Coaching FeedForward: January 2010

Sunday, January 31, 2010

Programmed Identity

Programmed Identity is the result of other people sending messages about who you are or will become in the future. When I was growing up my mother imprinted me with two immutable notions—(1) I was smarter than all of the kids in the neighborhood and (2) I was a slob. The first notion, I now realize, was part of my mother’s natural desire to have a successful son. The second was the distillate of my mother’s own incredible need to be tidy and clean. After years of hearing of this from my mother, I grew up with an outsized (and frankly delusional) faith in my own brainpower, and I was an incredible slob. My mother had programmed me to believe these attributes were integral components of what made me me. It wasn’t until I started understanding the dynamics of identity that I began to realize: (1) I wasn’t always that smart and (2) I didn’t have to be a slob.
By the time I got to graduate school, where I was shocked—shocked!—to learn that my professors and fellow students also had mothers, fathers and other important people telling them how smart they were, I had to rethink my mother’s programming. In addition, if only to improve my social acceptance, I worked on not being such a slob.
In its most extreme forms, there’s a lot that can be positive about Programmed Identity. For example, the Marine Corps excels at forging new identities for its recruits—and it does so in the relatively short span during eight weeks of boot camp. That’s where new recruits are literally drilled into thinking of themselves not only as soldiers but as members of a unit—so that they have their comrades’ backs at all times and perform fearlessly under the stress of combat. It’s the reason Marines get “Semper Fi” tattoos and regard being a Marine as part of their identity for life. It’s the reason that wounded soldiers who’ve been sent stateside for medical attention want to get back to their unit as soon as they’re healed; they want to be a part of something bigger than themselves. That’s how they’ve been trained. The Corps is at the core of their identity.
Your Programmed Identity has many sources. It can be influenced by the profession you enter, the culture you grew up in, the company you work for, the entire industry you work in, or the people you select as your trusted friends. Each of these can shape your opinion of yourself, some more vividly than you may realize.
Not long ago I met up with an old friend from graduate school whom I hadn’t seen in years. I remembered him as a quiet, earnest academic type who liked nothing more than dreaming up clever social experiments and writing research papers about them. Then he decided he needed more money than a life in academe would provide, so he became a trader on Wall Street. I caught up with him a few years into his new career, and the change in his personality was impossible to ignore. He was very aggressive and clearly cared a lot about making money.
“You’ve come a long way since the psych lab,” I said, trying to make a joke about the “new” person sitting in front of me.
“It’s the culture,” he said. “Everyone in my company is there for only one reason: to make money. I was told that in order to succeed in this environment, I would need to become like everyone else. I guess that I have.”
In other words, he didn’t disagree that he was a changed man, or that this change was not all positive. He simply gave himself a free pass by defining his new personality by his industry ‘programming’.
And therein lies the flaw in our eager acceptance of our Programmed Identity. It can become a convenient scapegoat for our behavioral mistakes.
I was once hired to work with a Greek-American executive whose scores on showing respect for colleagues and subordinates were abysmal. As I reviewed his co-workers’ feedback with him, his first comment was, “I don’t know if you’ve ever worked with men from Greece before…”
I cut him off and said, “I’ve worked with a lot of men from Greece, and most of them were not perceived as mean or disrespectful. Don’t blame your problems on Socrates!” In effect, he was blaming his supposed cultural heritage—his alleged programming—for his acting like a jerk.
Through the years I’ve become a connoisseur of people using their “programming” as an excuse. I’ve heard overbearing people who always need to get their own way blame the parents who spoiled them and gave them everything they wanted (Blame My Parents programming). I’ve heard overweight people blame their inability to shed pounds on their genetic makeup (Blame My Genes programming). I’ve heard bigots blame their intolerance on the hateful small-minded town where they were raised (Blame My Neighbors programming). I’ve heard aggressive don’t-get-in-my-way salespeople blame their boorish behavior on their company’s ruthless Darwinian culture (Blame My Company’s programming).
At some point, usually when we’ve suffered an unambiguous Nojo moment for the second or third time (e.g., getting fired or passed over for a promotion again) it finally dawns on us that maybe we can’t lay all our problems on our programming. That’s when we stop turning to the past and to others for our sense of self.

Life is good.

