Past a certain rank, your helpful suggestions arrive as orders.
A junior engineer brings her manager an idea, and it is a good one. The manager is smart and wants it to succeed, so he suggests two changes, and they are real improvements. A month later the project is limping and the engineer has stopped bringing him ideas. What went wrong, when every step was the manager trying to help?
Marshall Goldsmith’s answer is that the idea is improved by 5% while commitment drops by 50%. Before the manager spoke, it was her idea. Afterwards it was his, and nobody works as hard on someone else’s idea. The manager doesn’t notice, because nothing changed on his end. When he was junior, the same suggestion would have read as collaboration. Now that he is senior it reads as an instruction. Only the power differential changed. Goldsmith calls the habit “adding too much value,” and he thinks it is the most insidious habit of successful people because it looks like contributing.
Why success makes it worse
The book’s thesis is that the higher you go in an organization, the more your problems are behavioral rather than technical, and that the habits that got you to this level are often the habits that will keep you from the next one.
The manager shows how. He was promoted for having better ideas than the people around him and saying so. That reflex made him a strong individual contributor, but as a manager it pulls every decision back toward himself, the opposite of what intent-based leadership tries to do by pushing decisions down to the people who will carry them out. Goldsmith lists twenty habits of this kind, from winning too much to failing to give credit, and nearly all are strengths that have curdled.
Why can’t successful people see this? Because their success looks like proof. The delusional self-confidence that pushed them through early barriers now makes them resist the change they need most. Morgan Housel makes the same point about money, where keeping it is harder than making it: luck increases confidence without increasing ability, so a run of success leaves people more certain and with less room for error than before. Most refuse to believe in luck at all, because it threatens the story that they earned everything.
Goal obsession
A second force works on the manager. He wants the project to be as good as possible, and that focus is exactly what makes the engineer invisible to him. Goal obsession is not a flaw. It is a creator of flaws. In a classic Princeton study, seminary students hurrying to give a talk on the Good Samaritan walked past a man slumped in a doorway, some stepping over him, because they were late. Whatever didn’t serve the task dropped out of view.
A list of things to stop
So the remedy is unusual for a self-help book. Smart people know what to do. They need to know what to stop. Goldsmith recommends a To-Stop list in place of a To-Do list. You don’t have to become a different person, just stop one destructive habit at a time. For the manager, the question before offering an improvement is not “is it true?” but “is it worth it?” Sometimes the 5% is worth the cost. Usually the better move is to say “good idea” and let her run with it.
The obvious objection is that this is corporate etiquette dressed up as leadership wisdom: be nicer and you’ll get promoted. But Goldsmith is describing something sharper than manners. Success selects for traits that become liabilities at higher levels, and the people best placed to notice are the ones least likely to tell someone above them. The manager needs feedback to find his curdled strengths, and the engineer who could have given it has already learned to keep her ideas to herself.
References:
- Marshall Goldsmith, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There
- Venkatesh Rao, Ribbonfarm review of the 20 habits