What keeps otherwise smart leaders from achieving the next level of career success? What stops them from moving up the career ladder? What are the barriers? Marshall Goldsmith’s aptly titled book – What got you here, won’t get you there – describes some of those barriers.
Barriers to further career success
What stops intelligent, hard-working, and driven leaders from breaking through to the next level of career success? What keeps otherwise smart people from achieving the next level of career success?
Think about it for a moment. What answers did you come up with? When I ask this question to the leaders who participate in any of my leadership training programs, I get some answers.
Fear – Fear of failure and fear of rejection have killed more dreams than any other single factor! When we are afraid, we don’t want to take chances. We avoid taking action. And that does not help in achieving further career success.
Lack of focus – We live in a world filled with continuous distractions and interruptions. The choices we have are endless. This often overwhelms us. Without focusing on a few things we are great at, it is difficult to achieve significant results.
Lack of time – Lack of time and lack of focus are closely related. When we get involved in too many things unrelated to our primary goals and focus areas, we suffer from a dual problem—lack of focus and lack of time.
Inability to change – The world is changing at a frenetic pace. Technology, communication, artificial intelligence, and a confluence of many other factors are speeding up the frenetic pace of change. Unless we change and adapt, it is unlikely that we will achieve further success. Staying in the comfort zone and not wanting to change is more a recipe for career failure than career success in a fast-changing world!
Often, the skills to reach the next level of career success are different from the skills that brought us to the career ladder’s current rung. We tend to hang on to the skills and the approach that brought us the current level of success. Unfortunately, holding on to them and not changing is what holds us back from reaching the next level of success. What got you here won’t get you there!
The root cause that stops intelligent leaders from reaching the next level
What if I told you that all these answers are mere symptoms of a deeper root cause? What is the root cause that prevents leaders from achieving the next level of success? Well, the answer so obvious and in such plain sight that we often are blindsided by it and cannot see it! What is that answer? It is a success. Yes, that is right! When we achieve a certain level of success in life or leadership, we stop doing many of the things that made us successful in the first place. What got you here won’t get you there!
The paradox of success – What got you here won’t get you there!
When we become successful, we become superstitious. We want to keep doing the things that made us successful in the past. In a fast-changing world, doing the same things doesn’t bode well.
We become a little more fearful and stop taking chances. What made us successful is exactly that – taking chances, trying things, failing, learning, and moving ahead. While climbing the ladder to success, the focus was essential. We get good at a few things. When we are successful, we have more choices, we have more time and more money – and often, it results in a lack of focus and dilution of efforts. Success often takes us away from the essential things that made us successful in the first place, and hence success becomes the reason for failing to get to the next level of career success and achievement.
What got you here won’t get you there! Won’t help you move up the career ladder?
Bill Gates rightly said – “Success is a lousy teacher. It makes smart people think they can’t lose.”
To quote Einstein, “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.”
Marshall Goldsmith warns successful leaders in his bestselling book aptly titled – “What got you here, won’t get you there!”
How to reach the next level of career success as an intelligent leader?
One of the best ways to break through to the next level of success as a leader is to work with a leadership coach.
The coach also helps the leader uncover limiting beliefs that hold the leader from reaching the next level of career success. A leadership coach helps the leader understand their strengths and weaknesses. The coach then helps the leader to leverage her strengths and improve weaknesses. Executive coaching (aka leadership coaching) is the best tool for behavior change. Leaders who support an executive coach have a better chance to move up the career ladder.
Read: How to get promoted and avoid mid-career crisis
NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching
That delivers guaranteed and measurable leadership growth. It is based on a stakeholder centered coaching process with a 95% effectiveness rate (in a study or 11000 leaders on 4 continents). It is used by companies ranging from startups to 150 of the Fortune 500 companies to develop their leaders.
Here are some of the salient benefits of NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching
Time and resource-efficient: The leader does not have to leave work to attend training programs. We go to the leader and her team. And it only takes 1.5 hours per month. The rest of the time, the leader is working to implement with her team.
Separate and customized improvement areas for each leader: Every leader is different. One size fits all approach doesn’t work. Individual development areas for each leader aligned to the business strategy.
Involves entire team: Unlike most leadership programs, NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching involves the leader’s entire team, and it has a cascading effect – increasing the team effectiveness and improving organizational culture.
The leader becomes the coach: for continuous improvement for leaders themselves and their teams. It is like kaizen for your leadership development.
Cost-Effective: Our entire one-year coaching engagement often costs less than sending the leader to a short duration leadership program at any reputed B school.
Guaranteed and measurable leadership growth: as assessed – not by us – but anonymously rated by the leader’s own team members.
