"It's the avenue, I'm taking you to, 42nd Street!"

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith's 24 books include "What Got You Here Won't Get You There" - a New York Times best-seller, Wall Street Journal #1 business book and Harold Longman Award winner for Business Book of the Year. His latest book "Succession: Are You Ready?" - is the newest edition to the Harvard Business 'Memo to the CEO' series.

There is a huge fallacy about the process of helping people change for the better. Sometimes the best leaders may be the ones least noticed.

We focus too much on the salesperson rather than the customer. We focus on the speaker rather than the learner. We focus on the coach rather than the person being coached. We focus too much on the leader rather than the people doing the work.

It's certainly true in my coaching. Of the great clients I have had the privilege to work with, Mike may be my star pupil. His coworkers judged him to have improved more than anyone I've worked with.

Mike managed a division of about 40,000 people in one of the world's largest organizations. His CEO recognized that Mike was a great leader and wanted him to expand his role by providing more leadership in building synergy across divisions. The CEO asked me to work with him.

Mike eagerly accepted this challenge and involved his team. Together, they established the most rigorous project-management process I've ever seen. Each person took responsibility for creating positive synergy. They regularly reported on their efforts in reaching out to colleagues across the company to build teamwork. They kept learning from all of their colleagues. They thanked people for ideas and suggestions and followed up to ensure effective implementation.

And yet, as I told Mike, "I probably spent less time with you than any client I have ever coached. What should I learn from my experience with you and your team?"

Mike quietly pondered my question. "As a coach," he said, "you should realize that success with your clients isn't about you. It's about the people who choose to work with you." He modestly chuckled, then continued. "In a way, I am the same. The success of my organization isn't about me. It's all about the great people who are working with me."

This flies in the face of conventional wisdom about leadership. If you read the literature, you'll see that much of it exaggerates -- if not glamorizes -- the leader's contribution. The implication is that everything grows out of the leader. She's responsible for improving you. She's the one who guides you to the promised land. Take the leader out of the equation, and people will behave like lost children.

Not so. As the ancient proverb says, "The best leader, the people do not notice. When the best leader's work is done, the people say, 'We did it ourselves.' "

That's why I don't hold myself up as "coach as expert." I'm much more a "coach as facilitator." Most of what my clients learn about themselves comes not from me but from their friends, their colleagues, and their family members. I just try to provide help when needed and assist them in not wandering too far off the course that they have chosen.

For example, let's say you want to do a better job of listening. It's possible that a coach can explain to you how to be a better listener. The advice will probably be reasonably logical, supportable, and hard to dispute. But it will be generic. It's much better to ask the most important people in your life, "Please give me some ideas on how I can do a better job of listening to you."

They can give you specific, concrete suggestions that relate to them -- how they perceive you as a listener -- not vague ideas that you can read in a book. They may not be experts on listening, but they actually know more about how to listen to them than anyone in the world.

I cannot make the successful people I work with change. I don't try. Too many people think that a coach -- especially an accomplished one -- will solve their problems. That's like thinking that you'll get in shape by hiring the world's best trainer and not by working out yourself.

Truly great leaders, like Mike, recognize how silly it is to think it's about the coach. Long-term success is created by the 40,000 people doing the work -- not just the one person who has the privilege of being at the top.

Life is good.

Marshall

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Ultimately, our actions will say much more to employees about our values and our leadership skills than our mission statements ever can. If our actions are wise, no one will care if the words on the wall are not perfect. If our actions are foolish, the wonderful words on the wall will only make us look more ridiculous.

Companies have wasted millions of dollars and countless hours of employees’ time agonizing over the wording of statements that are put on plaques and hung on walls. There is a clear assumption that people’s behavior will change because the pronouncements on plaques are “inspirational” or because certain words “integrate our strategy and values.” There is an implicit hope that when people — especially managers — hear great words, they will start to exhibit great behavior .

Sometimes these words morph to keep up with the latest trends in corporate-speak. A company may begin by striving for “customer satisfaction,” then advance to “total customer satisfaction,” and finally reach the pinnacle of “customer delight.”

