Coaching works best with high potential people who are willing to make a concerted effort to change, not as a religious conversion activity.
Interpretation
Coaching is most effective with motivated individuals ready to put in the effort to improve themselves.
In this quote, Marshall Goldsmith emphasizes that successful coaching requires engagement from individuals who have the potential for growth and are actively willing to work towards change. He clarifies that coaching should not be viewed as a form of forced belief change, but rather as a supportive process that individuals embrace to enhance their skills and performance.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech during a leadership training session.
Active questions are the alternative to passive questions. There is a huge difference between, 'Do you have clear goals?' and 'Did you do your best to set clear goals for yourself?' The former is trying to determine the employee's state of mind; the latter challenges the employee to describe or defend a course of action.
Treat every piece of advice as a gift or a compliment and simply say, βThank you.
The only thing I don't think people don't understand about good leaders is that they're both good and lucky. A lot of it is timing.
Life is short. Do whatever you can to help people - not for status, but because the 95-year-old you will be proud if you did help people and disappointed if you didn't.
If we become aware of what's happening before we act, behaviour becomes a function of choice rather than a result of an impulse or trigger. You begin to control your world more as opposed to the outside world controlling you.
A leader who is self-aware enough to know that he or she is not adept at everything is one who has taken the first step toward being a great leader.
Empathy represents the foundation skill for all the social competencies important for work.
I cannot penetrate the soul of Arafat. I cannot know in advance whether, behind all the masks, he's the kind of leader who can reach an agreement or whether he wants to be the Moses of the Palestinians, staying in front of the river and not crossing into the promised land.
Your most precious possession is not your financial assets. Your most precious possession is the people you have working there, and what they carry around in their heads, and their ability to work together.
And I'd say one of the great lessons I've learned over the past couple of decades, from a management perspective, is that really when you come down to it, it really is all about people and all about leadership.
I think we would find, if you study the conduct of guerilla-type wars, that the Obama Administration has hit more targets on a broader scale than the Nixon Administration ever did.
People talk about tactics, but when you look at it, tactics are just players. You change things so that the team can get the most out of the skills they have to offer, but you don't go any further than that.
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