Marshall Goldsmith; Mark Reiter. What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful (Kindle Location 666). Hyperion. Kindle Edition
SECTION TWO, CHAPTER 4:
Knowing What to Stop
Among the myriad wise things I have heard Peter Drucker say, the wisest was, “We spend a lot of time teaching leaders what to do. We don’t spend enough time teaching leaders what to stop. Half the leaders I have met don’t need to learn what to do. They need to learn what to stop.”
The recognition and reward systems in most organizations are totally geared to acknowledge the doing of something. We get credit for doing something good. We rarely get credit for ceasing to do something bad.
That’s the funny thing about stopping some behavior. It gets no attention, but it can be as crucial as everything else we do combined.
If we successfully stop smoking, we regard it as a big achievement—and congratulate ourselves all the time for it. Others do too.
But we lose this common sense in the can-do environment of an organization—where there is no system for honoring the avoidance of a bad decision or the cessation of bad behavior. Our performance reviews are solely based on what we’ve done.
We get credit for being punctual, not for stopping our lateness.
We can change this. Get out your notepad. Instead of your usual “To Do” list, start your “To Stop” list.
Shifting into Neutral
Not all behavior is good or bad. Some of it is simply neutral. Neither good nor bad.
For example, let’s say you’re not regarded as a nice person. You want to change that perception. You decide, “I need to be nicer.”
In effect, you have to convert all of the negative things you do at work into positive actions. That’s asking a lot of most people, requiring a complete personality makeover that is closer to religious conversion than on-the-job improvement. In my experience very few if any people can institute that many positive changes in their interpersonal actions all at once. They can handle one at a time. But a half dozen or more changes? I don’t think so.
Fortunately, there’s a simpler way to achieve the goal of “being nicer.” All you have to do is “stop being a jerk.”
All you have to do is . . . nothing. When someone offers a less-than-brilliant idea in a meeting, don’t criticize it. Say nothing. When someone challenges one of your decisions, don’t argue with them or make excuses. Quietly consider it and say nothing. When someone makes a helpful suggestion, don’t remind them that you already knew that. Thank them and say nothing. This is not a semantic game. The beauty of knowing what to stop—of achieving this state of inspired neutrality—is that it is so easy to do. Given the choice between becoming a nicer person and ceasing to be a jerk, which do you think is easier to do? The former requires a concerted series of positive acts of commission. The latter is nothing more than an act of omission.
Correcting the behavior, you’ll discover, does not require polished skills, elaborate training, arduous practice, or supernatural creativity. All that’s required is the faint imagination to stop doing what you’ve done in the past—in effect, to do nothing at all.
What’s Wrong with Us?
What we’re dealing with here are challenges in interpersonal behavior, often leadership behavior. They are the egregious everyday annoyances that make your workplace substantially more noxious than it needs to be.
- Winning too much: The need to win at all costs and in all situations—when it matters, when it doesn’t, and when it’s totally beside the point.
- Adding too much value: The overwhelming desire to add our two cents to every discussion.
- Passing judgment: The need to rate others and impose our standards on them.
- Making destructive comments: The needless sarcasms and cutting remarks that we think make us sound sharp and witty.
- Starting with “No,” “But,” or “However”: The overuse of these negative qualifiers which secretly say to everyone, “I’m right. You’re wrong.”
- Telling the world how smart we are: The need to show people we’re smarter than they think we are.
- Speaking when angry: Using emotional volatility as a management tool.
- Negativity, or “Let me explain why that won’t work”: The need to share our negative thoughts even when we weren’t asked.
- Withholding information: The refusal to share information in order to maintain an advantage over others.
- Failing to give proper recognition: The inability to praise and reward.
- Claiming credit that we don’t deserve: The most annoying way to overestimate our contribution to any success.
- 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.
- Playing favorites: Failing to see that we are treating someone unfairly.
- Refusing to express regret: The inability to take responsibility for our actions, admit we’re wrong, or recognize how our actions affect others.
- Not listening: The most passive-aggressive form of disrespect for colleagues.
- Failing to express gratitude: The most basic form of bad manners.
- Punishing the messenger: The misguided need to attack the innocent who are usually only trying to help us.
- Passing the buck: The need to blame everyone but ourselves.
- An excessive need to be “me”: Exalting our faults as virtues simply because they’re who we are.
I will demonstrate that correcting each of these irritants is the best way to enlist people as our allies—which in the long run is a much more promising success strategy than defending behavior that alienates people.
…
Who would want to work in an environment where colleagues are guilty of these sins? And yet we do every day. The good news is that these failings rarely show up in bunches. You may know one person guilty of one or two of them. You may know another with one or two different issues. But it’s hard to find successful people who embody too many of these failings.
There’s more good news. These faults are simple to correct.
For example, the cure for not thanking enough is remembering to say, “Thank you.” (How tough is that?) For not apologising, it’s learning to say, “I’m sorry. I’ll do better in the future.”
For not listening, it’s keeping your mouth shut and ears open. And so on. Although this stuff is simple, it’s not easy (there’s a difference). You already know what to do. We just lose sight of the many daily opportunities to employ them, and thus get rusty.
Check yourself against the list. It’s unlikely (I pray) that you’re guilty of all of these annoying habits. It’s not even likely that you can claim six to eight of them as your own. And of those six to eight, it’s also unlikely that all of them are sufficiently significant problems that we have to worry about. Some are going to be more serious issues than others. If only one out of twenty people says that you have an anger management issue, let it go. On the other hand, if sixteen out of twenty say it, let’s get to work.
Whittle the list down to the one or two vital issues, and you’ll know where to start.
Think about how we perceive other successful people. We rarely associate their success with technical skill or even brainpower. Maybe we say, “They’re smart,” but that’s not the sole factor we attribute to their success. We believe they’re smart and something else. At some point we give them the benefit of the doubt on skill issues. For example, we assume our doctor knows medicine, so we judge him on “bedside manner” issues—how he tolerates our questions, how he delivers bad news, even how he apologises for keeping us cooling our heels too long in his waiting room. None of this is taught in medical school. We apply these behavioral criteria to almost any successful person—whether it’s a CEO or a plumbing contractor. We all have certain attributes that help us land our first job. These are the kind of achievements that go on our résumé. But as we become more successful, those attributes recede into the background—and more subtle attributes come to the fore.
In the course of going through the following list of common flaws, you may recognise yourself. “That’s me,” you’ll say to yourself. “I do that all the time. I had no idea I was coming across that way.”
The chances that you’ll get a little nudge of self-recognition here are fairly high. The chances that you’ll admit it’s a problem are less high. The chances that you’ll take corrective action to mend your ways are even slimmer. But even if you were that extraordinarily enlightened open-minded individual who could cop to all this, I’d still say we’re getting ahead of ourselves. You’re not ready to change yet.
For one thing, I’m a little skeptical of self-diagnosis.
More important, even if the diagnosis were correct—say, you are a chronic interrupter—you cannot be sure that it’s a serious problem to other people. It might be a personality tic to your colleagues, a foible they tolerate. But if it doesn’t bother them or affect their opinions of you or isn’t holding you back at work, you can ease up on yourself—at least on this issue.