 | | |  | Quelling Your Inner Jerk
Robert Lenzer
Forbes.com
Marshall Goldsmith coaches chief executives to lose the swagger and listen up.
Tough, blunt, sure-handed and successful--that is how the chief executive saw himself in his role at a famed financial services giant (anonymous here). Until June. Then Marshall Goldsmith, a Zenlike, gentle soul who makes $1.5 million a year coaching some of the most powerful senior executives in the world, stepped in with the shocking truth.
The boss' dozen lieutenants do indeed see him as "smart, gifted and dynamic," Goldsmith told him, citing comments gleaned in confidential interviews. But they nonetheless feel their boss is "disrespectful, intimidating and arrogant," Goldsmith said in soft, soothing tones. His client was wounded: "I'm an asshole," he blurted out. "This is like a knife in the gut."
Goldsmith is a rock star in the inward-looking, sometimes backbiting world of executive coaching. In the past 28 years he has counseled the brass at Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Mills, Toyota and elsewhere.He culls comments from his clients' colleagues to let the bosses "find out how other people perceive them," aiming to "develop a tightly structured program of more acceptable behavior," he says.
Business is booming in this post-Enron era, when corporate chieftains are prone to atone and tone down. In the 1990s chief executives were capitalism's heroes, celebrated for a can-do, stab-'em-in-the-chest style. Now they are encouraged--by experts who can charge upwards of $10,000 a day--to drop that pose, rev down and look inside themselves for traits they need to change.
A key component of this pricey navel-gazing is peer pressure, in the form of "360-degree"reviews with the underlings. They are conducted anonymously by the coach and are aimed at a peculiar pursuit:trashing the boss. It is enough to stir paranoia in any thin-skinned, insecure leader (which arguably covers most of corporate America).
"CEOs are waking up to the new reality that they can't be SOBs and get away with it," says Goldsmith, 56, an inveterate optimist and self-promoter who meditates, believes in the curative spirit of Buddhism and has worked with 40 or so chief executives in the past five years. But the brass hats are "so damned busy and always facing a crisis," he says, that they need an outsider like him to deliver a needed smack upside the head.
So in one gig Goldsmith got personal--he called in for help from the client's wife. The swaggering boss of a brokerage firm got lousy reviews from his peers; essentially, they said he was a jerk. But he rejected that view and vowed to make no changes. Goldsmith suggested the exec call his wife, with Coach Goldsmith on the line, to ask what she thought of her husband; she, too, said he was a jerk.
A little skepticism is in order. Can chief executives (or anybody) truly change themselves all that much? Coaching is, let's face it, a fad, drawing into the act academics, business consultants, psychologists, even ex-journalists. "We've gone overboard. There are more dilettante coaches than good ones. You can only modify behavior within bounds," says Warren Strickland, a partner at McKinsey & Co.
Even Goldsmith has reservations. "I'm not a believer in instant religious conversion," says he. (Slow conversions, perhaps. Raised a Southern Baptist, he switched to Buddhism in 1975, drawn by its focus on letting go of the past to concentrate on the now.) "I'm very skeptical about the process."
Marshall Goldsmith was born and bred in Valley Station, Ky., an only child. His father worked in a gas station; his mother was a first-grade teacher. He graduated from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Ind., then got an M.B.A. at Indiana University and a Ph.D. in organizational behavior at UCLA. As a consultant he first worked for Paul Hersey at the Center for Leadership Studies in Escondido, Calif. He started his own practice in 1979.
These days Goldsmith, who is married with two grown children and based in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., earns about $500,000 a year coaching eight executives one-on-one, and he has a waiting list. He brings in another $850,000 a year from other stuff--one-day seminars at companies, each of which pays him $17,000 a gig; fees from up to 50 coaches in the Marshall Goldsmith network, who get referrals thanks to his prominence; and writing and coediting books (18 so far).
Goldsmith preaches four golden rules: Care about what your colleagues say and feel about you; don't try to prove you are always right; ask, listen and follow up; and solicit appraisals from your associates. Goldsmith polls an executive's associates every three months to measure whether his behavior has changed, passing on the results to the executive. "Without the feedback, there's no incentive to change," he says.
He also preaches vulnerability. At a big drugmaker, an executive hoping to one day succeed the chief executive managed to rankle the boss by trying too hard to impress with all he knew when he should have listened more to what the boss knew. Goldsmith's advice:Don't be such a show-off all the time, ask for help from your mentor--and be willing to learn.
Too many chief executives don't know how to listen to others, the coach says. "If people start listening to others, they learn the value of listening. To become a successful listener, you have to keep listening," he says mystically, channeling Deepak Chopra.
"Marshall forces you to have awkward conversations with co-workers that are easy to postpone," says one current client, George Borst, who runs the U.S. financial services arm of Toyota, with assets of $50 billion. "He holds a mirror to your face and reminds you to put the needs of the organization first."
Borst's 360-degree review said he was impatient, had not properly united his team and needed to clarify standards for high performance. Goldsmith managed to shroud this in a softer message: Your people need more guidance. So Borst has scheduled his individual meetings with all of Toyota Financial Services' nine vice presidents to give them "the coaching they have requested of me," Borst says.
When a recalcitrant client relapses, Goldsmith steps in like a drug counselor at a family intervention. Jonathan Klein, the South Africa-born boss of Getty Images, a global photo distributor, was known for sarcastically debating his colleagues, making some of them feel inferior. He was arguing with his people instead of leading them. In a group meeting with 75 of his employees in Getty Images' Seattle offices, Klein took a question and engaged in a debate rather than answering it. Goldsmith later called him on his behavior.
Klein began to "listen to others, learn to shut up, think before he talked and open a healthy dialogue about Getty Images' direction," says Coach Goldsmith. Sounds a little syrupy, but Klein himself, now rehabilitated, says Goldsmith "helped me become a more effective leader, as judged by the people who are the most important: our employees."
Alan Mulally, who runs Boeing's airplane division, changed after learning he was so hard-driving that he had no room in his head for other people's ideas. He met one-on-one with colleagues to thank them for their input, express gratitude for their involvement and ask them for ideas in the assembly of the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner jet.
"We took the intensity of talking to each other to another level," Mulally rhapsodizes. The feedback showed 85% of Mulally's lieutenants gave him a high rating.
At General Mills, Executive Vice President James Lawrence became a client amid complaints that he berated some of the 28 people who worked alongside him, Goldsmith says. Lawrence denies this characterization. Nonetheless, client and coach met every other month for a year and a half, followed up by monthly phone calls "to remove the roadblocks from Lawrence's ability to bring out the best in people," says Kevin D. Wilde, General Mills' chief learning officer. Later 26 of the 28 colleagues agreed that Lawrence had modified his behavior positively, and he was rewarded with more authority.
At times such efforts fail. One chief hired Goldsmith to coach the chief financial officer to succeed him; the CFO made marked improvements but was passed over anyway. Goldsmith believes it was a setup. At another company one top exec went along with coaching, only to confide that he was hoping to bail out of the company altogether.
Goldsmith says he forgoes billing a company if his methods fail to change a dysfunctional boss for the better; this occurs in one in eight cases, he says. He declares success when the final feedback from co-workers is overwhelmingly positive. But in this fed-up age of the diminished chief executive, this amounts to leadership by popularity contest, doesn't it? No way, he insists.
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