Marshall Goldsmith

For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

He doesn’t simply meet us at our place of need; he lives in our place of need.

Our pain never outstrips what he himself shares in. We are never alone.

Jesus does not throw his hands up in the air when he engages sinners. He is calm, tender, soothing, restrained.

Whoever comes to me I will never cast out.

His heart is too bound up with yours.

In the biblical gospel we are not given a thing; we are given a person.

Intercession is the constant hitting 'refresh' of our justification in the court of heaven.

Christ sides with you against your sin, not against you because of your sin.

His heart is as drawn to his people now as ever it was in his incarnate state.

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

Fallen, anxious sinners are limitless in their capacity to perceive reasons for Jesus to cast them out.

If you are part of Christ’s own body, your sins evoke his deepest heart, his compassion and pity.

People don’t get better without follow-up.

Becoming a better leader (or a better person) is a process, not an event.

Winning too much is the #1 challenge because it underlies nearly every other behavioral problem.

What’s wrong is that they have no idea how their behavior is coming across to the people who matter—their bosses, colleagues, subordinates, customers, and clients.

Whatever we gain in the form of a better idea is lost many times over in our employees’ diminished commitment to the concept.

When you start a sentence with “no,” “but,” “however,” or any variation thereof, no matter how friendly your tone or how many cute mollifying phrases you throw in to acknowledge the other person’s feelings, the message to the other person is You are wrong.

Negativity is their default response. You could walk into their office with the cure for cancer and the first words out of their mouth would be, 'Let me explain why that won’t work.

These delusions are a direct result of success, not failure. That’s because we get positive reinforcement from our past successes, and, in a mental leap that’s easy to justify, we think that our past success is predictive of great things in our future.

Successful people believe that they have the capability within themselves to make desirable things happen. It’s the reason why some people raise their hand and say, “Put me in, coach” when the boss asks for volunteers to solve a problem—and others cower in the corner, praying they won’t be noticed.

Successful people literally believe that through sheer force of personality or talent or brainpower, they can steer a situation in their direction.

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 only natural law I’ve witnessed in three decades of observing successful people’s efforts to become more successful is this: People will do something — including changing their behavior — only if it can be demonstrated that doing so is in their own best interests as defined by their own values.

Even in the most gentle, intimate moments, when people are offering us their most acute (and helpful) snapshots of ourselves, we can’t help passing judgment.

The only sure thing that comes out of passing judgment on people’s efforts to help is that they won’t help us again.

Emotional volatility is not the most reliable leadership tool. When you get angry, you are usually out of control. It’s hard to lead people when you’ve lost control.

The problem with not sharing information—for whatever reason—is that it rarely achieves the desired effect. You may think you’re gaining an edge and consolidating power, but you’re actually breeding mistrust.

Of all the interpersonal slights we make in our professional or private lives, not providing recognition may be the one that endures most deeply in the minds of the slighted.

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.

Destructive comments are the cutting sarcastic remarks we spew out daily, with or without intention, that serve no other purpose than to put people down, hurt them, or assert ourselves as their superiors.

When someone you work with steals the credit for a success that you created, they’re committing the most rage-inducing interpersonal “crime” in the workplace.

If we can stop excusing ourselves, we can get better at almost anything we choose.

Expressing regret, or apologizing, is a cleansing ritual, like confession in church. You say, “I’m sorry”—and you feel better.

The best ideas are like great wines. They improve with age. But they can also go through a dumb period when they need time to settle and sink in.

The more you subsume your desire to shine, the more you will shine in the other person’s eyes.

When you say, “I’m sorry,” you turn people into your allies, even your partners.

Gratitude is a skill that we can never display too often. And yet for some reason, we are cheap and chary with gratitude—as if it were rare Bordeaux wine that we can serve only on special occasions.

Passing the buck is the dark flip side of claiming credit that others deserve. Instead of depriving others of their rightful glory for a success, we wrongfully saddle them with the shame of our failure.

Successful people only have two problems dealing with negative feedback. However, they are big problems: (a) they don’t want to hear it from us and (b) we don’t want to give it to them.

Feedback is very useful for telling us “where we are.” Without feedback, I couldn’t work with my clients. I wouldn’t know what everyone thinks my client needs to change.

It’s my contention—and it’s the bedrock thesis of this book—that interpersonal behavior is the difference-maker between being great and near-great, between getting the gold and settling for the bronze.

In my experience the best solicited feedback is confidential feedback. It’s good because nobody gets embarrassed or defensive. There are no emotional issues, because you do not know who to blame or retaliate against for attacking you.

These blindside moments are rare and precious gifts. They hurt, perhaps (the truth often does), but they also instruct.

Every day, people are giving us feedback, of a sort, with their eye contact, their body language, their response time. Interpreting this casual observational feedback can be tricky; learning that something’s not right is not the same as learning what’s wrong and how we can fix it.

If you can see your world in a new way, perhaps you can see yourself anew as well.

The lesson: Your flaws at work don’t vanish when you walk through the front door at home. The moral: Anybody can change, but they have to want to change.

I regard apologizing as the most magical, healing, restorative gesture human beings can make. It is the centerpiece of my work with executives who want to get better.

80 percent of our success in learning from other people is based upon how well we listen. In other words, success or failure is determined before we do anything.

The ability to make a person feel that, when you’re with that person, he or she is the most important (and the only) person in the room is the skill that separates the great from the near-great.

Follow-up is how you measure your progress. Follow-up is how we remind people that we’re making an effort to change, and that they are helping us. Follow-up is how our efforts eventually get imprinted on our colleagues’ minds.

There is an enormous disconnect between understanding and doing. Most leadership development revolves around one huge false assumption: If people understand, then they will do. That’s not true.

A person who thinks he can do no wrong usually can’t admit that he’s wrong.

Unlike feedback, which often introduces a discussion of mistakes and shortfalls, feedforward focuses on solutions, not problems.

More than anything, feedforward creates the two-way traffic I love to see in the workplace, the spirit of two colleagues helping each other rather than a superior being providing a critique.

Successful people have a glaring tendency to overcommit. If you outline seven flaws, they’ll want to tackle all of them.

When people commit to getting better, they are doing something difficult and heroic.

If you want to succeed at goal setting, you have to face the reality of the effort and the payoff before you begin.

Everything is measurable if we’re clever enough to see that it needs measuring—and can devise a way to track it.

If you want to change anything about yourself, the best time to start is now. Ask yourself, “What am I willing to change now?” Just do that. That’s more than enough. For now.

A lot of managers assume that their staff should be exactly like them—in behavior, in enthusiasm, in intelligence, and most especially, in how they apply that brainpower.

If they need too much of your time, you can’t just tell them to stop bothering you. You have to wean them away and make it seem like it’s their idea. Let them figure out what they should be doing on their own. Let them tell you where you’re not needed.

If you manage your people the way you’d want to be managed, you’re forgetting one thing: You’re not managing you.

Most leadership development revolves around one huge false assumption—that if people understand then they will do. That’s not true. Most of us understand, we just don’t do.

Sharon is guilty of Habit #14: Playing favorites.

Martin is on such a roll that he doesn’t notice that the scheduled hour has gone by in a flash.

If we aren’t careful, we can wind up treating people at work like dogs: Rewarding those who heap unthinking, unconditional admiration upon us.

The days when managers know how to do every job in the company better than anyone else are over.