Pay us only after we deliver results! : We work with many of our clients on a pay for results basis. What does it mean? If the leaders don’t improve, you don’t have to pay us.
Schedule an exploratory 15-minute conversation with our leadership adviser today
What is the compound effect? What does leadership development have to do with the compound effect? Find out how to use the compound effect to supercharge leadership development. Use, Marshall Goldsmith leadership coaching with the power of the compound effect for leadership development for leaders in your organization.
A hypothetical example to illustrate the power of the compound effect
Consider this hypothetical example that illustrates the power of the compound effect. Imagine that I have offered you freelance programming work. You have two options to get paid.
Two options – small improvements consistently vs. staying the same
Option 1 is to get paid $10 per week. However, if you improve your skills by 10% a week, your salary will proportionately increase by 10% every single week.
This option requires you to improve your skills on a weekly basis. Not a huge jump in the skill level, but small, continuous, and constant improvements.
Option 2 is to get paid a fixed amount of $5000 per month. With this option, there is no need for any improvement in skills. There are no additional increases either – the salary stays the same.
Which option would you choose? Here is the table detailing the accumulated total salary for both options.
Which option would you choose?
At the end of the first month, option 1 would give you a total salary of $51. While option 2 would fetch you a cool $5,000.
Months two and three are equally depressing for option 1 – with a total salary of $126 and $235 respectively at the end of months two and three. At the end of 3 months, option 1 will get you a meagerly amount of $235. Option 2 would fetch you a cool $15,000.
At the end of 1 year, option 1 would add up to $15541 while option 2 is still way ahead with $60,000. Still lagging option 2 by a significant amount.
The power of the compound effect
However, by the end of the 16th month, option 1 has caught up to option 1 – with $86,762 vs. $80,000 for option 2!
And by the end of the 24th-month option 1 has compounded to a cool $2.2 million while option 2 is lagging way behind with a meager sum of $120,000.
How does the compound effect relate to our behaviors and leadership development?
Here are a few real-life options to consider.
What if you ate a chocolate bar a day for a year? What if you instead exercised 20 minutes a day for a year?
What if you watched TV for 1 hour a day for an entire year? What if instead, you read 10 pages of a good book a day for a year?
You would get completely different results.
Small choices + consistency + time = significant results
Seemingly small choices made daily don’t appear to make any difference in the short term. But consistently making the small choices add up to drastically different outcomes over time. That is the power of the compound effect.
Leadership development is no different! Small changes in leadership behaviors applied consistently over 12-18 months add up to extraordinary results!
We offer Marshall Goldsmith’s stakeholder centered executive coaching for leadership development that capitalizes on the principle of the compound effect. Why is coaching important for leadership development? How is it beneficial?
Leadership coaching is the most effective way to ensure that leadership improvement takes place. Executive education and training programs help in creating awareness for change – however behavior change requires customized solutions, consistent follow-up, and accountability.
Executive coaching provides it by design. Marshall Goldsmith executive coaching is one of the best leadership development programs available in India and worldwide through a network of over 3000 certified coaches who provide the same consistent executive coaching process used by many of the Fortune 500 companies for their leadership development coaching programs.
Leadership behavior effectiveness is making the leader aware of his behaviors and their impact on the team members. Behavior change helps establish better relationships, better employee engagement and improved performance of the team.
It also includes rectifying derailing behaviors. These are the annoying behaviors of otherwise good leaders. Often such behaviors become a hindrance to smooth team functioning.
Marshall Goldsmith stakeholder centered coaching helps leaders improve their own derailing behaviors and change the perception of the team members.
Often people get promoted to a higher role with little support. This is often because of business emergencies like an urgent project or a senior leader leaving the organization.
Leadership coaching helps leaders transition into a higher role. It also helps the leader transition across into another role within the company – when such a need arises.
Through Feedback / Feedforward from Stakeholders on the Job
Feedback allows the leader to realize the blind spots that may act as their leadership bottlenecks. Most leaders have one or more poor leadership behavior that they may not be aware of.
Such toxic leadership behaviors often end up hurting the engagement and the performance of the leader’s team. However, once they receive feedback, most of the focus is on feed-forward. Feed-forward is asking for suggestions from team members (stakeholders) for improvement for the future.
This takes the focus away from the past – which cannot be changed, to the future – which can be improved if the leader acts of stakeholder’s suggestions.
Coaching the executive and improving on poor or toxic leadership behaviors creates effective teams and organizational culture that promotes employee engagement and performance.
As acknowledged by the stakeholders
Stakeholders are the leader’s team members who interact frequently with the leader. They are at the receiving end of the leader’s behaviors.
