you who have purchased the book before, thank you. But I think this audio book is something that I wanted to do and I wanted to get the book to kind of work with the rhythm of the audio book and what's kind of fun is. I have two voice actors, one that's doing my voice and one that is doing Dr Durst's voice that I use as a reference throughout the book, and it's a really great exchange of what I was trying to do in written word, but it is such a better medium on how it came out in the audio book that I'm excited for you to hear it so you can find it on and I'll talk about it at the end. I'll give the reference, but it's on Amazon, it's on audible and it's also available on my website. So our website, author jawcom, and that's where it's our home for the podcast.
Speaker 2:Anyway, that's the personal news. Now to talk a little bit about what we wanted to talk about in this podcast was coaching, and that's really the essence of what my book is based on, and what we're trying to do with this series is coach and share the ideas that we think are important in terms of leadership. Greg, through this research, I think we found somebody that is an interesting coach. Why don't you bring us up to speed on Marshall Goldsmith?
Speaker 1:Thanks, john. So let's meet Dr Marshall Goldsmith. Dr Goldsmith has been recognized as one of the top 10 business thinkers in the world and the top rated executive coach at the Thinkers 50 ceremony in London since 2011. He got published in 2015 in a book called Triggers, a Wall Street Journal and New York Times number one bestseller. He's also author of the New York Times bestseller and Wall Street Journal business book. I think we all know it what got you here won't get you there. Winner of the Harold Longman Award as best business book of the year. Just think about 10 best business coaches in the world to follow. This is where Mr Goldsmith is right in the middle. Think about folks like Grant Cardone, peter Bucca, tony Robbins and Jay Abraham, so America's number one executive coach in Inc Magazine. Dr Goldsmith has a PhD from UCLA and he's a guy who pioneered 360 feedback for human resource professionals and, clearly, for managers an incredible leadership development tool and he did some great work in that space. With nearly 40 years of hands-on experience, he's a leading expert on leadership and coaching for behavioral change.
Speaker 1:Mission statement here's what his mission statement is. He wanted to make it simple. I want to help successful people achieve positive, lasting change and behavior for themselves, their people and their teams. As an executive, educator and coach, he wanted to help people understand how folks' beliefs and the environments that they operate in can trigger negative behaviors. Through simple and practical advice, he was helping people achieve and sustain positive change Triggers, creating behavior that lasts and becoming the person you want to be.
Speaker 1:And that's what this is really about being very specific about the kind of leader you want to be and making it happen. But getting there can be very tricky. Even when we acknowledge there's certain needs we have to change, we don't just naturally do it. We just don't have that habit. We're just human beings, and so he works with how to manage those situations to get the kind of change you're looking for. So the book Triggers confronts head-on the challenges of behavior and change, looking at external factors which he calls triggers, both negative and positive. Marshall Goldsmith invites us to understand how our own beliefs and environments in which we operate can trigger negative behaviors or a resistance to the need to change, but he also offers some simple, practical advice to help us navigate the negative and make the most of the triggers that will help us sustain change. John.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So triggers are something, that is, any stimulus that impacts our behavior, and he wants to try to help people understand how that effect actually is implied in the real world. How does it really happen? And it kind of works out to another psychologist, skinner, who was talking about mutual creation. And it's the mutual creation of my world, whether it's fate or choice. And to make it a little bit more understandable, fate is sort of like a deck of cards that were dealt. Choice is how we're going to play that hand. So the external things that are happening around you are happening. That's life. His key is how do you actually address the things that are happening in your life, being purposeful about that process.
Speaker 2:And he goes on to talk about how we're competitive. That's one of those triggers. We have a competitive element of like when you're coming home and you're going to explain to your wife that you've had really a horrible day. The place has been blowing up around you and you walk in the door and the first thing you hear from your wife is you won't believe the day I had. Now you have a choice. She's really interested in telling you about her day. Now you can go ahead and have that contest of saying who had the worst day, because you'll listen to her day and be like you haven't heard anything. Let me tell you about my day and you've achieved absolutely nothing. And the best part is the line that he used in one of his presentations was when the wife looked at the husband and said if you think your day was bad, then wait until the end of the day. Yeah, she's only going to make it worse.
