PDF Summary:What Got You Here Won't Get You There, by Marshall Goldsmith
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Many professionals get stuck at a certain level of success. For instance, they manage to climb to a middle-management position at their organization, but always get passed over for promotion to the executive level. Author and business coach Marshall Goldsmith believes that when a professional’s career stalls in this way, it’s usually because they’ve slipped into bad behavioral habits. In other words, they’ve started to treat their colleagues poorly.
In this book, you’ll discover how you can reach your full potential by eliminating 21 harmful workplace behaviors. Learn how to rescue your reputation after you’ve treated your colleagues poorly, why learning to listen is crucial to professional success, and how becoming too goal-oriented can harm your career.
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The Healthier Behavior: Consider whether you’re really unable to change your bad behavior, or if you’re just unwilling to try. If the latter is the case, make a commitment to changing. It won’t be easy, but people will respect you for it.
Bad Habit #14: Refusing to Change Under the Guise of “Authenticity.” Some professionals believe that their harmful habits should be celebrated, not changed, because those habits are a part of their “authentic self.” This attitude selfishly disregards the behavior’s impact on other people and consequently harms the professional’s reputation.
The Healthier Behavior: Remember that your feelings aren’t the only ones that matter. Ask yourself, “Is prioritizing feeling authentic worth the damage that I’m currently doing to both other people and my own reputation?”
Bad Habit #15: Never Apologizing. Many professionals find saying sorry painful and humiliating, because they think it makes them look weak. However, if you don’t apologize for your wrongdoings, the people who’ve suffered because of your actions will become bitter. You’ll gain a reputation for being callous, unfeeling, and arrogant.
The Healthier Behavior: When you’ve done something wrong, apologize to the person or people affected by your behavior. Don’t let your pride get in the way of making amends.
Refusing to Express Gratitude or Listen to Others
Goldsmith identifies the next two bad habits, not saying thank you and refusing to listen to other people, as crucial elements of becoming a good colleague and leader.
Bad Habit #16: Not Saying Thank You. Many leaders avoid expressing gratitude because they see it as a form of weakness. They don’t like acknowledging that they sometimes need other people’s help. However, when you fail to thank others, you appear arrogant and unappreciative.
The Healthier Behavior: Swallow your pride and say thank you whenever people help you.
Bad Habit #17: Refusing to Listen to Other People. Often, successful people feel so confident in their abilities that they think listening to others is a waste of time. Why should they sit around listening to ideas they’ve probably already thought of? However, failing to listen destroys the speaker’s confidence, makes them feel unimportant, and makes them resent you.
The Healthier Behavior: Respectfully listen to any ideas that people put forward to you.
Miscellaneous Bad Behaviors
The final four habits don’t really fit into any of the above categories. However, they still negatively impact the people around you and are therefore important to eradicate.
Bad Habit #18: Withholding Information From Your Colleagues. People often do this accidentally—they’re so busy that they forget to pass on important information to their coworkers. However, whether it’s accidental or not, withholding information makes people distrust you. They start to wonder what else you’re hiding from them.
The Healthier Behavior: Take a set amount of time each day to share information with the people who need to know it, either by email, over the phone, or in person.
Bad Habit #19: Taking Undeserved Credit for Other People’s Successes. When you claim that you were responsible for an achievement that you actually had very little part in, you generate rage and bitterness on the part of the person whose credit you’ve stolen. If they tell others about what you’ve done, your reputation will undoubtedly suffer.
The Healthier Behavior: When you’re congratulated for an achievement, consider how others might have contributed to your success. If someone else did help you, publicly credit them.
Bad Habit #20: Engaging in Favoritism. Favoritism is treating some of your team members better than others, not because they’re performing better, but because you like them more. It breeds resentment among the members of your team who work hard and yet see few rewards simply because you don’t like them that much.
The Healthier Behavior: When you find yourself tempted to favor a particular team member, question whether, based on their performance, this person actually deserves a reward. If not, refrain from giving them one.
