Marshall Goldsmith - world-renowned senior executive coach, speaker and author of popular books on personal development, some of which, such as What Got You Here Won´t Get You There (Jak se dostat do vyššího levelu) and Mojo, have been translated into Czech (Bizbooks, 2011) - has just published a new book. Entitled Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts – Becoming the Person You Want to Be, it deals with environmental and psychological "triggers" that complicate our work and life. Using real-life examples from his coaching practice, Goldsmith presents ways to achieve change by taking responsibility for one's own actions.
One of the topics Goldsmith monitors is employee engagement. "In my new book Triggers, I propose a radical new approach to employee engagement," he writes on his blog. "It’s that the key variable in employee engagement is the individual, the employee, not the program. Although it may sound obvious, this idea is not taught or acted upon. Instead, companies spend billions of dollars every year trying to get employees and leaders to believe that the solution to employee engagement problems is 'out there" not 'in us'."
To prove this assertion, Goldsmith describes three examples of situations which lack engagement based on personal responsibility.
1. Leadership development programmes
Most evaluations of leadership development programmes take the form of participants evaluating the popularity of lecturers. Authors of these programmes try to create the most popular programmes by hiring the most popular lecturers. Very often, however, lecturers take no responsibility for the development of the participants. Likewise, the participants are often not responsible for applying what they have learned.
2. Executive coaching
Executive coaching evaluations tend to focus on the popularity of the coach. Companies hire coaches who are the most popular among managers. Again, the result of this is that coaches are training themselves in becoming more popular. The managers being coached bear no responsibility for changing their behaviour.
3. Employee engagement
Evaluation of employee engagement programmes usually focuses on the company. Indicators such as fair pay, providing resources needed to perform work or a safe working environment are measured. Companies are trying to implement popular programmes for increasing engagement, but employees are not responsible for becoming more engaged.
While circumstances affect some things in our lives - a programme, a coach or a company - much remains up to us. We ourselves decide whether we will become more engaged."And maybe you can’t change your company, boss, or employee, but you can change your reaction to them," says Marshall Goldsmith. "Your success in becoming engaged, being happy, finding meaning, and leading people will largely come from inside you – not from some teacher, coach, or program. It is not just what you learn, but how you (and if you) use it that will make the difference."
In his new book, Goldsmith formulated these so-called "active questions" to help us measure our efforts (not results). The questions should help us take responsibility for improving and admitting to our shortcomings so that we can remove them for ever.
Book
GOLDSMITH, Marshall: Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts - Becoming the Person You Want to Be. New York: Crown Business, 2015.
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