They are the “customers” of the leadership product. No one else is in a better position than the stakeholders to assess whether the leadership behaviors are good. They can also assess whether the behaviors are improving. In the Marshall Goldsmith stakeholder centered executive coaching process, as the name suggests, stakeholders are at the center.
Ultimately, they decide whether the leader has improved her behaviors. This is done through an anonymous survey. We consider a leader has improved, not because the leader says he has improved, or the coach says he has improved, but only when the stakeholders (through an anonymous survey) confirm that the leader has improved!
Using a well-defined process/system for 12-18 months
Marshall Goldsmith’s stakeholder centered executive coaching process is a well-defined and tried and tested process. We design it to appeal to the leader’s ways of thinking and leverage it to help the leaders improve. It is also a process that has been used to coach over 400,000 executives in over 60 countries – including executives from 150 of the Fortune 500 companies. The process is highly effective. In a survey of 11,000 leaders on four continents, over 95% of the leaders using the stakeholder centered process improved. Marshall Goldsmith stakeholder centered executive coaching usually lasts from a minimum of six months up to a year and a half.
The compound effect of Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Leadership Coaching
Day by day and week by week, small changes in the leader’s behaviors – based on the suggestions given by stakeholders – don’t seem like much, but compounded over the period of 12-18 months, they help the leader significantly improve her leadership effectiveness. That is the power of compounding applied to leadership coaching using the Marshall Goldsmith stakeholder centered leadership coaching process!
Here are some features of the Marshall Goldsmith executive coaching program
Guaranteed, measurable leadership growth as assessed–not by us–but by the leader’s own stakeholders.
In addition, unlike leadership training or executive education programs, it will involve the entire team while doing their day to day work.
The leader becomes the coach, and it has a cascading effect on the team increasing team effectiveness and improving organizational culture.
It is a system for continuous improvement for leaders themselves and their teams – although it is leadership coaching for an individual leader; they realize the benefit of team coaching through the involvement of the entire team.
In a study of 11,000 leaders on 4 continents–95% of the leaders using this leadership coaching process improved!
This is the exact same executive coaching process that is used by 150 of the Fortune 500 companies to grow their leaders through CEO coaching and leadership coaching at C-suite levels
We are so confident of the process we work on a no growth no pay basis (don’t try that with other vendors, lol!)
Schedule an exploratory 15-minute conversation with our leadership adviser today
What is extreme ownership? As a leader would you like to inspire an organizational culture of “extreme ownership” in your team members? What kind of organizational culture would it create for your teams? What can it do for team performance and team effectiveness? How will it help improve your leaders in 2020 and spark an organizational culture transformation in your organization?
Ramadi, the hot spot of insurgency during the Iraq war
In the spring of 2006, Jocko Willink, a Navy seal for US armed forces, was stationed in Ramadi, Iraq. Ramadi was the hotspot of insurgency in post-war Iraq. Terrorists controlled the Ramadi area by any means necessary – urban warfare, torture, murders, and even rapes. US forces suffered heavy casualties as the terrorists were improvising and using advanced tactics. Jocko Willink and Leif Babin’s Navy SEAL unit faced an impossible mission: help U.S. forces secure Ramadi, a city deemed “all but lost.”
The unfortunate incident that inspired extreme ownership
One morning Jocko was in charge of an operation in a suburb of Ramadi. It was a combined and complex operation involving the navy seals, US army soldiers, and US marines. Their instruction was to clear outbuildings and set up positions to fight the enemy. Friendly Iraqi soldiers were to arrive later to provide additional support.
Jocko’s team, the navy seals were engaged in a heavy gunfight while attempting to evacuate a particular building. Jocko heard on the radio that a friendly Iraqi soldier was shot. The team immediately called in for the support of heavily armored ground troops and air support to strike that particular building. With the morning fog came the fog of war – bringing with it the chaos and the confusion – gunfire, enemy attacks, screaming, wounded and bloodied soldiers, and even death.
A big mistake
Even through this confusion, Jocko’s gut instinct told him that something wasn’t right. He called in to hold off on the airstrike and went to the building to assess the situation himself. He discovered that the navy seal team wasn’t firing on the enemy, but firing on their own men inside the building! Call it the confusion of war, an error of judgment, bad luck or even blame it on Murphy’s law – But Jocko’s team had committed one of the cardinal crimes of war – firing on their own people! The causalities were one Iraqi soldier dead, two wounded, one navy seal injured and everyone on the team shaken!
When Jocko went back to the command center, he found an email waiting from his commanding officer asking him to shut down all operations and wait for them to arrive at the scene. Unfortunately, the email had arrived just after he had left to go to the scene of the event and check things himself. Now Jocko had to report the incident up the chain of command, and there would be a postmortem done.