Speaker 2:So the wisdom he was saying is you had the choice. When you walked in the door and you heard that first line I have had a horrible day. Listen, listen, listen to her day, understand that what happened in your day? Great, but that life partner wants to tell you something about her day. And the first rule and I can speak as a professional, okay, I've been married for 49 years Listen. And really, they're not asking for you to cure the problem, they're asking for you to give them the opportunity to be heard. That's probably the most important part. Make a conscious decision on how you want to react. You can tell her about your day later. Don't do it when you first walk through the door, because there was a desperate need to share and you've had maybe an exchange of 50 people and she's at home, possibly with the kids all day and she's looking for that adult interchange of what is happening in her world. You have to listen.
Speaker 2:Another example of meaningful decisions when you're listening, he gave an example of Viktor Frankl, who wrote the book Man's Search for Meaning and he's a concentration camp survivor. Man's Search for Meaning and he's a concentration camp survivor. So someone who understands, probably, the things that are triggers and how to survive. Great quote Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies growth and or our freedom. Very, very powerful, especially how he presented it, and I think that's the interesting part. Sometimes you go to business environments and you talk about how they're trying to engage the department or engage in the employees and the way that they present it is how it's the company's presentation. And they talk about program after program after program on what they're trying to give to the employees and the bottom line is no one's talking about owning or asking for the participation of the employee, so it's 100% on the company's shoulders. Actually, greg, you know the 200% and 0%. Maybe you can talk about the MBR balance of responsibility in this example.
Speaker 1:Thanks, john, absolutely. So when you think about I call it an old HR metric employee engagement and think about this the company has a percentage they need to achieve and the employee has a percentage they need to achieve. Well, guess what? Both need to achieve 100%. Both need to be fully engaged in the opportunities and the challenges in the work moving forward. It's not a good balance if the company is at 150% and the employees at 50%, or vice versa. Both parties employees and leadership management need to be 100% engaged.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 2:The other thing that Marshall was talking about was coaching is not based on whether you're making the employee, you're teaching the employee. It's whether you're making the employee better. It's a contact sport. It's. Leadership means you have to be engaged in the process. You just can't go along with the program. It isn't going to happen by magic. There has to be leadership in order to organize it and actually get that gear to move. But you're not there to answer everyone's questions. You're not the answer man. You're the one that's trying to inspire the people to try to engage. That's the secret Hiring people that you're empowering and making sure trying to inspire the people to try to engage. That's the secret hiring people that you're empowering and making sure that that is the process.
Speaker 2:So he was talking about something in terms of how people challenge the data that comes to them, and he created this thing called the change wheel and for me, I think it really breaks down to whether you have something that's happening. You're making a decision on whether you want to change it or whether you want to just create it as a memory and move on. If it's a negative kind of environment, you're not going to do anything more than delay it or make peace with it. Maybe, if it's a negative environment, you're improving or you're preserving it as an idea, more so like a memory that you don't want to do again. If it's a decision that you want to make a change, then you're creating and you're trying to find some way to make and adapt, to make it better to intervene, and if the change is negative, you're trying to basically stop it. You're making the effort in order to try to eliminate it or reduce it. His point is that you're making a conscious decision when you're going through this process. So he broke it down to an identity matrix and it really comes down to making a decision whether it's important or not, whether it's yourself or about someone else, whether it's about the future or about the past, and then making a conscious decision whether you want to make a change or not. That time, to sit back and actually be creating. He broke it down into four parts Creating, preserving, eliminating and accepting. Let's talk about creating just for a second. Who is the you that you want to create? What is blocking you from the creation or what fears are inhibiting you from creating something that's different about your response or yourself Visualizing the future and looking for the hope in the future that stimulates the creative side of decision-making creative side of decision-making In terms of preserving the who is you is. What do you want to preserve? Whether it's something in terms of gratitude from the past, challenges from the past, possibly, maybe lessons learned in terms of things that didn't work. An example that he gave in terms of preserving things that are bad would be like Kodak and their moments of sticking with film, no matter how the industry changed. They're a film manufacturing company and they have a Kodak history and the company was basically tanked following that mantra of preserving.