Marshall

MOJO: How to Get It, How to Keep It, and How to Get It Back When You Lose It!
What Got You Here Won't Get You There

http://www.marshallgoldsmithlibrary.com/mojo

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Reflected Identity

Reflected Identity lives where the past and other people’s opinions meet. Other people remember events in your past and they remind you of them, sometimes constantly. It’s one thing for the executive above to admit to poor follow up. But if his boss or wife or customers tell him the same thing, it reinforces the picture he already has of himself. You might know this as feedback. Feedback from others is how we shape our Reflected Identity.
As a professional who relies on feedback as a tool for helping people change for the better, I would never disparage its value. But I will mention that not all feedback is offered in good faith or in the most forgiving spirit.
It could be the spouse who keeps dredging up your one or two failures as a mate. It could be the colleague who never misses an opportunity to remind you of one of your workplace disasters. It could be the boss whose only impression of you is some less-than-brilliant statement you made in a meeting, which he repeats like a leitmotif whenever your name comes up. (I gave feedback to one manager who repeatedly derided one of his top lieutenants’ work habits, all because the subordinate refused to schedule an early morning phone call with the boss over a holiday weekend. I regarded this as an admirable display of work-life balance, but the manager saw it as evidence of the man’s 9-to-5 mentality and, therefore, a lack of commitment.) While some of our feedback may be quite fair, some of it may be part of the towel-snapping give and take of a lively corporate environment, where humor and piquant one-liners play key roles. But in an environment where we tend to become what other people say we are, the wrong kind of feedback can become self-limiting and pernicious.
People who keep reflecting your worst moments back to you—with the implication that these moments are the real you—are no different than the friend who sees that you’re on a diet trying to lose weight and yet insists, “C’mon, you can loosen up for one day. Have a second helping of this.” They’re trying to suck you back to a past self, someone you used to be, not who you are or want to become.
Yes, there’s value in paying attention to your Reflected Identity - but healthy skepticism is called for here as well. At its worst your Reflected Identity may be based on little more than hearsay and gossip. It may enhance your reputation or it may tarnish it. But either way, it’s not necessarily a true reflection of who you are.
Even if your Reflected Identity is accurate, it doesn’t have to be predictive. We can all change!

Life is good.

Marshall

MOJO: How to Get It, How to Keep It, and How to Get It Back When You Lose It!
What Got You Here Won't Get You There

http://www.marshallgoldsmithlibrary.com/mojo

Friday, January 29, 2010

Remembered Identity

Our Remembered Identity exists where our self and past collide. How do you know who you are? Because you remember events in your life that helped form your sense of self. It’s not so important whether these are glorious moments in your autobiography or events you’d rather erase; what’s important is that you can’t forget these touchstones. For better or worse, they’ve left an impact—and when you write a profile of yourself, these moments inevitably get reported.
The good news is that successful people, with robust senses of self-worth, tend to mine their past for the shiny diamonds, not the lumps of coal. They do this, in part, out of self-protection. After all, who in their right mind would gorge on painful or embarrassing episodes from his or her past, let alone allow these episodes to define his or her identity? The trouble is, the further you go back into your past the greater the chances that your Remembered Identity doesn’t match up with who you are today. The world is full of people who aced their teenage years, but is there a sadder commentary about an adult than “he peaked in high school”?
Likewise, the workplace is full of people who made mistakes in their past, but those errors do not necessarily pinpoint with any accuracy who they are now.
I remember asking one of my more self-effacing clients—a man with amazing achievements—to itemize his plusses and minuses as an executive.
“Well, I’m not very good at follow up,” he said.
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“My biggest screw-ups in business occurred when I didn’t pay attention to my customers,” he said. “I didn’t check up on them as much as they’d like. I didn’t return phone calls promptly. I didn’t always do what I promised to do, at least not in the timely manner they expected. And sometimes I lost customers because of that.”
I glanced down at the feedback I had gathered about the man from his direct reports and colleagues. He was a capable leader, with several thousand employees under his command. He had a few behavioral issues that needed to be dealt with, but “bad at follow up” was not on the list.
“When was the last time a customer gave you negative feedback for poor follow up?” I asked.
“It’s been a while, at least ten years.”
“Then why do you still insist you’re bad at it?” I asked.
He didn’t have an answer.
That’s where Remembered Identity can cheat us in establishing our Mojo. There’s nothing wrong with harkening back to the past to sort out your strengths and weaknesses. But cling too tightly and you might be getting it all wrong, creating a dark blurry picture of someone who doesn’t exist anymore.

Life is good.

Marshall

MOJO: How to Get It, How to Keep It, and How to Get It Back When You Lose It!
What Got You Here Won't Get You There

http://www.marshallgoldsmithlibrary.com/mojo

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Identity: Who Do You Think You Are?