Bad Habit #21: Becoming Obsessed With Achieving Goals. Becoming too focused on pursuing your goals can lead to ruthlessness: feeling that you need to meet your goals, no matter how much your actions harm other people. Ultimately, being ruthless will gain you a reputation for being a cold-hearted backstabber who’s unpleasant to work with.
The Healthier Behavior: Constantly reflect on the behavior that’s moving you closer to achieving your goals. Consider whether it’s having any negative consequences. If it is, apologize to anyone you’ve harmed and modify your behavior.
Overcoming Your Bad Habits
We’ve discussed the 21 bad habits that many successful people adopt. Now, it’s time to explore the process of overcoming these bad behaviors.
Step 1: Identify Your Bad Habits
The first step in overcoming your bad habits is establishing exactly which habits you’ve adopted. The easiest way to do this is to solicit feedback from your colleagues. Approach the people you work with and ask them which elements of your behavior they would like to see improved. If many colleagues say that they’re unhappy with the same two or three behaviors, you’ll know these are the bad habits you’ve slipped into.
Solicited feedback works best if it’s requested confidentially by a third party. If you personally ask people for feedback on your behavior, it’s very unlikely that they’re going to answer honestly. They may be afraid of upsetting you with negative comments or fear retribution if you don’t like what they say. Therefore, they’re going to keep what they say fairly positive. Soliciting feedback confidentially through a third party takes away these reservations and encourages people to share their true opinions.
Who Should You Ask for Feedback?
Goldsmith argues that you should solicit “360-degree” feedback. This means asking people from all levels of your organization for feedback on your performance: your bosses, your peers, and your subordinates.
When it comes to selecting precisely which of your peers, bosses, and subordinates to ask for feedback, each potential candidate needs to fit four requirements:
- They need to be willing to let go of the past. If people remain too focused on your past sins when giving their feedback, they’ll lean towards giving you harsh criticism rather than helpful tips for improvement.
- They need to be truthful. You’re not going to be able to fully improve upon your bad behaviors if you don’t get an honest picture of how bad they are in the first place.
- They need to agree to make the feedback helpful and supportive. You need helpful tips on how you can move forward, not people telling you that you’re a terrible person who’s failed in numerous ways.
- They need to commit to improving an element of their behavior, too. This will create a bond between the two of you, as you’ll be going on a journey of self-improvement together. You’ll be able to offer mutual support and encouragement.
Deciding Which Habit to Change First
If you receive feedback that suggests you’ve got multiple bad habits, don’t try to overcome them all at once. You’ll quickly become mentally exhausted and struggle to continue with the process of change. For this reason, it’s best to stick to fixing one behavior at a time.
When choosing which bad habit to address first, pick the one that featured the most prominently in your feedback. For example, if 10% of the people you asked for feedback said you’re a bad listener, but 80% of them said you have an anger problem, tackle the anger issue first.
Step 2: Start the Process of Change
You’ve gathered feedback from your colleagues and identified which bad habit you’re going to tackle. Now, it’s time to begin the process of change: to start to cut this habit out of your life. In short, this involves replacing your bad behavior with its healthier alternative.
Start the process of change as soon as possible after deciding which bad behavior you’re going to address. Don’t fall into the trap of putting change off until a time when you’re “less busy.” As an already successful person, you’re always going to be busy. Bite the bullet and start to cut out your bad behavior now. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll make progress.
Obstacles to Change
As you begin the process of changing your behavior, there are two obstacles you may face:
Obstacle #1: Feeling overwhelmed. The idea of changing your behavior may seem incredibly overwhelming, especially if you decide to immediately jump from one behavioral extreme to another—for instance, from being a rude jerk who makes destructive comments all the time to being a benevolent boss who’s incredibly polite and kind.
