Guest Author Leadership Marshall Goldsmith

Are We Born Leaders or Can We Become One?

0 140 6 minutes read

By | Dr Marshall Goldsmith | #1 Leadership Thinker, Exec Coach, NYT Bestselling Author. Dartmouth Tuck Professor Mgmt Practice

There is simply no excuse for making excuses at work – or anyplace else for that matter. If we can stop excusing ourselves, we can get better at almost anything we choose. Learn more in this week’s Marshall Goldsmith Newsletter!

Jim Masters: Speaking of leaders again, are we all born leaders or can we become a leader? Do you have to be somebody who is already at a certain level to be considered a leader? There is that conversation about, “Well, the only way you can be a leader is if you’re a born leader.”

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith: I mean, to me, I think that’s largely ridiculous. I’m not sure, maybe some people are incapable of being leaders. I don’t know that. Well, number one, everyone I work with to start with already is a leader.

Jim: Right.

Marshall: Whether they should be a leader or they shouldn’t, whether they’re a good leader or a bad leader, they’re in a leadership role, they’re a leader already. Then the question is only can they become a more effective leader? And the answer to that question is distinctly yes. I have a research study called Leadership Is A Contact Sport. 86,000 people won all kinds of awards from around the world. If anybody wants a copy of it, send me an email, Marshall@MarshallGoldsmith.com, two L’s, it’ll say, “Leadership Is A Contact Sport”, and I’ll send them the article. You can’t argue with its results. People can get better and this is around the world. Our coaching process, there’s no country it doesn’t work, there’s no industry it doesn’t work, there’s no place it doesn’t work. It pretty much always works. They have to do the work though required to get better. So number one, can leaders get better? Yes. And number two, you shouldn’t stereotype yourself.

Jim: Right.

Marshall: “I can’t be a good leader.” Well, why not? Unless you have an incurable genetic defect, then you can change. If you have an incurable genetic defects, you can’t change. Or, for example, I can’t make myself taller.

Jim: There’s certain things you shouldn’t dwell on and waste time with because you’re spinning your wheels.

Marshall: On the other hand, when it comes to behavior, we can almost always change. Let me give you a simple test. Let’s take one behavior, listening. You say, “I’m a bad listener.” I have a question. If I put a gun to your head and said, “If you don’t start listening, well, I’m going to blow your brains out,” could you do this?

Jim: Come again?

Marshall: Yeah. Well, almost everyone says, “Yes.” You know what that shows? You don’t have a skill problem. You have a haven’t tried problem. Now, if you put a gun to my head and said, “If you don’t speak Chinese, I’m going to blow your brains out,” goodbye.

Jim: That’s going to be a problem.

Marshall: I’m done. I can’t speak Chinese. On the other hand, almost everything I coach people on, if I put a gun to their head, they could do it.

Jim: They just need that little encouragement or push, is that what it is?

Marshall: Well, and also, they need to prioritize it. Probably they have not prioritized it, they haven’t made it part of their day-to-day life, and maybe they’ve made excuses. See, here’s another problem with success, and I talk about that in the book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, is delusions of success. A typical success person is, “I behave this way. I am very successful. Therefore, I must be very successful because I behave this way.” Wrong. See, everyone I work with behaves the way they behave and they’re all mega successful, and all of us are successful because we do many things right and in spite of doing some things that are stupid. And I’ve never met anyone in my life who is so wonderful they had nothing on the “In Spite Of List”.

Jim: Right.

Marshall: We all have a little bit of something on that “In Spite Of List”.

Jim: Right, absolutely. I once had a long all nighter conversation with a really good friend and we were talking about success and achieving success and what our standards or thoughts of what success for us individually would be. And he said something which I thought was rather fascinating, and I understood what he was saying. I could connect to it, maybe you will as well. He was a perfectionist. He was incredibly of genius qualities, highly intelligent, creative, always thinking, thinking, doing, building, creating. Not always finishing everything he was building, doing, and creating, but always coming up with new ideas. He told me that he feared reaching, which was a block for him, he feared reaching epic, total, complete success of what he felt success in his mind was because if he reached that level of success and it didn’t match up to what his dream of it would be, it would be a total letdown. And then when you reach that pinnacle of success, the only place you have is to go down. So how do you speak to somebody who has that drive, that thirst for success, but fears the success not being what they dreamed it would be.

Marshall: Well, his philosophy is very Western philosophy. My philosophy is more Eastern or Buddhist philosophy on this topic. I mean, his philosophy is things will be better when.

Jim: Right.

Marshall: And he keeps saying, “Things will be better when,” and his fear, which is quite justified, is you get the win, that doesn’t stop. There is no win. That’s the great Western myth. Well, the reality is, if you think that way, he’s probably exactly right.

Jim: Climb a mountain, reach the top, and then, now what?

Marshall: He needs to look for another mountain.

Jim: It’s empty after that.

Marshall: Yeah, it’s just another mountain. So, to me, success is a process. It’s the journey, it’s not the final outcome. I’m much more Eastern philosophy on that, and to me, what a success is, the process of life. And if you look at it, to me, in my book, Succession: Are You Ready?, I’ve done five programs at my house with retiring people, people my age who are talking about, “Now what? What’re you going to do now?” Well, they can’t play bad golf with old people, they’ve been very important people. And what matters? Well, not that much. Take care of your health, that’s important. If you don’t have your health, the rest of this stuff is irrelevant.

Jim: Everything else is void, yeah.

Marshall: Then number two is, you really need to have enough money to have a middle class or upper middle class income, but much beyond that, there is no correlation between money and happiness. I mean, people that win the lottery are not particularly happier than those that don’t.

Jim: If anything, sometimes unhappy.

Marshall: It goes both ways. Sometimes worse. And then you need some sort of baseline income, then you need to have health, then you need to have good relationships with people you love, that’s important. After that, what matters? Two things, happiness and meaning, and you need simultaneous happiness and meaning. What is happiness? I love the process of what I’m doing. And what is meaning? The outcomes are important to me. And you need both because, for example, if you enjoy something but it has no meaning, it gets empty after a while. Playing golf, going on a 12th cruise. Cruise director jokes are not that funny after the 10th cruise.

Jim: You’ve heard the same jokes over and over.

Marshall: Yeah, it gets empty. On the other hand, if you’re doing something meaningful but you don’t love the process, you’re a martyr or a victim, and there’s no use being successful to the people I work with being a victim or a martyr. So you need both. And my daughter is a Professor at Northwestern, Kelly Goldsmith, and we’ve done research on this and the more hours you spend doing things that simultaneously make you happy and provide meaning, the more satisfied you are with your life.