Before you can assess your Mojo—that positive spirit—toward what you are doing—that starts on the inside—and radiates to the outside, you have to determine who ‘you’ are. How do you define yourself?
Ask me this question concerning my profession—and my answer is simple and immediate: “I help successful people achieve positive, lasting change in behavior.” That’s a 10-word description of how I see myself as a professional that’s so indelible it may as well be tattooed on my forehead.
I didn’t always define myself this way.
When I was fourteen, I was a ’one of the boys’ back in Kentucky. That’s how I saw myself. A few years later, I was the first member of my family to graduate from college. By my late twenties, when I had a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from UCLA under my belt and a teaching position at Loyola, I saw myself as a researcher and professor. It wasn’t until my forties—more than half the average person’s lifetime—that I could even approach a self-definition as pithy as “I help successful people achieve positive, lasting change in behavior.”
Now, tell me: Who do you think you are?
Take your time. It’s not a test with one correct answer. On the other hand, it’s the kind of question that ends up stumping the vast majority of people.
Identity is a complicated subject, and we make it even more complicated when we’re not sure where to look for the best answer. Many people hurtle back to their past—to signal events, memorable triumphs, painful disasters—to define themselves. Some rely on the testimony of others—a boss or teacher’s good review—as a means of defining themselves. Still others project themselves into the future, defining themselves as who they would like to be rather than who they actually are.
Let’s take the complexity out of the question. Let’s make it simple—so we can understand our identity and, in turn, do something about it.
At its core, our identity is determined by two dynamics complementing and competing with one another.
One vector represents the interplay between our past and our future. I spend a lot of my time admonishing clients to stop clinging to their past—and certainly to stop using the past as an excuse for current or future behavior—but there’s no getting around the fact that much of our sense of self is determined by our past. How could it not be? Then again, if we want to make positive changes in our lives, we also need some sense of a future self—not the person we think we were but the person we want to become. This tug of war between our past and future selves, not surprisingly, can leave heads spinning as we veer between the comfort of our past self and the unknown promise of a future self.
The other vector tracks the tension between the image others have of us and our self image. It’s the different weight we assign to what others say about us and what we tell ourselves.
Each of the four boxes created by this matrix represents four different sources of our identity. Each of these four sources of our identity combine to influence our Mojo.

• Remembered Identity
• Reflected Identity
• Programmed Identity
• Created Identity

In summary, how do we know who we are? Our identities are remembered, reflected, programmed and created. My suggestion to you is simple. First review the various components of your current identity. Where did they originate? Review the matrix in the context of how you see yourself today—and who you would like to become in the future. If your present identity is fine with you, just work on becoming an even better version of who you are. If you want to make a change in your identity, be open to the fact that you may be able to change more than you originally believed that you could. Assuming you do not have “incurable” or “unchangeable” limitations, you, like Bono, can create a new identity for your future, without sacrificing your past.
Your Mojo is that positive spirit toward what you are doing now that starts on the inside and radiates to the outside. To understand how you are relating to any activity, you need to understand your identity—who you are. To change your Mojo, you may need to either create a new identity for yourself or rediscover an identity that you have lost.

Life is good.

Marshall

MOJO: How to Get It, How to Keep It, and How to Get It Back When You Lose It!
What Got You Here Won't Get You There

http://www.marshallgoldsmithlibrary.com/mojo

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Solving the Mojo Paradox

I once had a CEO client who had a penchant for making sarcastic remarks to his employees. In his case, I abbreviated the two questions into a four-word test. Before he opened his mouth and said something that he would regret, I told him to ask himself, “Is it worth it?” He was skeptical at first. I explained that the question was like closing his office door when he didn’t want to be interrupted. The door won’t keep everybody out, but it makes people think twice before they knock. After twelve months of using this tactic, he made the startling admission that half the things he was going to say were “not worth saying.” So he stopped saying them—and within a year was he perceived as a much more effective leader.
The global economy is highly uncertain. I always counsel my friends in major organizations, “This is not a great year to make ‘ego points’”. One simple questioning activity—that two of my friends swear has changed their lives—and led to major promotions- is to breathe before speaking and acting, then ask yourself, “Is what I am about to say or do in the best interest of myself and the people that I love?” If the answer is “no”, think hard before saying or doing it!
This simple ‘two question’ discipline can be applied to any activity. Imagine that you’re about to attend a one-hour mandatory meeting. Your initial mind-set is that the meeting will be a boring waste of time. But on this occasion, you flash forward an hour into the future and ask yourself two questions: How much long-term benefit or meaning did I experience from this activity? How much short-term satisfaction or happiness did I experience in this activity? Remember, it’s your life. If the meeting makes you feel miserable and empty, it’s your misery and emptiness. So try to make the best of the situation rather than defaulting to the role of victim. You have two options. Option A is to attend the meeting and be miserable (and probably assist other attendees in being miserable too). Option B is to make the meeting more meaningful and enjoyable. You might be able to do this by observing your colleagues more closely than ever, or by challenging other attendees with questions that you’ve been dying to ask, or by creatively generating an idea that becomes the meeting’s center of attention. Your options are not as limited or limiting as you think, but you may never even consider these option without first posing the two questions.
All you’re doing is changing how you approach any activity. You’re no longer defaulting to inertia—i.e., continuing to do what you’ve been doing. You’re electing to be more mindful, more alert, and more awake. Remember this as you pursue the courses of action in MOJO: How to Get It, How to Keep It, and How to Get It Back When You Lose It!. This is how we can overcome the pernicious effects of inertia, or mindless activity. This is how we solve the Mojo Paradox. This is how we can regain control of our future and create positive change. This is how Mojo begins.

