Short audio preview

It's impossible to watch Marshall Goldsmith speak without smiling. He delivers every piece of advice with a joke. He's genuinely optimistic that coaching can improve people's lives in both the workplace and the home. And, most importantly, he looks like a comedian - always grinning, always flailing his gangly limbs, as if rival teams of puppeteers were fighting to control his trajectory from above the stage. "Life is good!" says the homepage of his website. And, after an hour in his company, you can't disagree. For his appearance at the London Business Forum (LBF), the Comedy Store was the ideal venue.

Goldsmith said he wanted to disabuse us of the following two misconceptions about coaching: (1) To help someone, you need to have a deep knowledge of the person and their business; and (2) You need to be better than the person you're coaching - superior, smarter, etc - if you want to help them. Both these statements are plain wrong, he argued. "You can work with anybody. [Indeed,] if people don't know you, they don't bring with them any baggage or stereotypes." And when you seek help from anybody - no matter what their background or their status in relation to yours - you tend to find they face exactly the same problems.

We're all coaches, Goldsmith pointed out, whenever we seek to change the behaviour of the people around us. So if you develop your coaching skills, you'll probably become a better person in general. The most beneficial change you can make to your behaviour, he continued, is to "help more and judge less". Research shows that 65% of all interpersonal communication is taken up by "people talking about how smart, special or wonderful they are; and people talking about how stupid, inept or bad someone else is." This in spite of the fact that both subjects are totally unhelpful.

Next time you start a sentence with the words "no", "but" or "however", you should fine yourself £1, Goldsmith suggested. Why? Because any sentence beginning with those three words is likely to irritate the person you're talking to and unlikely to be of any practical use. Successful people are stubborn, opinionated and over-keen to "add value" to every idea put in front of them, he explained. It's in their nature to improve things they regard as deficient. But in doing so, they tend to demoralise the people who work for them, and whom they rely on to generate ideas.

"The worse thing we can do when we try to recognise another person is to say: 'That's great, but...' or 'That's great, however...'" Imagine that person as a child coming home with their school report, he said. "The little child says: 'Daddy, Mommy, look at my report card: five times, I made the highest grade, and one time I made almost the highest grade.' What do we now say, Daddy and Mommy? 'That's great, but why didn't you make the highest grade every time?' What's the little child thinking? 'That's great, but why do I have asses like you for parents?'"

You need to stop making needless judgements and start dispensing more "unqualified positive recognition," Goldsmith suggested. "Who gets the most unqualified positive recognition at home? It's the dog, isn't it? The dog, the dog, the dog. The dog is winning in a landslide!" How does this translate to the workplace? Well, the equivalent of petting your employees is to say an unqualified "thank you" for each and every one of their ideas. Respond in any other way, and you'll gradually make them more and more reluctant to show initiative.

Equally, you should invite more criticism upon yourself, Goldsmith said. "I'll never forget the first time I got my own 360-degree feedback from my staff. One area was called 'Avoids making destructive comments about other people.' And what score did I get? Eighth percentile. Eighth! Ninety-two per cent of people in the world did better than me, and I wrote the test!"

When Goldsmith complained to his staff about the result, he made the rash decision to pay them a $10 fine for every future destructive comment he made "about a person or group". "I gave them a pep-talk because I thought they'd be embarrassed to ask for the money," he recalled. "That talk was unneeded. They tricked me into making nasty comments... By noon I had lost $50. So I locked myself in my office and refused to speak to anyone. First day, it cost me $50, second day it cost me $30, third day it cost me $10... What does this teach you? Spend a few thousand bucks, you start getting better."

The "swear-box" method of deterring destructive comments may be open to abuse, but that doesn't stop it from being highly effective, Goldsmith maintained. "Who has a great cause for people who need the money more than anyone in this room?" he asked suddenly. Several members of the audience raised their hand, and one was picked to tell us more. His chosen charity was Friends of Swindon Young Carers, which helps children who have been forced to take on a caring role in their families.

Now, the speaker asked, "Which of you has made a comment about someone else that they shouldn't have over the past month?" Every hand in the room went up, and as self-confessed offenders we were duly asked to place a £1 fine on the floor in front of us, as a donation to the Swindon charity. This was a remarkably effective move that instantly raised over £100 for a good cause. And it underlined the point that tiny fines geared towards good causes can draw attention to tiny but repetitive transgressions.

Goldsmith said the best feedback he gets comes from clients rather than staff, "and certainly none of it comes from my family." He recalled hearing his daughter reading from a Wall Street Journal report that named him one of the top 10 consultants in the world and saying that she wanted to go into his field because "the standards are so low." Nevertheless, he said it's important to ask "How can I be a better parent?" just as it's important to ask "How can I be a better manager?"

As a prolific speaker who travels frequently, Goldsmith used to monitor the number of days he spent four hours or more with his family, to make sure that he wasn't failing as a father. And he recommended the technique to the LBF audience. "If four hours is too many for you, make it three. If three's too many for you, make it two," he said. "How much time does the average American father spend in meaningful dialogue with the average American child in a week? Seven to 15 minutes. It's not real hard to beat the average."

To conclude the event, Goldsmith got us to participate in a peer-coaching exercise that he calls "Feed Forward". Each of us picked a partner from the audience, and a personal behaviour that we felt we needed to change. Now, Goldsmith announced, "You're going to talk to your partner and say: 'Here's what I want to get better at, and here's why it's going to make a positive difference.' Then the other person says the same thing."

There are two roles you have to play during the exercise, he explained: (1) you have to learn as much as you can; and (2) you have to help as much as you can. And there were two rules to observe:

• <li>Rule 1: No feedback about the past
• <p>"Have any of you been impressed by your wife, husband or partner's near-photographic memory of your previous sins, which have been documented and which have then been shared with you in an annoying and repetitive way?" Goldsmith asked. "You know what? We can't change the past anyway. Let it go."</p></li>
• <li>Rule 2: You cannot judge or critique ideas
• <p>You must listen to ideas without judging them, Goldsmith reiterated. The only two words you can say to someone who comes up with an idea are: "Thank you." Don't ask for qualification using questions such as "Why this...?" or "Why that...?", he added. And don't babble on!</p></li>

Over the next 10 minutes or so, each of us tried to gather the advice of five other people, armed with our tricky instructions and trying not to filter anything we heard through our judgemental instincts. Once we had reconvened, Goldsmith asked us whether we found the exercise helpful. And upon finding out that we did, he told us to consider briefly why 95% of those who had done the same thing at his various events had reached the same conclusion.

One audience member said they appreciated the fact that Feed Forward was "non-judgemental", to which Goldsmith replied: "If I allowed you to critique and judge other people's comments, you'd spend twice as much time debating the comments as listening to them. How much do we learn proving someone else wrong? Nothing. How much do we learn by proving them right? Nothing." Another audience member pointed out there was a "mutuality" about the exercise, to which Goldsmith nodded vigorously. If you approach someone and say, "Let's help each other get better," he pointed out, then you'll get a much better reception than by saying: "You need to get better."

But perhaps the most helpful realisation to come from the exercise was that verbalising a self-improvement objective to one of your peers makes it more likely to happen. "The drive to get better has to come from the person being coached, not the coach," Goldsmith said. Execution is key. As Arnold Schwarzenegger once put it: "Nobody ever got muscles by watching me lift weights."