"What Got You Here Won't Get You There" by Marshall Goldsmith: Summary and Review

Marshall Goldsmith’s book makes a claim that sounds simple but is uncomfortable for successful people. The habits that helped you rise are often the same habits that now stop you from rising further. Goldsmith is an executive coach who has worked with the chief executives of large companies. In 2007, together with the writer Mark Reiter, he put his coaching method into a short book. This review explains the book’s main ideas and how Goldsmith tries to change behavior. It also asks how much of his advice is supported by evidence.

The higher you rise, the more your problems are about behavior

Goldsmith starts from his experience with senior managers. At the start of a career, people rise because of their skills. They know accounting, write good code or sell well. Higher up, everyone is skilled. What separates people then is how they behave toward others. A boss who interrupts, takes credit or never says thank you damages the work of many people.

Goldsmith therefore does not teach new skills. He helps people stop doing things. His coaching clients are leaders whose colleagues complain about them. He describes a simple rule for his own payment. He is paid only if the client’s key colleagues, whom he calls stakeholders, say that the client’s behavior has really improved. The client’s own opinion does not count.

Success makes people believe their bad habits helped them

The first part of the book explains why successful people resist change. Goldsmith calls the main obstacle the success delusion. Successful people believe that their success was caused by everything they did, including their bad habits. In Goldsmith’s words, they think: “I behave this way. I am successful. Therefore, I must be successful because I behave this way.”

He explains this with four beliefs that successful people share:

1. I have succeeded. They remember their wins and forget their failures.
2. I can succeed. They believe that their own effort, not luck, makes good things happen.
3. I will succeed. They are optimists and often take on too much.
4. I choose to succeed. They want to decide for themselves and dislike being told to change.

These beliefs help people succeed. They also make it hard to hear criticism. Goldsmith asked over 50,000 participants in his training programs to rate themselves against their peers. He reports that 80 to 85 percent placed themselves in the top 20 percent.

The key distinction is between behavior that causes success and behavior that comes along with it. Goldsmith calls the second kind “in spite of” behavior. A boss may be successful because of her strategy and in spite of her temper. Goldsmith compares the error to superstition.

In experiments by the psychologist B. F. Skinner, hungry pigeons repeated random movements that happened to come just before food arrived. Leaders, he says, repeat bad habits in the same way, because the rewards keep coming. In his 2009 article on this topic, Goldsmith also links the resistance to change to cognitive dissonance, the discomfort of holding beliefs that do not fit together. The mentua article What Is Cognitive Dissonance? explains this effect in detail.

Twenty habits hold successful people back

The center of the book is a list of twenty habits. All of them are about how people treat others. Goldsmith describes them one by one, with examples from his coaching:

1. Winning too much
2. Adding too much value
3. Passing judgment
4. Making destructive comments
5. Starting with “no”, “but” or “however”
6. Telling the world how smart we are
7. Speaking when angry
8. Negativity, or explaining why something won’t work
9. Withholding information
10. Failing to give proper recognition
11. Claiming credit we don’t deserve
12. Making excuses
13. Clinging to the past
14. Playing favorites
15. Refusing to express regret
16. Not listening
17. Failing to express gratitude
18. Punishing the messenger
19. Passing the buck
20. An excessive need to be “me”

He adds a twenty-first problem that he treats separately, goal obsession. It means chasing a goal so hard that you forget the larger purpose behind it.

Goldsmith calls the first habit the most common problem among the leaders he has coached. Winning too much means needing to win every argument, even when the result does not matter, such as which restaurant to choose. The second habit is close to it. Adding too much value means improving every idea that someone brings you, even slightly. The boss’s small addition may make the idea 5 percent better. But the employee feels that it is no longer their idea, and their commitment drops by much more.

For many of these habits Goldsmith offers a simple test question. Before you speak, ask yourself whether your comment is worth it, not only whether it is true. Knowledge at Wharton quotes his version. “The question is not, ‘Is it true?’ but rather, ‘Is it worth it?’”

Several habits are about small words. Goldsmith points out how often people start a reply with “no”, “but” or “however”. Each of these words tells the other person that they are wrong, even when the speaker then agrees with them. Other habits are about credit and information. A manager who claims credit for a team’s idea, or who keeps useful news to himself, may gain a little power. But the team learns to stop bringing him ideas and news.

To break such habits, Goldsmith uses small penalties. Knowledge at Wharton describes one example from the book. You ask a friend to charge you ten dollars each time you pass needless judgment on someone’s idea. The money is not the point. The fine makes the habit visible, and other people help to notice it.