Who was at fault? Pass on the blame or take extreme ownership?
The senior officers were determined to find out what went wrong and who was responsible. Jocko had to be ready for his debriefing. He understood that someone had to be held accountable and would be fired for this horrible incident. He went over the details of the terrible incident to figure out what may have caused this grave error in the planning and execution of this mission. He found that there was plenty of blame to go around!
But he didn’t feel that it was the right thing to do. He wondered what would happen to the morale of the team if he pointed fingers at some of the team members whose actions may have contributed to this grave incident. When he was just minutes away from the debriefing, he suddenly realized whose fault it was. There was a single person responsible for this entire mess.
When he walked into the debriefing room, the senior officers and his team members, including the wounded navy seals, were eagerly waiting for his answers. Jocko’s commanding officers and his team members may have expected finger-pointing and blame to be passed on to others. Commanding officers may have been ready to “investigate” him and team members may have been ready to “defend” themselves.
Extreme Ownership
Jocko said that he knew that there was a single person he had identified who was responsible for this unfortunate and horrible incident. Who was that person? Jocko said that it was his OWN fault. As the leader in charge of the operation, he took complete and full responsibility for the incident. If the seniors thought that he should be fired, he was ready to accept the punishment. He understood clearly that if his team had to put things behind and bounce back to normal, he himself had to take complete and total responsibility. But when Jocko took “extreme ownership” and complete blame, something strange started happening!
Inspiring Extreme Ownership in others
One after another, the team members raised their hands and shouted that it was their fault! “I didn’t keep the Iraqi soldiers updated of our mission.” “I didn’t pass the information over the radio quick enough.” “I didn’t identify my target correctly and shot an Iraqi soldier.” Many of the team members admitted to their role that may have caused things to get out of hand. Instead of passing on the blame or defending themselves, the team members were taking responsibility for their own actions!
Jocko didn’t get fired! Because Jocko had taken full responsibility, the team members trusted him even more than before. Their respect for Jocko had increased. They realized that Jocko really “had their back” and would never dodge responsibility and would never pass the blame. When their leader took “extreme ownership” it inspired the team to take ownership instead of passing on the blame.
Imagine what would have happened if Jocko had passed on the blame to other members on the team. Would it have inspired ownership? Would it have helped build trust? Would the team’s subsequent performance be hampered? That is the difference between a leader taking complete responsibility and ownership – even when there are things that are out of the leader’s control – vs. leader passing on the blame and creating a toxic leadership culture.
Jocko then promised to everyone that he would never let this happen under his watch. He outlined his plan – new tactics, new procedures, and new training – to ensure that this never happened again.
Extreme Ownership is a game-changer in 2020
What a leader does when things go wrong, can either inspire an organizational culture of ownership or instigate an organizational culture of blame and passing the buck. As a leader, don’t make excuses. Don’t pass on the blame. Don’t let your ego get the better of you. Swallow your pride. Even when there are situations and circumstances that are beyond your control, take complete responsibility! For everything! Your mistakes, your shortcomings, and team results. Don’t we take complete responsibility for successes as a leader? Why not take complete responsibility for the problems and failures?
In battle and in business as well as in life – a leader must take “extreme ownership”. It is a game-changer! It inspires the team members to do the same. It transforms team culture. It lights the fire in people to take their performance to the next level. It is a leadership super-power!
How do your extreme ownership as your organization culture?
Would you like the leaders in your organization to become better leaders? Take more responsibility and ownership instead of passing the buck? Even extreme ownership like Jocko Willink did? We help leaders do just that – take ownership of their behaviors and outcomes through the process of feedback and feed-forward using Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s stakeholder centered leadership coaching.
Why is coaching important in leadership development? How is it beneficial? Leadership coaching is the most effective way to ensure that leadership improvement takes place. That leader takes ownership and responsibility for her behavior and results. Executive education and training programs help in creating awareness for change – however behavior change requires customized solutions and consistent follow-up and accountability, which executive coaching provides by its design.
Marshall Goldsmith executive coaching is one of the best leadership development programs available in India and worldwide through a network of more than 3500 coaches who provide the same consistent executive coaching process that has been used by many of the Fortune 500 companies for their leadership development coaching programs.
We offer Marshall Goldsmith coaching in India, the middle east, and southeast Asia. It is the best coaching program in India because it is exactly the same executive coaching process used by Marshall Goldsmith to coach CEOs of Fortune 500 companies worldwide and we guarantee measurable leadership growth or you don’t pay at all.