To avoid feeling overwhelmed, start the process of change by shifting into behaving neutrally. Cut out your bad behavior without instantly trying to replace it with something “better.” For example, stop making destructive remarks to your colleagues without immediately switching to making lots of kind remarks. While “just” cutting out a bad behavior still takes a lot of work, it requires considerably less effort than ceasing a behavior and introducing a new one all at once. It’s therefore a much less overwhelming prospect.
Obstacle #2: Resisting change. Successful people often develop the superstitious delusion that their bad habit was a major factor in generating their professional success up to this point. They believe that if they cease their bad behavior, they’ll only experience failure in the future. Therefore, any calls for them to change their behavior are met with extreme hostility.
To overcome superstition and become willing to change, fully analyze how beneficial this bad behavior has actually been to you. List of all of the ways this you think behavior has helped you in the past, and all of the ways in which it’s harmed you—for instance, by giving you a bad reputation or ruining your working relationships. You’ll probably find that your bad behavior does much more harm than good, and you’ll hopefully feel more certain that you do need to change.
Step 3: Discuss Your Behavioral Change With Your Colleagues
Your next move is to frequently and repeatedly talk about your behavioral change. There are three types of conversation that you need to have with your colleagues:
Conversation #1: Apologize for your previous bad behavior. By saying sorry, you’ll show your colleagues that you know you’ve messed up and are willing to take responsibility for your actions. You may also give people the closure they need to move on from your past indiscretions and forgive you. You’ll have gained a small amount of ground in your mission to recover people’s goodwill and restore your reputation.
Conversation #2: Announce your intention to change. Frequently and consistently tell your colleagues exactly what you’re going to do to overcome your harmful habit and reassure them that you’re fully committed to changing. Doing so will further erode your colleagues’ negative perceptions of you. They’ll start to believe that you’re serious about making up for your past mistakes and really do intend to behave in a healthier way.
Conversation #3: Follow up and request “feedforward.” Approach your colleagues on a regular basis—say, once a month—to ask them how they think you’ve progressed in your attempts to change so far. Following up in this way gives you a way to measure your progress so far. It also helps to improve your colleagues’ opinions of you even more, as it forces them to think about how much better your behavior has become.
While following up with your colleagues, you should ask them for two pieces of “feedforward.” Feedforward is practical advice on what you can do to improve your behavior even further moving forward. This type of advice is beneficial because it focuses on creating a positive future, not punishing yourself for the mistakes of the past.
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PDF Summary Introduction
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In What Got You Here, Won't Get You There, Marshall Goldsmith explains how you can reach your full potential by eliminating harmful work behaviors. First, he explores the 21 bad habits that many professionals slip into and healthier alternatives to these problematic behaviors. Then, he discusses how to identify, overcome, and make amends for your bad habits. He argues that while engaging in these behaviors may not have stopped you from getting “here”—to your current level of success—they won’t get you “there”—to the heights of success that you ultimately aspire to.
(Shortform note: We’ve reordered and reorganized many of the book’s chapters to add coherency and avoid repetition. Likewise, we’ve split the 21 habits of successful people into five categories to clarify themes and make the habits easier to recall.)
PDF Summary Part 1: The Bad Habits | Chapter 1: Flaunting Your Apparent Superiority
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Bad Habit #1: Constantly Needing to Win
In the context of this bad habit, “winning” could mean a lot of things. For instance, it could mean being right about something. It could mean your idea being selected over a colleague’s. Or it could mean meeting a goal quicker than your peers.
Chasing “wins” isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes, having healthy competition with your colleagues can drive you to get great results. For instance, it might push you to close a lot of deals, or bring on as many prestigious new clients as possible, just to “beat” your coworkers. Ultimately, these “wins” are beneficial to you and your employer.
However, the need to win becomes a problem when you make everything into a competition and strive to “win” at things that don’t really matter. For example, unhealthy winning is needing to be right whenever you talk to your peers, even if the conversation is about something trivial like which brand of coffee is best. It’s also gloating about these small, trivial wins at every given opportunity, just to remind the people around you that you “beat” them.