Change starts with honest feedback

The second half of the book describes how to change. The first step is to find out which habits matter. You cannot see your own behavior well, so you must ask the people who work with you.

In his coaching, Goldsmith interviews a client’s colleagues and sometimes family members. He tells the client what was said but never who said it. For readers without a coach, he suggests simpler routes. Ask colleagues one question, “How can I do better?”, rather than “What do you think of me?” Notice what people say about you in passing. And watch how people react to you in daily work.

The goal is to choose one or two behaviors to change. Goldsmith stresses that trying to fix everything at once usually fails.

Apologizing turns colleagues into helpers

Once you know what to change, Goldsmith’s next step is to apologize. You tell the people affected that you are sorry for the behavior, that you want to change it, and that you need their help. He treats the apology as one of the strongest steps in the whole method. As Knowledge at Wharton quotes him, “When you say, ‘I’m sorry,’ you turn people into your allies, even your partners.”

The apology is followed by advertising. You tell people what you are trying to change. Goldsmith’s reason is that people judge others through their old picture of them. If your colleagues expect you to interrupt, they will notice every interruption and miss every time you listen. Announcing the change makes them watch for the new behavior.

Listening, thanking and following up make the change last

The next three steps are habits in themselves. The first is listening. Goldsmith means real attention, without interrupting, finishing other people’s sentences or planning your answer.

The second is thanking. When someone gives you advice or criticism, Goldsmith says, the best answer is “thank you”, without defending yourself. He argues that thanks cost nothing: “Gratitude is not a limited resource, nor is it costly.”

The third is following up. At regular intervals, for example once a month, you go back to your colleagues and ask whether they have seen an improvement and what else you could do. Goldsmith calls this the most important part of the process and also the hardest. It keeps the change visible, and it keeps you honest. Teams that review their work regularly use a similar idea, as the article What Is an After-Action Review? shows.

Feedforward asks for ideas about the future

The last tool is the one Goldsmith is best known for. He calls it feedforward. Ordinary feedback is about the past, and it often makes people defensive. Feedforward asks only for suggestions about the future.

The exercise is simple. You name one behavior you want to improve, for example “I want to listen better”. You ask someone for two ideas that might help you next time. You listen and say thank you. You do not argue with the ideas, and you do not explain why they would not work. Then you ask the next person.

Goldsmith’s reason is that nobody can change the past, but everybody can try a new idea tomorrow. People also find it easier to give advice than criticism.

How it differs from other books on behavior at work

Three neighbors help to place this book.

• How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (1936) gives similar advice about listening, praise and avoiding arguments. Carnegie writes for anyone. Goldsmith writes for people who are already successful and believe they do not need such advice.
• Thanks for the Feedback by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen (2014) covers the other side of the process: how to receive criticism well. It goes deeper into the emotions involved than Goldsmith does.
• Triggers by Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter (2015) is Goldsmith’s own sequel. It asks how our surroundings set off bad behavior and adds a daily routine of self-questions.

What this book adds is its target reader and its focus. It speaks directly to people who believe they have earned the right to their habits. And it offers a short list of things to stop, not a long list of things to learn.

Where it falls short

The book has three weaknesses.

The first is its evidence. Almost everything comes from Goldsmith’s own coaching. The striking survey figure, that 80 to 85 percent of people rate themselves in the top 20 percent, comes from his own training groups, not from a published, controlled study. The examples are anonymous success stories. We hear little about clients who did not change.

The second is its narrow view of the problem. The book treats bad behavior as a personal habit. Sometimes the cause is a company that rewards people for winning every argument or for hiding information. Goldsmith says little about changing the system rather than the person.

The third is its age and setting. The examples come from large American companies of the early 2000s. Some passages read like a talk to senior managers, with jokes and stories that add little. A reader who is not a manager can still use the habits, but has to translate them to their own situation.

Which format to choose

The book is short, about 250 pages, and easy to read in a few evenings. Print or an ebook is best if you want to use the list of habits as a checklist. The audiobook, read by Jared Vanderbeck, runs just under eight hours and works well, because the book is built from stories and has no charts. Profile Books also publishes a graphic edition.

Use the list of twenty habits as a menu, not as a test to pass. Read it once, then ask two or three colleagues which habit they would most like you to change. Work on that one for several months, and follow up as Goldsmith describes. That is how he uses the method himself.