Here are some of the features of Marshall Goldsmith executive coaching program
Guaranteed, measurable leadership growth as assessed – not by us – but by the leader’s own stakeholders
Unlike leadership training or executive education programs, the entire team will be involved while doing their day to day work
The leader becomes the coach and it has a cascading effect on the team increasing the team effectiveness and improving organizational culture
It is a system for continuous improvement for leaders themselves and their teams – although it is leadership coaching for the individual leader, the benefit of team coaching is realized through the involvement of the entire team
In a study of 11,000 leaders on 4 continents – 95% of the leaders using this leadership coaching process improved!
This is the exact same executive coaching process that has been used by 150 of the Fortune 500 companies to grow their leaders through CEO coaching and leadership coaching at C-suite levels
We are so confident of the process that we work on a no growth no pay basis (don’t try that with other vendors, lol!)
Schedule an exploratory 15-minute conversation with our leadership adviser today
Lessons for leaders: Henry Ford FAILURE story & bad leadership
Many of us have heard about the legendary leader Henry Ford assembly line and the Model T car’s success story. The success story has a lot of lessons for leaders. What to do to be a successful leader – persistence, hard work, and thinking outside the box.
But there is also a relatively unknown and darker story of Henry Ford’s bad leadership and equally spectacular failure! And therein lie critical lessons for leaders. These lessons for leaders are about what not to do as a leader.
Leadership success often leads to ignoring feedback and some poor leadership behaviors, ultimately leading to failure. A good 360-degree feedback tool combined with leadership coaching is the most effective way to ensure that leaders become aware of his/her bottlenecks, take ownership of their behaviors and their impact, and work to improve their behavior.
[lwptoc]
The Model T, the Henry Ford assembly line success story, and lessons for leaders
Until the 20th century, the first automobiles were hand made, clunky, and expensive. Only the rich could afford to own one. October 1, 1908, was a noteworthy date in the automobile industry’s history. When the first Model T, the car, rolled off the assembly line and revolutionized transportation forever. The assembly line became synonymous with Henry Ford and his ingenuity. The Model T was the first affordable car for the mass market, and it kept selling and selling. It took seven years for Ford to sell its millionth Model T. Just a year and a half later, it sold its two-millionth. By 1920, four million model T’s were sold!
Over the next quarter of a century, it made Ford Motor the most successful automobile company globally. It also made Henry Ford America’s second billionaire after John D. Rockefeller.
That is the success story of the legendary Henry Ford, his innovation vision, and his leadership. Many of us have heard about this success story of Henry Ford, the assembly line, and the Model T., The lessons for leaders from Henry Ford’s success story, are persistence, tenacity, and hard work.
Image courtesy – Henry Ford museum
The flip side of success and the lessons for leaders
But there is also a relatively unknown and darker story of Henry Ford’s bad leadership and equally spectacular failurethat took the company to the brink of bankruptcy! There are lessons for leaders in his failure story as well. These lessons for leaders lessons in poor leadership and are not what NOT to do as a leader!
During the 1920s, subtle but sure trends emerged that were dangerous to the Model T’s dominance. However, Henry Ford was in denial. Henry Ford stuck to the assembly line and mass production concept. Ford famously declared, “History is more or less bunk.” But history was about to happen to him.
Following the depression of the 1920s, the wealth of Americans grew at a rapid rate. By 1920, more than half the population lived in cities instead of living near a farm or in a rural community for the first time. Working-class Americans enjoyed more leisure than ever before, and some companies implemented the two-week vacation policy. Hollywood was turning out motion pictures that engrossed audiences. Sporting events also captured the nation’s imagination, especially Babe Ruth’s sixty home runs in 1927. Popular culture, style, and fashion were coming to the United States.
The winds of change in the automobile industry – a lesson for leaders to stay ahead of change
This cultural and social transformation also affected the automobile industry. Automobiles, originally just a means of transportation, became a status symbol for the upwardly mobile Americans. Most of what we own is not on display. No one knows your salary or your financial assets, and we consider it impolite in our culture to ask. Only people invited to your home know what it looks like and can guess what it cost to furnish it. Your automobile, by contrast, is on display wherever you drive. It is visible, mobile, and communicates your status everywhere you drive it!
A leader in denial who refuses to change – a classic example of poor leadership behaviors and the lesson for leaders
Henry Ford refused to believe that an automobile was anything more than an appliance. His favorite slogan about the Model T was “It takes you there, and it brings you back.” The factory that was producing the Model T was the same as it had been for years. The way he was producing it—the moving assembly line, interchangeable parts, extreme specialization of labor—was by 1925 the same as it had been for years. His pricing strategy also remained the same. Model T came in only a single color – Black. Henry Ford wrote in 1922 that “any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants – as long as it is black.”