But this obsession with words belies one very large problem: There is almost no correlation between the words on the wall and the behavior of leaders. Every company wants “integrity,” “respect for people,” “quality,” “customer satisfaction,” “innovation,” and “return for shareholders.” Sometimes companies get creative and toss in something about “community” or “suppliers.” But since the big messages are all basically the same, the words quickly lose their real meaning to employees — if they ever had any in the first place.

Enron is a great example. Before the energy conglomerate’s collapse in 2001, I had the opportunity to review Enron’s values and even saw a wonderful video on Enron’s ethics and integrity. I was greatly impressed by the company’s espoused high-minded beliefs and the care put into the video. Examples of Enron’s good deeds in the community and the professed character of Enron’s executives were particularly noteworthy. It was one of the most smoothly professional presentations on ethics and values that I have ever seen. Clearly, Enron spent a fortune “packaging” these wonderful messages.

It didn’t really matter. Despite the lofty words, many of Enron’s top executives either have been indicted or are in jail.

The situation couldn’t be more different at Johnson & Johnson. The pharmaceutical company is famous for its “Credo,” which was written many years ago and reflected the sincere values of the leaders of the company at that time. The J&J Credo could be considered rather quaint by today’s standards. It contains several old-fashioned phrases, such as “must be good citizens — support good works and charities — and bear our fair share of taxes” and “maintain in good order the property that we are privileged to use.” It lacks the slick PR packaging that I observed at Enron.

Yet, even with its less-powerful language and seemingly dated presentation, the J&J Credo works — primarily because over many years, the company’s management has taken the values that it offers seriously. J&J executives have consistently challenged themselves and employees not just to understand the values, but to live them in day-to-day behavior. When I conducted leadership training for J&J, one of its very top executives would spend many hours with every class. The executives’ task was not to talk about compensation or other perks of J&J management; they were there to discuss living the company’s values.

My partner, Howard Morgan, and I completed a study of more than 11,000 managers in eight major corporations. (See “Leadership Is a Contact Sport,” s+b, Fall 2004.) We looked at the impact of leadership development programs in actually changing executive behavior . As it turns out, each of the eight companies had different values and different words to describe ideal leadership behavior. But these differences in words made absolutely no difference in determining the way leaders behaved. Ironically, one company spent thousands of hours composing just the right words to express its view of how leaders should act — in vain. I am sure that the first draft would have been just as useful.

At many companies, performance appraisal forms seem to undergo the same careful scrutiny as credos. In fact, more effort seems to be given to producing the perfect words on an appraisal form than to managing employee performance itself. I worked with one company that had used at least 15 different performance appraisal forms and was contemplating yet another change because the present sheet “wasn’t working”! If changing the words on the page could improve the performance management process, then every company’s appraisal system would be perfect by now.

Companies that are doing the best job of living up to their values and developing ethical employees, including managers, recognize that the real cause of success — or failure — is always the people, not the words.

Rather than wasting time on reinventing words about desired leadership behavior, companies should ensure that leaders get (and act upon) feedback from employees — the people who actually observe this behavior. Rather than wasting time on changing the words on performance appraisal forms, leaders need to learn from employees to ensure that they are providing the right coaching.

Ultimately, our actions will say much more to employees about our values and our leadership skills than our words ever can. If our actions are wise, no one will care if the words on the wall are not perfect. If our actions are foolish, the wonderful words on the wall will only make us look more ridiculous.

Life is good.

Marshall

Here are the seven "must have" skills you need to be a good leader.  I was asked what advice I have for a leader when their boss says they need to exhibit more self-confidence while still being collaborative and authentic. This is a great question.

I rarely encounter this issue in my work with CEOs and potential CEOs because people at the top of huge organizations don’t often have self-confidence problems. But I have had several inquiries lately about helping future leaders who need to demonstrate more self-confidence.

Here are a few suggestions that I give leaders who have self-confidence issues:

1. Decide if you really want to be a leader. Many of the MBAs who report self-confidence issues are brilliant technicians. They often find the uncertainty and ambiguity of leading people very unsettling. They are looking for the “right answers” – similar to the ones in engineering school. In some cases, brilliant technical experts should continue to be brilliant technical experts – and not feel obligated to become managers.

2. Make peace with ambiguity in decision making. There are usually no clear right answers when making complex business decisions. Even CEOs are guessing.

