A Day with Marshall Goldsmith: Seven Things We Learned from the World’s #1 CEO Coach

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Last week, we hosted A Day with Marshall Goldsmith: How Successful Executives Become Even More Successful. It was hard to miss online (between our tweets and the Marshall Goldsmith series of guest posts!), and was a major point of conversation within the CEO Global Network Membership for the past few months.

Imagine this: a room full of chief executives and their executive teams, all learning together from the world’s #1 CEO coach, Marshall Goldsmith, for an entire day. It was bound to be an outstanding day of learning and high-impact takeaways – and that it was! We are delighted to announce that A Day with Marshall Goldsmith was the home run we expected it to be.

Attendee feedback included extremely high scores in all areas: the content was valuable, Marshall’s presentation style was effective, he delivered thought-provoking ideas, they were highly engaged, and that they would recommend Marshall to others.

For those that couldn’t join us, we’ll be posting video clips here as they become available with some of Marshall’s best stories and exercises from the day. In the meantime, here’s a list of seven leadership takeaways we took from Dr. Goldsmith:

1. Leaders spend an disproportionate amount of their learning time focused on what to do. They don’t spend enough time learning what to stop.

2. Using small incentives (such as small amounts of money), can create large changes in behaviour. Try small fines for your team whenever they respond to other team members’ ideas with “No, but…”, “Great, but…”, “Great, however…”, or destructive comments.

3. We all deny it, but as leaders, we have favourites! How do we overcome that? Try ranking your direct reports on: how much they do like you, how much they are like you, what their contribution is to the company, and how much recognition you give them.

4. Pick one behavioural change that will make the biggest difference for you and reflect on why it will make that difference. Focus on that area. Too often leadership improvement involves too broad a stroke across our habits and traits. Start with one, work towards it, and model the idea of positive change for the rest of your team.

5. One-off retreats and coaching events don’t cut it on their own. The real key to success is follow-up, continually and throughout the year. Think of your team members as internal coaches, and vice-versa, and hold each other accountable to their desired areas of change. This also works within your CEO Peer Group.

6. Behavioural coaching will not work when: the person does not want to change, the person has been ‘written off’ by the company, the person lacks business or technical knowledge, the company has the wrong strategy or direction, there are integrity or ethics violations, or the person is in the wrong job/company.

7. While peer coaching is one of the most effective ways to create positive behavioural change within organizations, the above practices apply in all other areas of your life as well. Use these tips to improve as a person and a professional.

Thank you to all the CEOs, Senior Executives, and their Management Teams for joining us and making the day so successful!

For CEO Global Network Members, all the resources from the day including handouts, case studies, and Marshall’s slides have been posted to The Wire here.