The desires and expectations of consumers were changing in the 1920s. Ford’s sales in 1925 were flat compared to 1924, although the car market grew rapidly. Ford’s market share declined from 54 to 45 percent, a sign of danger. Ford chose to ignore it. But the legendary leader Henry Ford was in denial of the reality. He was ignoring feedback and avoiding facing reality. It often happens with many successful leaders; Ford cushioned himself from reality by surrounding himself with “yes men” who told him only what he wanted to hear and not what he needed to hear!
General Motors beat Ford by listening to feedback and being responsive – an important lesson for leaders.
General Motors, on the other hand, had the answer to the needs of the changing market. Instead of following the Henry Ford assembly line concept and producing the same model in a single color, they customized. Not only did GM differentiate its cars through colors but also through a policy designed to exploit the automobile as a status symbol. The cars in GM’s line were Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac. Fortune magazine in the 1930s characterized the options of GM models as: “Chevrolet for the hoi polloi, … Pontiac . . . for the poor but proud, Oldsmobile for the comfortable but discreet, Buick for the striving, Cadillac for the rich.”
Unlike Ford, GM also introduced an annual model change for all its cars. With the annual model change, driving last year’s model became a comment on your status in the world. General Motors adapted to the feedback and the changing tastes of the consumers. It poised GM to thrive for the next few decades!
Delivering the bad news to a leader who won’t listen
The sales department told Henry Ford that Model T sales were slipping. Unless they substantially changed the car, it would soon stop selling. The Henry Ford assembly line that brought them success was now an Achilles heel. Ford said the car was fine—the problem was an incompetent sales department. This is a typical poor leadership behavior of ignoring feedback and blaming others.
Imagine that you are a Ford executive. The truth is obvious for all to see. How do you clearly communicate to the boss, a genius, and a successful leader, that change is needed?
Poor leadership behavior – Punishing the messenger.
The man who finally decided to “bell the cat” was Ernest Kanzler. He was a senior executive at Ford and also the brother-in-law of Ford’s only child, Edsel. He wrote a seven-page memorandum and delivered it to Ford on January 26, 1926. Kanzler spoke the unpleasant truth. His reward was the same as for many people who do so. He was fired. The fantasy that you can render the message untrue if you get rid of the messenger is a powerful one.
Punishing the messenger is one of the often fatal poor leadership behaviors of successful leaders. By the mid-1920s, Ford was living in a world of his own. There was irrefutable evidence that his strategy was failing. Ford nevertheless told The New York Times late in 1926, “The Ford car will continue to be made in the same way. . . . I am not governed by anybody’s figures but by my own information and observation.” Ford was suffering from classic “ego traps” that successful leaders often fall prey to.
The Achilles heel of successful leaders – Denial of reality
“What will Ford do next?”—the answer came as quite a shock to almost everyone. Ford decided to shut down the Model T plant at River Rouge completely. The plant remained shut down for nearly a year to retool it to make a new Model A. This left General Motor’s Chevrolet with no competition for an entire year! Sensing the opportunity, Mr. Chrysler also entered the automobile market with his Plymouth model. Ford remained steadfast in his denial of what the automobile market had become. After killing off the Model T, he created the Model A. Although Model A was a technically improved product, there would be no “car for every purse and purpose” and no annual model change.
No one could have predicted the catastrophic fall of Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company.
This marked the end of the market leadership of the Ford Motor Company. Occasionally over the next decade, it would beat GM in sales. However, except for three years (1929, 1930, and 1935), Ford trailed GM in the automobile’s market share by a wide margin for eight decades to come! Henry Ford never changed. Successful leaders often become superstitious – they hold on to doing the same things that originally made them successful. Not changing is a recipe for disaster. In 1945, by the end of World War II, his company was at the edge of bankruptcy. Henry Ford II, Henry Ford’s grandson, eventually saved Ford when he took the company over later.
Bad habits of good leaders (Poor leadership behaviors) – lessons for leaders
Henry Ford exhibited many of the 20 bad habits that hold back further success – that Dr. Marshall Goldsmith lists in his bestselling book – What Got You Here Won’t Get You There”.
Not listening: Successful leaders often disregard others’ ideas and are unwilling to listen to others. It is not only disrespectful to the team members but also harmful as it was with Henry Ford.
Telling the world how smart we are: Successful leaders suffer from this tendency to show off. The need to show people we’re smarter than they think we are. It is unnecessary and annoying to others.
Making destructive comments: The needless sarcasm and cutting remarks that we think make us witty. Ford was known for such sarcastic comments and practical jokes that may be funny to him but insulted others.
Making excuses: The need to reposition our annoying behavior as a permanent fixture, so people excuse us for it.
Clinging to the past: The need to deflect blame away from ourselves and onto events and people from our past, a subset of blaming everyone else.