Speaker 2:Eliminating, I think, is an interesting category of how to handle the information. What part of you do you want to eliminate? Know what to eliminate? Know what? The dangers of over commitment, the challenges of technology and trying to depend on it too much, understanding that you have to make a decision. And whenever automation starts to get away, like one of the things that just drives a lot of people crazy is it's not my fault, the computer did it. The computer is garbage in, garbage out.
Speaker 2:If you're not putting the information in, you're not going to be surprised that you're getting something that's not right coming out and then accepting what it is to you is that you learn to accept it, let it go. It's the past, forgiving, prioritizing, accepting environmental limitations acceptable in terms of how you're trying to deal with it. These are like you're stepping back and you're trying to make peace with whatever decisions you're making, but making a conscious decision on which ones you're actually trying to apply. That's the essence of what we're talking about and if you wrap this all up, I mean you try to take his concept. He kind of did a better job of summarizing it, in my opinion, and he has this mantra I am willing at this time to make an investment required to make a positive difference on the topic.
Speaker 2:If that is a true statement, then you're putting the time and the effort to make a change and it's like that little bit of a mantra that you want to keep in your head. Otherwise it's noise and it's a decision of where you want to just consider it as history or record it, but it isn't action required. When you're using this model, am I willing to invest the time to make a positive difference? Then that's when you're actually being effective leader. Applying this model is to yourself, to your team, to your function, to your company. It is a very good way of trying to set yourself up for success to understand that conscious decision-making process. Greg, maybe you can use another tool that Dr Goldsmith talked about.
Speaker 1:Thanks, John. So think about some of the previous work that's been done on employee engagement, Things like recognition, reward programs, training, compensation programs and the ability to empower employees. But you know what? In spite of all the previous efforts, global employee engagement is near an all-time low. Global employee engagement is near an all-time low.
Speaker 1:And think about John F Kennedy and some of his famous statements, but one in particular ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Well, think about engagement like this Focus on what the organization can do to engage you, not what you can do to engage yourself. Again, what are you doing for the company? What's the hardest daily question you could ask yourself? Right, you write the question down, you know what the answer is and you believe that it's very important, and all you have to do to get a high score is just try. So think about six active questions that you can ask yourself on a given day.
Speaker 1:Did I do my best to be happy? Did I do my best to find meaning? Did I do my best to be fully engaged? Did I do my best to build positive relationships and set clear goals? And did I do my best to make progress towards goal achievement. That boring meeting right, we all know a little bit about that, have a little experience in sitting in those meetings. Imagine that you're going to be tested about your performance at that meeting and tested in a different kind of performance. Questions like did I do my best to be happy? Did I do my best to find meaning? Did I do my best to build positive relationships during or after that meeting? Did I do my best to be fully engaged in that meeting? And then the big question what would you do differently in that boring meeting?
Speaker 2:John. So you really brought up the interesting part about the six active questions. Be happy, find meaning, fully engaged, positive setting goals. What Marshall Goldsmith was talking about was do that weekly, don't do that annually. Do that weekly, if not daily, and it really will influence what you do in a given work day. It's amazing how you can go through the week and if you want it to make your own private hell, you can do that. But engagement is a conscious decision and going through those six questions really helps focus, whether you're trying to make a difference or not. So that is our attempt to try to give you another frame of reference in terms of coaching, and we both felt that this was kind of an interesting and unique way of describing how to conduct yourself as a coach and as a leader.
Speaker 2:So, if you like what you've heard, yeah my new book, the second edition of building your leadership toolbox, is available on Amazon. And uh, you are listening to us. Uh, success solutions, success to us. Success Solutions, success Sequencing Stories, the podcast, whatever you're listening to, thank you. We're also available in a lot of other popular formats like Apple, google and Spotify To get a hold of Dr Gers's information and books and his MBR program. It's on successgrowthacademycom in books and his MBR program. It's on successgrowthacademycom. And if you'd like to send us a message, you can send us to wwwauthorjawcom. That's our website. The music is brought to you by my grandson, so we want to hear from you. Please drop us a line, send us a note. It has helped us with our program and we have heard that we have helped some folks and that's really the purpose of what Greg and I are trying to do. Gotta get those last notes in man. Thanks, Greg.
Speaker 1:Thanks.
Speaker 2:John.
Speaker 1:As always.
Speaker 2:Yeah, next time.