A Coach as a Facilitator

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Jim Masters: Talk a little bit more about your coaching methods. How would you describe your style of coaching?

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith: I'm much more of a coach as a facilitator. I mentioned my friend, Alan Mulally as a leader as a facilitator. That's why we get along. My coaching process and his leadership process are basically the same process. So as a coach, I give you the feedback and then you interview everyone around you and you ask them for ideas. This is called Feedforward. No feedback about the past after that, ideas for the future, you shut up, you listen, you thank them then you talk to me, I give you ideas and we just follow up, follow up, follow up, follow up. And our research is clear by doing this over and over again, you really achieve huge change. The reason it's transferable though is, most of what you learned you don't learn from me. I am a facilitator helping you learn from everyone around you. In the same way as a leader, my friend, Alan at Ford, a facilitator. He didn't provide the answers, he never worked in a car company. He didn't know the answers. He was a facilitator who helped everyone learn.

Jim: Right. Which makes him, also, adaptable to a lot of different scenarios too, and a lot of different conditions and a different venue.

Marshall: Who knows, maybe Secretary of State.

Jim: Maybe. You also do speaking engagements as well, and I know that you find them uplifting, fun. Tell us about the speaking engagements, and what those are like, and what's your presentation style like there? What can audiences expect?

Marshall: As a speaker, I'm a Professor of Management Practice at the Dartmouth Tuck School, I enjoy that. I don't grade papers, I don't do that. I didn't enjoy that when I had to do it.

Jim: You did it, but been there done that.

Marshall: Been there done that, don't grade papers. Then I travel all around, my teacher style is very interactive. So my class is very lively, interactive. It's not just me talking. People are learning from each other.

Jim: Which is very important to the process, isn't it? Interaction, people feeling involved, invested.

Marshall: Yeah, getting involved. Getting involved, they stay awake. They stay awake and it's fun. I really enjoy speaking and teaching. It's entertaining, it's interactive, it's fun, practical. I try to use a very practical approach to teaching. My old mentor, Dr. Paul Hersey said always use, what he called nickel words. Never try to use big words to be impressive or fancy language, try to talk like a regular human being. And so, the way I look at what I do as a teacher is, I tell everyone I teach, this is not graduate school, this is trade school. I'm not here to help you learn, I'm here to help you do. And so, my stuff is very practical. Now it's easy to understand, everything I teach is easy to understand. It's hard to do. It is very hard to do. I have a process we can talk about later called The Daily Question Process, takes three minutes a day, it'll help you get better at almost anything. Very easy to understand. Half the people quit within two weeks.

Jim: Why do you think that is?

Marshall: Well, I'll describe the process first. Here's the homework assignment. I teach people, get out an Excel spreadsheet. On one column, you write down a series of questions to represent what's most important in your life. Friends, family, health, work, whatever you want. Seven boxes across, one for every day of the week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Every question must be answered with a yes or no or a number. Fill it out every day. At the end of the week, the Excel spreadsheet will give you a report card. I warn people in advance the report card at the end of the week may not be quite as beautiful as the corporate values plaque that you have stuck up on the wall. So I've been doing this for years and you do this week after week and day after day, you learn life's incredibly easy to talk. It's just difficult to live. Easy to talk and difficult to live, I'll share some of my questions. If anybody would like all my questions, send me an email. I'll send you all of them.

But for example, one of my questions every day is, how many times yesterday did you try to prove you were right when it wasn't worth it? I've almost never got to zero in my whole life. Kind of hard for that old professor not to be right all the time. How many angry or destructive comments did you make about people yesterday? Well, it's kind of easy to get into that gossipy, saying bad things about people behind their back. How many minutes did you walk? How many push-ups? How many sit ups? How many minutes did you write? Say you did something nice for your wife, your son, your daughter, your son-in-law, your grandkids, just a bunch of questions about life.