This attitude is quickly going to irritate and alienate your colleagues. It suggests you believe...
PDF Summary Chapter 2: Expressing Negativity and Withholding Positivity
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All of us get angry in the workplace from time to time—for instance, when a decision doesn’t go our way, or when a colleague negatively interferes with our work. However, you’ll create problems if you regularly express this anger—especially if you direct it at your colleagues.
If you frequently lose your temper in the workplace—for example, if you shout at your team members, or rant and rave to your manager about your problems—your reputation will suffer. People will see you as volatile and out of control, not a dependable and respectful employee. Unfortunately, in Goldsmith’s experience, volatility is a reputation that lingers. It often becomes a person’s defining trait, with their strengths being forgotten.
Some leaders argue that anger can, at times, be a useful management technique. For example, they claim that getting angry at underperforming employees may drive them to change their behavior. In reality, most people don’t respond to anger with contrition and renewed hard work. Instead, they respond with anger of their own—specifically, fury that their leader would treat them in such a way. This leads to resentment growing and working relationships being...
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Learn more about our summaries →PDF Summary Chapter 3: Avoiding Accountability
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For example, imagine you get criticized by a superior for being overly aggressive with your team members. You believe you’ve developed this aggressive aspect of your personality because your father was frequently aggressive during your childhood, and you explain this to your boss.
You might think that your boss will be so sympathetic to your plight that they’ll give you a “free pass” to keep acting harmfully. After all, your aggression isn’t really your fault. In reality, your boss will probably express sorrow that you were treated that way, but question why you haven’t taken steps to deal with your past in a healthy way. Ultimately, your troubled relationship with your father isn’t your coworkers’ problem. Why should they suffer because of it?
The Healthier Behavior: Try to develop a healthier relationship with your past and lessen its impact on your present behavior. For instance, you could talk to a therapist about what you’ve been through and how you can move past it. This isn’t by any means a quick or easy fix, but it’s a necessary step to take if you want to stop sabotaging your present and future. Likewise, consistently remind yourself that being treated badly in...
PDF Summary Chapter 4: Refusing to Express Gratitude or Listen to Others
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Third, some leaders rarely express their gratitude because they feel they have to wait until the “right time” to do so. This “right time” is usually a big event—for instance, one of their team members completing a huge project, or their team hitting their annual target. These leaders think that the phrase “thank you” becomes less impactful the more it’s said, and should therefore be saved for “special occasions.”
However, this simply isn’t true. People will never get sick of being thanked—it makes them feel appreciated and valued. So, you might as well thank them as often as possible (provided they deserve this effusive gratitude).
The Healthier Behavior: Say thank you, and do so often. When someone compliments you or gives you a suggestion, fight the urge to say anything but those two short words.
Goldsmith’s Gratitude Drill
If you think you’ll struggle to get used to the idea of expressing gratitude after years of not doing so, Goldsmith suggests completing what he calls a “gratitude drill.” This drill has two simple steps:
- Identify the top 25 people who’ve helped you to get to your current level of career success.
- Send each of these people a note...
PDF Summary Chapter 5: Miscellaneous Bad Behaviors
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Bad Habit #19: Taking Undeserved Credit for Other People’s Successes
This habit involves unfairly claiming that you were responsible for an achievement that you actually had very little part in. For example, it’s claiming the credit for making an amazing sale when, in reality, a different member of your team did most of the work.
Stealing credit is most frequent when people have been working on a team project that has an unclear division of labor. When you’ve been sharing tasks with colleagues, it’s difficult to know who deserves what credit when the project comes to a close. Some people capitalize on this uncertainty. They claim that they’re the main driving force behind the project’s success, even if this isn’t true. They become so focused on impressing their superiors that they’re willing to throw their peers under the bus.
This generates rage and bitterness on the part of the person whose credit you’ve stolen. That person will see your behavior as unforgivable, and their opinion of you will be forever tainted. They may tell other people about the injustice they’ve suffered, thus changing others’ opinions of you, too. **You’ll find yourself gaining a reputation...