Punishing the messenger: The misguided need to attack the innocent who are usually only trying to help us. Henry Ford did it to Ernest Kanzler, who was just a messenger of the bad news.
It is not just the arrogant leaders who fall prey to these bad leadership habits. The most humble leaders often fall prey to many of these bad habits when they constantly get positive reinforcement. When a leader hardly ever gets real, truthful, and unfiltered feedback that may help them stay grounded, it is easy to fall prey to one or more of these bad habits.
How can leaders stay grounded and avoid the bad habits that derail their careers?
A good 360-degree feedback tool combined with leadership coaching is the most effective way to ensure that leaders become aware of his/her bottlenecks, take ownership of their behaviors and their impact, and work to improve their behavior.
One of the most effective tools for leaders to stay grounded is to get regular and anonymous 360-degree feedback from all the team members with whom the leader interacts regularly. This allows the leader to see himself as others see him. Any difference in perception between how the leader sees himself and how others see the leader is an area where the leader may be blindsided and addressed through leadership coaching. The 360-degree feedback should be administered to ALL leaders at least once a year. It is one of the best tools to identify strengths and improvement areas for leadership development.
Global Leadership Assessment (GLA360) for your leadership team
The Global Leadership Assessment (GLA360) is a 360-degree feedback tool based on extensive research and designed and tested by Dr. Marshall Goldsmith. He has been awarded and recognized worldwide and is considered the #1 Leadership Thinker and the Executive Coach to Fortune 500 CEOs. The research included the CEOs of Fortune 100 companies, global thought leaders and their inputs, and international business executives of multinationals on six continents.
A statistician creates most assessments. In contrast, the GLA 360 is created based on inputs by the leaders and for the leaders. A real-life leader, in all likeliness, will know a lot more about leadership than an academician or a statistician. You are assessed on competencies that have made real leaders in multinationals successful. You are compared with actual leaders, which gives a more accurate assessment helpful in the real world.
The GLA 360 measures the following 15 competencies that matter to real leaders on 6 continents. It shows leaders the areas they need to develop to succeed in a competitive business environment.
Helping successful leaders become more successful – lessons for leaders
Making leaders aware of their strengths and improvement areas through 360-degree feedback is only the first step. The next step is to help the leader leverage their strengths and improve weaknesses through leadership coaching. Why is coaching important in leadership development? How is it beneficial? Leadership coaching is the most effective way to ensure that leadership improvement takes place. That leader takes ownership and responsibility for her behavior and results. Executive education and training programs help in creating awareness for change – however, behavior change requires customized solutions and consistent follow-up and accountability, which executive coaching provides by its design.
World’s number 1 Executive Coaching program designed by World’ number 1 leadership thinker
We offer our New Age Leadership – NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching.
That delivers guaranteed and measurable leadership growth. It is based on a stakeholder-centered coaching process with a 95% effectiveness rate (in a study or 11000 leaders on 4 continents). It is used by companies ranging from startups to 150 of the Fortune 500 companies to develop their leaders.
Here are some of the salient benefits of NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching
Time and resource-efficient: The leader does not have to leave work to attend training programs. We go to the leader and her team. And it only takes 1.5 hours per month. The rest of the time, the leader is working to implement with her team.
Separate and customized improvement areas for each leader: Every leader is different. One size fits all approach doesn’t work. Individual development areas for each leader aligned to the business strategy.
Involves entire team: Unlike most leadership programs, NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching involves the leader’s entire team, and it has a cascading effect – increasing the team effectiveness and improving organizational culture.
The leader becomes the coach: for continuous improvement for leaders themselves and their teams. It is like kaizen for your leadership development.
Cost-Effective: Our entire one-year coaching engagement often costs less than sending the leader to a short duration leadership program at any reputed B school.
Guaranteed and measurable leadership growth: as assessed – not by us – but anonymously rated by the leader’s own team members.
Pay us only after we deliver results! : We work with many of our clients on a pay for results basis. What does it mean? If the leaders don’t improve, you don’t have to pay us.
Schedule an exploratory 15-minute conversation with our leadership adviser today
The statistics on the effectiveness of leadership training and executive education programs are both shocking and depressing! Despite a plethora of executive education and leadership training programs and many consultants offering them, most executive education and leadership development programs waste time and money! Why does leadership training fail? Because there is a fundamental problem with them! Read on to find out what this problem is and how to fix it.
A fundamental problem with leadership programs
Executive education and leadership development programs have a fundamental problem. What is it? They often assume that leadership knowing equals leadership doing!
Unfortunately, knowing is not the same as doing! Neither in life nor in leadership. We know many things, but we only consistently do a minuscule of the things we know!