My friend, Jim Moore, does this and he would tell you it kind of saved his life. It didn't kind of save his life, it did save his life. One of his questions and it's one of mine too, are you currently updated on your physical exam? First 90 days, he did this he said no every day. After 90 days, he said, "This is embarrassing. I'm failing a test every day and I wrote the question. I've got to get the exam or quit asking." Well, he got the exam. What the doctor say? You have cancer. That was years ago, he's going to be fine. The doctor also said, "If you'd waited seven more months, you'd be dead." He knew he should've got the exam, just didn't do it. Hold a mirror in your face every day, it's hard to hide. Most people can't do this.

Jim: These are life questions.

Marshall: It's hard.

Jim: They're basic life questions, yeah.

Marshall: I pay a woman named Kate to call me on the phone every day. Every day, I pay her. All she does is she listens to me read questions I wrote and provide answers I wrote every day. Someone asked me, I talked to her this morning, I'll talk to her tomorrow. So I said, "Why do you pay a woman to call you on the phone every day? Don't you know the theory about how to change behavior." You see, I wrote the theory about how to change behavior. That's why I pay woman to call me on a phone every day. I know how hard this is. You see, always in my classes I always say this, "My name is Marshall Goldsmith. I'm the world's leading executive coach. I pay a woman to call me on the phone every day just to listen to me read questions I wrote and provide answers I wrote every day. Why do I do that? You see, my name is Marshall Goldsmith. I'm too cowardly to do this by myself and I'm too undisciplined. I need help and it's okay."

It's okay. See, once we get over that silly macho, I can do it on my own. Come on. I teach my classes, I'll say, "Who needs to be a better listener?" Guy raised his hand. I say, "What's your name?" "Joe." "Joe, how many years you've been needing to be a better listener?" He'd say 30. I'll say, "Repeat after me. My name is Joe. I need to be a better listener. I have not fixed this by myself in 30 years. Who am I kidding? I'm not going to fix this by myself in the future. I need help. It's okay." One of the world's greatest choreographers, Twyla Tharp, same personal trainer for 25 years. Why? Trainer doesn't teach her anything new? She's smart enough to say, "My name is Twyla Tharp."

Jim: That's one of the hardest things I think in life. It probably goes as far back as when you were in school and you didn't understand that math equation, but you were fearful of raising your hand to ask so you went through life and getting F's on tests because you never went up because all the kids would look at you. So many people do that, or you figure that, Oh, I can do this myself. Do you find that a cultural thing sometimes too, that certain people just around the world don't ask for help?

Marshall: It's all around the world.

Jim: I'll help you but I don't need help.

Marshall: I'll give you the worst example. There's a great book called The Checklist Manifesto published by Dr. Atul Gawande from Harvard Medical School and his research is very sobering. If you go in for a surgery and the nurse asks the doctor a series of very simple questions from a checklist, the odds of unneeded infection plummet and the death rates cut by about two thirds. It's not theory, it's a fact. A huge majority of hospitals around the world do not allow the nurse to ask the doctor the questions, why? Ego. According to Dr. Gawande, more people have died because the egos of surgeons than died in the Vietnam War, the Afghan War and the Iraqi War combined. The doctor is too proud to say, "I am a surgeon. I need help. And it's okay." So guess what happens? People die every day.

By the way, I shared this process with Dr. Gawande, and he said I'm going to implement this in my own life. I asked him why? He said maybe once every, I don't know, two or three months, the nurse will ask me, "Did you wash your hands?" And he said my answer is, "I don't know. Thank you for asking." He said, "I cannot remember every now and again if I washed my hands five minutes ago." And he said, "I wrote a book on washing hands." Then he said, "How many days did I forget to be happy? How many days did I forget the people I loved? And how many days did I forget what mattered in life?" You know what he said? Far too many days, far too many days.

Well, see, it's very good to have those reminders. Keep that stuff in your head and everything I teach people is easy to understand and hard to do. My book, What Got You Here Won't Get You There, if you read that book, you read funny story after funny story. It's so funny reading the book. What a bunch of idiots. Other people are so dumb. The idiots in the book all have IQs of 150 and they're CEOs of multi-billion dollar companies and you know what they'll tell you? This stuff is easy to understand and this stuff is hard to do.

I hope that you enjoyed The Marshall Goldsmith Newsletter and that it is helpful to you!

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