3. Gather a reasonable amount of data, involve people, then follow your gut and do what you think is right.

4. Accept the fact that you are going to fail on occasion. All humans do.

5. Have fun! Life is short. Why should you expect your direct reports to demonstrate positive enthusiasm, if they don’t see it in you?

6. Once you make a decision, commit and go for it. Don’t continually second guess yourself. If you have to change course, you have to change course. If you never commit, all you will ever do is change course.

7. And finally, demonstrate courage on the outside, even when you don’t feel it on the inside. We are all afraid on occasion -- that is just part of being human. If you are going to lead people in tough times, you will need to show more courage than fear. When direct reports read worry and concern on the face of a leader , they begin to lose confidence in the leader’s ability to lead.

Originally published in Harvard Business Online, 2008.

Life is good.

Marshall

If you really want to know how your behavior comes across to your colleagues and clients, stop looking in the mirror and admiring yourself.

Remember the character Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street? Michael Douglas won an Oscar for his portrayal of this rude, larcenous wheeler-dealer. Well, I worked with a real-life investment banker who in some ways could have inspired the Gekko character.

A significant part of my practice as an executive coach is working with supremely successful people who may need to change some behaviors to achieve the next level of success. The man I coached -- let's call him Jim -- wasn't amoral and unethical like Gekko, but he had the same competitive fires.  He sometimes treated people like gravel in a driveway. They were the pebbles; he was the SUV. Jim's score for treating direct reports and colleagues with respect was an astounding 0.1%. That is, out of 1,000 managers rated, he was dead last!

But Jim put up equally astounding numbers with his trades. His profit contribution was so vast that the CEO promoted him to the company's management committee. This should have been the apex of Jim's young career. Instead, it exposed his bad side as well. The firm's leaders, who had been insulated from Jim's behavior, were suddenly in a position to get a firsthand dose of his "lead, follow, or get out of my way" style. In meetings, they saw that there was often no checkpoint between Jim's brain and mouth. He was surly and offensive to everyone, even mouthing off to the CEO (his biggest supporter), who finally called me in to "help Jim change now."

When I met Jim, he was clearly delighted with his success. He was making over $4 million a year, so professional validation was coursing through his veins like jet fuel. I knew that breaking through to Jim by challenging his performance would be tough. He was clearly delivering financial results. So I sat down with him and said, "I can't help you make more money. You're already making a lot. But let's talk about your ego . How do you treat people at home?"

Jim insisted that he was totally different outside the office, that he was a great husband and father. "I don't bring my work home," he assured me. "I'm a warrior on Wall Street but a pussycat at home."

"That's interesting," I said. "Is your wife home right now?"

"Yes," he said.

"Why don't you give her a call and see how different she thinks you are at home than at the office?"

He called his wife. When she finally stopped laughing at her husband's statement, she concurred that Jim often acted like a jerk at home, too.  The kids agreed as well!

"I'm beginning to see a pattern here," I said. "As I told you, I can't help you make more money. But I can get you to confront this question: Do you really want to have a funeral that no one attends other than for business reasons?"

For once, Jim looked stricken. "They're going to fire me if I don't make my numbers, aren't they?" he asked.

"Not only are they going to fire you," I said, "but several people will be dancing in the halls when you go."

Jim thought about that for a minute and then said, "I'm going to change, and the reason I'm going to change has nothing to do with money and it has nothing to do with this firm. I'm going to change because I have two sons, and if they were receiving this same feedback from a person like you in 30 years, I'd be ashamed to be their father."

Within a year, Jim's scores on his treatment of people shot up past the 50th percentile, above an already high company norm. He probably deserved even better, since he started so far down in the ditch. He also doubled his income.

The lesson: Our flaws at work usually don't vanish when we go home.

The moral: Anybody can change, but they have to want to change.

Sometimes you can deliver that message by reaching people where they live, not where they work.

The action plan for leaders (and followers):

If you really want to know how your behavior comes across to your colleagues and clients, stop looking in the mirror and admiring yourself.

Let your colleagues hold the mirror and tell you what they see. If you don't believe them, do the same with your loved ones and friends -- the people in your life who are most likely to be agenda-free and who truly want you to succeed. We all claim to want the truth. This is a guaranteed delivery system.

Life is good.

Marshall