Let me give you an example that I often use in my training sessions to drive home this point. “How many of you have attempted to lose a few pounds?”
Often many people raise their hands when I ask this question. During adulthood, most of us have put on a few extra pounds that we want to shed.
Knowing is NOT the same as doing!
Then I ask – “Do you have any suggestions for me to lose a few pounds around my waist?” And I get a lot of suggestions like – eat more fruits, more raw vegetables, cut down on sugar, exercise more, eat mindfully, join a gym, take the stairs instead of the elevator, walk 10,000 steps daily, and on and on.
Most of them are usually excellent and useful suggestions. I then say – “Thank you for the lovely and useful suggestions!”. My next question is – “How many of you consistently implement one or more of these suggestions regularly?”
Very few people raise their hands in answer to this question! Knowing how to lose weight is not the same as doing it consistently enough to get the desired outcome.
There is high awareness amongst Americans about weight loss. Diet books are popular and are often on the list of best-selling books.
Americans are buying more and more diet books than ever, and yet there are more obese people in America today than ever! People simply do not lose weight by reading a diet book!
More diet books are sold than ever, yet more Americans are obese than ever!
Leadership is no different. The fundamentally flawed assumption in leadership training and executive education programs is that attending a course for a few days and knowing about some leadership skills and tools will translate into job leadership behavior change. Unfortunately, leadership development doesn’t happen this way. Read the article on how leadership development really happens here.
“Leadership awareness may happen in a training program – leadership development occurs when a leader is at her work, interacting with her team! “ – Tushar Vakil.
Approach leadership development like a fitness regime and fix why leadership training fails
We should approach leadership development like a fitness regime. If we want to get fit, a one-week routine at the gym once or twice a year, just doesn’t work!
We need to work out regularly, probably daily. The exercise routine should be customized based on our individual needs and not a standard curriculum of one size fits all. Our diet regime should be designed similarly. Despite the help and despite the good intentions, we will fail to go to the gym.
Failing, dusting ourselves off, and getting “back on the wagon” should be part of the fitness routine’s design and shouldn’t come as a surprise. Why?
That is how human beings learn and form habits. Losing weight and keeping it off is a process and not an event – and so is leadership development! It takes time, effort, and commitment.
Hiring a personal trainer for our fitness regime increases our chances of losing weight and getting fit by a wide margin. How wide a margin? Research studies have shown that hiring a personal trainer increases your success rate by a whopping 1100%!
“Personal trainer” for your leadership development – to fix why leadership training fails
Using Marshall Goldsmith’s stakeholder-centered coaching process, our leadership coaching program is like hiring a personal trainer for your fitness regime! Here, the coach is the “personal trainer” for our leadership growth! He will help you shed leadership fat and build some leadership muscles.
The leadership coach will help us reduce or eliminate leadership bottlenecks and build on our leadership strengths. And best of all – it guarantees results. If there are no improvements in leadership behavior, there is simply no charge. Period!
Executive education and training programs help in creating awareness for change – however, behavior change requires customized solutions and consistent follow-up and accountability, which executive coaching provides by its design.
Guaranteed and measurable leadership growth
Would you like to develop leaders in your organization? We use Marshall Goldsmith’s stakeholder centered coaching process to deliver measurable and guaranteed leadership growth.
NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching
That delivers guaranteed and measurable leadership growth. It is based on a stakeholder-centered coaching process with a 95% effectiveness rate (in a study or 11000 leaders on 4 continents). It is used by companies ranging from startups to 150 of the Fortune 500 companies to develop their leaders.
Here are some of the salient benefits of NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching
Time and resource-efficient: The leader does not have to leave work to attend training programs. We go to the leader and her team. And it only takes 1.5 hours per month. The rest of the time, the leader is working to implement with her team.
Separate and customized improvement areas for each leader: Every leader is different. One size fits all approach doesn’t work. Individual development areas for each leader aligned to the business strategy.
Involves entire team: Unlike most leadership programs, NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching involves the leader’s entire team, and it has a cascading effect – increasing the team effectiveness and improving organizational culture.
The leader becomes the coach: for continuous improvement for leaders themselves and their teams. It is like kaizen for your leadership development.
Cost-Effective: Our entire one-year coaching engagement often costs less than sending the leader to a short duration leadership program at any reputed B school.
Guaranteed and measurable leadership growth: as assessed – not by us – but anonymously rated by the leader’s own team members.
Pay us only after we deliver results! : We work with many of our clients on a pay for results basis. What does it mean? If the leaders don’t improve, you simply don’t have to pay us.
Schedule an exploratory 15-minute conversation with our leadership adviser today
