What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There
Marshall Goldsmith
Hyperion
ISBN: 9781401301309
Non-Fiction, Business
Reviewed by Kevin Aguanno

As a highly-successful career coach for the upwardly-mobile executive crowd, author Marshall Goldsmith has worked with leaders in many of the Fortune 500 companies to help them achieve even greater levels of success. In his coaching, he has worked with all different personality types and has seen both the good and bad side of what makes a leader.
His thesis: that the personal attributes that help people achieve a measure of success may be hindering them from furthering that success.
Goldsmith shares twenty habits that lead to early success, but that can be destructive to long-term growth and interpersonal relationships. Some examples include wanting to win at all costs, trying to add too much value, passing judgment, refusing to express regret for our failings, among others. He spends quite some time explaining how these behaviors can both support success in the short term and hinder success in the long term.
To change for the better, he suggests seven new behaviors to adopt for the future. These changes centre around recognizing your shortcomings, apologizing for the impact those have had on your coworkers, soliciting their suggestions for your improvement in a way that helps them feel safe, promising to change, and then frequently asking them for a report card on your progress. Goldsmith has named this overall process “feed forward” instead of “feed back.” His rationale for this is not to focus on the past, but rather to focus on the changes to be made in the future.
While the concepts in here are not original, the author does bring together many practical examples from his own coaching experience that illustrate the hazards of letting the negative traits run unfettered and the immediate and positive results that can be found by following his seven-step prescription for change. I’ve read many personal improvement books and I found this one refreshing in its approach.