PDF Summary Part 2: Overcoming Your Bad Habits | Chapter 6: Identifying Your Bad Habits
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How to Solicit Feedback
There are several ways to solicit feedback. One option is to simply ask your colleagues the open-ended question, “What do you think I need to do to improve as a colleague, team member, or leader?” This gives people free rein to describe your bad behaviors and areas for improvement.
Another option is to distribute a questionnaire in which your colleagues score you on how well you fulfill certain criteria—for instance, how good of a listener you are, or how good you are at sharing information with people. If you consistently get low scores on certain positive behaviors, or high scores on negative behaviors, you’ll know that these are your “problem areas.”
No matter which approach you take to soliciting feedback, make sure that your questions specifically ask for comments on your behavior, not simply people’s opinions of you as a person. For example, don’t ask general questions such as “What do you like and dislike about me?” or “How do you feel about me?”
While the responses to these questions will give a good indication of whether your colleagues like you or not, they probably won’t include information on why exactly they dislike you and...
PDF Summary Chapter 7: Starting the Process of Change
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- Successfully cutting out your bad behavior may be difficult at first. Habits are hard to break. But over time, behaving in a healthier way will become easier and easier.
Avoid Getting Overwhelmed
The idea of changing your behavior may seem incredibly overwhelming, especially if you decide to immediately jump from one behavioral extreme to another—for instance, from being a rude jerk who makes destructive comments all the time to being a benevolent boss who’s incredibly polite and kind. Making such a huge personality change might seem too difficult to achieve or too daunting to even attempt.
To avoid feeling overwhelmed, you could start the process of change by shifting into behaving neutrally— in a way that’s neither harmful nor “good.” In practice, this means cutting out your bad behavior without instantly trying to replace it with something “better.” For example, you could stop making destructive remarks to your colleagues without immediately switching to making lots of kind remarks.
While ”just” cutting out a bad behavior still takes a lot of work, it requires considerably less effort than ceasing a behavior and introducing a new one all at once....
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PDF Summary Chapter 8: Discussing Your Behavioral Change With Your Colleagues
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Announcing Your Intention to Change
Once you’ve apologized to your colleagues, your next step is to announce your intention to change. Tell your colleagues exactly what you’re going to do to overcome your harmful habit and reassure them that you’re fully committed to doing so.
Crucially, you should announce your intention to change frequently and consistently. If you only tell your colleagues of your plan to overcome your habit once, there’s no guarantee that what you tell them will stick in their minds. However, if you tell your colleagues about your intention to change again and again, over days, weeks, or even months, the message is more likely to sink in.
Announcing your intention to change is important for two reasons. First, it adds accountability to your journey of self-improvement. If you tell your colleagues that you’re going to make a change, they’ll start to monitor your efforts to see if you actually follow up on your word. The knowledge that people are checking up on you and expecting you to make progress will add extra pressure to the process of changing. This pressure will motivate you to actually get started on improving your...
PDF Summary Chapter 9: Miscellaneous Advice on Improving as a Leader
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Don’t Make Your Staff Too Dependent on You
As a leader or manager, it’s important that you give your subordinates the opportunity to seek your advice, get your opinion on major decisions, and ask for support when they need it. You can’t simply leave your staff to their own devices and expect things to run smoothly. You need to provide your team with some direction, inspiration, and guidance.
However, it’s important not to go too far the other way, and make your staff too dependent on your input or reassurance. For instance, your subordinates shouldn’t become totally incapable of making a decision or completing a task without asking you for advice or encouragement. If you let your staff become dependent on you in this way, you’re quickly going to find yourself overwhelmed by mountains of work. Not only are you going to have to complete your own tasks, you’re also going to have to help your subordinates with all of their tasks, too—a time-consuming and draining process.
How can you strike a balance between not giving your subordinates enough help, and making them too reliant on your help? One possible approach is that taken by one of Goldsmith’s former clients, a...