MARSHALL GOLDSMITH
When Marshall Goldsmith was in his early twenties and finishing his doctoral degree at UCLA, he was asked to teach a course at California American University, where I was teaching with founder Paul Hersey. Marshall and I immediately became soul mates and I have admired his teaching and writing skills ever since. I think you’ll see why I’m a big fan of his after reading his essay. —KB
A DECISION MAKER, a game changer, a force to reckon with, a wielder of power: this is a leader in the popular imagination. As an executive coach who has been helping successful leaders achieve positive, lasting change in behavior for more than thirty-five years, I have worked with many influential people who fit this description. The best of them understand that, for a servant leader, power is beside the point.
For example, one of the most inspiring servant leaders I have ever met is Frances Hesselbein, president and CEO of the Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute and former CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA. Her motto is To serve is to live. This kind of humility may seem at odds with the image of the heroic, powerful leader. But as my friend Frances has pointed out, great leaders are willing servants of people, organizations, and causes. Instead of worrying about how powerful they are or what position they hold, these leaders focus on what others need. Without the distractions of ego, they can see the clearest path to positive outcomes. (For more on Frances Hesselbein, see the essay by Jim Dittmar in Part Four of this book.)
Maintaining this clarity is a challenge, as any tested leader knows. In competitive situations or organizations, staying committed to a servant leadership mentality is a monumental challenge that requires daily, if not hourly, attention. To keep my coaching clients on track, I developed a simple formulation—one that helps them focus on making a positive difference instead of demonstrating their own superiority. It can help you, too. Follow it and you will dramatically shrink your daily volume of stress, unpleasant debate, and wasted time, while getting closer to the results you want.
The next time you run into a conflict, ask yourself this question:
AM I WILLING
AT THIS TIME
TO MAKE THE INVESTMENT REQUIRED
TO MAKE A POSITIVE DIFFERENCE
ON THIS TOPIC?
It pops into my head so often each day that I’ve turned the first five words into an acronym: AIWATT (it rhymes with “say what”). Like the physician’s principle “First, do no harm,” it doesn’t require you to do anything other than merely avoid doing something foolish.
Perhaps you’re thinking I don’t need to repeat a simple question to remember to make a positive difference. But I believe all of us need exactly this kind of help. In Triggers: Becoming the Person You Want to Be,1 I make the case that relying on structure—even something as simple as the AIWATT question—is key to changing our leadership behavior. In every waking hour we are bombarded by triggers—people, events, and circumstances that have the potential to change us. We often fail to appreciate just how much these triggers affect us, and how difficult it is to fend them off without some kind of support.
AIWATT is just one of the tactics I suggest. Of course, it isn’t a universal panacea for all our interpersonal problems, but it has a specific utility. It’s a reminder that our environment tempts us many times a day to engage in pointless arguments and prove ourselves the winner. We can do something about this unfortunate tendency—by doing nothing. In our Western, action-focused culture, that sounds like laziness or failure. But it can be a surprisingly powerful position to take. I’ll explain using two complementary insights: a Buddhist parable and an observation from Peter Drucker, one of my heroes and the father of modern management theory.
A young farmer laboriously paddled his boat up the river to deliver his produce to the village. It was a hot day, and he wanted to make his delivery and get home before dark. As he looked ahead, he spied another vessel, heading rapidly downstream toward his boat. He rowed furiously to get out of the way, but it didn’t seem to help.
He shouted, “Change direction! You are going to hit me!” to no avail—the vessel hit his boat with a violent thud. He cried out, “You idiot! How could you manage to hit my boat in the middle of this wide river?”
As he glared into the boat, seeking out the individual responsible for the accident, he realized no one was there. He had been screaming at an empty boat that had broken free of its moorings and was floating downstream with the current.
We behave one way when we believe there is another person at the helm. We can blame that stupid, uncaring person for our misfortune. This blaming permits us to get angry, act out, assign blame, and play the victim. We behave more calmly when we learn that it’s an empty boat. With no available scapegoat, we can’t get upset. We make peace with the fact that our misfortune was the result of fate or bad luck. We may even laugh at the absurdity of a random unmanned boat finding a way to collide with us in a vast body of water.
The moral: There’s never anyone in the other boat. We are always screaming at an empty vessel. An empty boat isn’t targeting us. And neither are all the people creating the sour notes in the soundtrack of our day.
I like to make this point in leadership classes with a simple exercise. I’ll ask a random audience member to think of one person who makes them feel bad, angry, or crazy. “Can you envision that person?” I ask.
