In our company, we do a leadership off-site once every 3 months, when we take around 150 of our senior managers for a two-day long trip involving intense discussions on company priorities and action plans. On such occasions, we also cover development inputs for the managers and supplement it with a book for them to carry, read, reflect and benefit from. In the May 2007 offsite, we chose a very powerful book titled: “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There” by the well-known executive coach, Marshall Goldsmith. When we started receiving feedback from the managers who had been on the off-site, we realized that they had words of great praise for the choice of the book.

For the successful to get even better:
Here, I am going to talk about some aspects from this game-changing book for managers and leaders. Goldsmith dedicates this book to “all successful leaders who want to take it to the next level and get even better”. The wisdom contained in the book is so very valuable, leaders across industries and experience levels can benefit from it enormously. The author introduces a concept called proprioception. This refers to how you know where you are and where you are oriented.

Goldsmith opens up the eyes of managers and leaders alike, who go through proprioceptions, but are not even aware of it. His book elaborates on 20 behavioral tics or bad habits that many of us repeat dozens of times each day in the workplace, which, if unchecked, could ruin the career of otherwise highly successful managers and leaders.

Learning to differentiate between ‘because of behaviors’ from ‘in spite of behaviors’
Many successful leaders persist with these career-limiting bad habits due to their mistaken notion that they have been successful in their career so far ‘because of these habits’, while often the fact is that they were successful so far ‘in spite of these habits’. It is difficult for most managers to admit that they ‘suffer’ from these bad habits because often they tend to see them as their strengths.