A nod, a disgusted face, and then, “Yes.”
“How much sleep is that person losing over you tonight?” I ask.
“None.”
“Who is being punished here? Who is doing the punishing?” I ask.
The answer inevitably is, “Me and me.”
I end the exercise with a simple reminder that getting mad at people for being who they are makes as much sense as getting mad at a chair for being a chair. The chair cannot help but be a chair, and people cannot help but be themselves. If there’s a person who drives you crazy, you don’t have to like, agree with, or respect them; just accept them for being who they are.
The empty boat parable is a useful metaphor for understanding how others affect us. To grasp how we affect others, I turn to Drucker, who has been an enormous influence on my life and work. “Our mission in life should be to make a positive difference,” he said, “not to prove how smart or right we are.” It sounds so obvious—given the choice, who wouldn’t opt to make a positive difference?
But Drucker is highlighting two notions that we have trouble holding in our heads simultaneously. When we have the opportunity to demonstrate our brainpower, we’re rarely thinking about a positive result for the other people in the room. We’re actually issuing what I like to call false positives—making statements to upgrade ourselves, often at the expense of others. They appear in many forms:
• Pedantry: A subordinate makes a grammatical error in a presentation—using who instead of whom—and you correct him. Smart, perhaps, if the objective is punctilious grammar—but hardly a contribution that improves the room’s vibe.
• Saying “I told you so”: You tell your wife the two of you need to leave the house at least sixty minutes in advance to make an eight o’clock Broadway show. She delays, and you arrive late. You proceed to ruin her night in proportion to how much she ruined yours.
• Moral superiority: You tell a friend or loved one that she shouldn’t smoke, that he doesn’t need another beer, or that you would have taken a faster route home. How often do these efforts elicit a genuine thank you, or anything but an eye roll?
• Complaining: The average American worker spends fifteen hours a month complaining about upper management, making it one of the more popular workplace activities. When you complain, you’re disagreeing with what someone else decided, planned, or did. By definition, you’re being disagreeable and adding the implication that you would have done better. It’s rarely a positive contribution, especially if you do it behind people’s backs rather than to their faces.
From wake-up to bedtime, when we’re in contact with another human being, we face the option of being helpful, hurtful, or neutral. If we’re not paying attention, it’s easy to choose hurtful—especially if in the process we prove we’re smarter, better, or more right than the other guy. Often we’re not aware that we’re being counterproductive. Nor is it our intention to be cruel, as if we have chosen to speak our minds and damn the consequences. Consequences don’t enter the picture. We’re only thinking about elevating ourselves. We’re trying to prove how smart we are to an empty boat!
This is where AIWATT is useful, if only to create a split-second delay in our potentially prideful, cynical, judgmental, argumentative, and selfish responses to our environment. The delay gives us time to consider a more positive response. AIWATT helps us after a trigger creates an impulse and before we exhibit behavior we may later regret. The nineteen-word text deserves close analysis. Each part is something aspiring servant leaders should know:
• Am I willing implies that we are exercising volition—taking responsibility—rather than surfing along the waves of inertia that otherwise rule our day. We are asking “Do I really want to do this?”
• At this time reminds us that we’re operating in the present. Circumstances will differ later on, demanding a different response. The only issue is what we’re facing now.
• To make the investment required reminds us that responding to others is work—an expenditure of time, energy, and opportunity. And like any investment, our resources are finite. We are asking “Is this really the best use of my time?”
• To make a positive difference places the emphasis on the kinder, gentler side of our nature. It’s a reminder that we can help create either a better us or a better world. If we’re not accomplishing one or the other, why are we getting involved?
• On this topic focuses us on the matter at hand. We can’t solve every problem. The time we spend on topics where we can’t make a positive difference is stolen from topics where we can.
Like closing our office door so people hesitate before they knock, asking ourselves “Am I willing, at this time, to make the investment required to make a positive difference on this topic?” gives us a thin barrier of breathing room—time enough to inhale, exhale, and reflect on whether the outcome we seek is a true positive that is intended for the benefit of others, or a false positive that is intended to polish our own image. For servant leaders who want to make serving others their primary mission, that’s a vital distinction.
Marshall Goldsmith (www.marshallgoldsmith.com) has been recognized by Thinkers50, Global Gurus, Fast Company, and Inc. as the world’s leading executive coach. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Triggers, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, Mojo, and several other books. He received his PhD from UCLA Anderson School of Management. His client list is a who’s who of the world’s CEOs.
1. Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter, Triggers: Becoming the Person You Want to Be (New York: Crown, 2015).