Life is good.

Marshall

MOJO: How to Get It, How to Keep It, and How to Get It Back When You Lose It!
What Got You Here Won't Get You There

http://www.marshallgoldsmithlibrary.com/mojo

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Does Anyone Really Change?

About twenty years ago I was preparing a leadership development session for a Fortune 100 company when one of the company’s senior managers asked me a perfectly plausible question: “Does anyone who goes to these leadership sessions ever really change?” My candid answer was “I don’t know.” Although I had been conducting these sessions for years with dozens of companies, I had never followed up with my clients to see if, later on, they actually took the sessions to heart, did as I’d instructed, and became more effective leaders. So I began going back to many of my clients and assembled data that answered the question, “Does anyone ever really change?” Our original follow-up study included 86,000 respondents. Our data base has now grown to more than 250,000 respondents. My conclusion is now unequivocal. Very few people achieve positive, lasting change without ongoing follow-up. Unless they know at the end of the day (or week or month) that someone is going to measure if they’re doing what they promised to do, most people fall prey to inertia. They continue doing what they were doing. They don’t change their behavior, and as a result, they don’t become more effective. On the other hand, if they know someone, like their coach, their co-workers, or their manager is watching—in the form of paying attention to them or caring about them, or evaluating them with follow-up questions—they’re more likely to change. The key is measurement and follow up, in all their myriad forms.
Now, what if we didn’t have to rely on an “outside agent” such as a manager or executive coach to do follow-up that initiated real positive change? What if we could be that “change agent” for ourselves? What if there was a regimen where we could ask the follow-up questions and provide the answers to ourselves.
It is my firm belief that, if you journey through life knowing all of your activities will be evaluated on these two simple questions, you will tend to experience more happiness and meaning in each activity and, in the aggregate, you will have a happier and more meaningful life.
The simple knowledge that you’re going to evaluate any activity will alter your experience of that activity. It makes you more mindful and awake. The dynamic is no different than if you knew that you would be observed and graded by your manager on a task. Chances are that you would perform the task better than if you knew there would be no evaluation. That’s human nature. We’ve obeyed it since we were little kids in school, goofing off when the teacher left the room and instantly resuming our best behavior when the teacher returned. We’re more alert to how we behave, perform, and appear to others when we know someone is judging us. The only difference in this experiment is that you are the one asking the questions and doing the evaluation.
I’m convinced that this ritual of self-directed follow-up works because I’ve seen it work both in my coaching practice and in my own life. The mere act of evaluating an activity forces you to break the pattern of inertia enveloping that activity.
For example, you’re curious about a subject—say, vacations in the south of France—so you fire up your laptop and type in a few key words at a search engine such as Google or Bing. Then you start sifting through the results. An hour later, you’re still in front of the screen, not much smarter about vacations in the south of France but still clicking and reading and clicking and reading. In fact, you may have completely forgotten about ‘vacations in France’ and aimlessly wandered through countless other topics! If you’re like millions of sentient adults with a laptop and wireless access, it’s quite possible that this activity—mindless net-surfing—takes up more hours of your time than you realize or can afford to spare. But if you knew in advance that one hour later you would be evaluating your net-surfing according to how much short-term satisfaction and long-term benefit it provided you, I suspect it would either (a) make you think twice about going online in the first place, or (b) make you use your time online with more discipline and more focus on its short- and long-term benefits.
That’s the power behind this exercise in self-directed follow-up. It not only tells us what’s working after the fact, but it also makes us think about our actions before the fact.
I’ve recently adopted this method in regards to my own time surfing the internet. Before I allow myself to get lost for an hour in a pointless cascade of links and screens, I now ask myself these two questions–“How much happiness am I going to get from this hour? How much meaning will come from the next hour?” Sometimes I’ll conclude that going online will deliver short-term satisfaction or long-term benefit—because I need the information and the search will be instructive. But many times I realize that I’ll just be doing it as a low-strain alternative to getting back to more important activities. I’ll be wasting my time. Whatever I conclude, the self-examination instructs my behavior: I either abandon the activity or find a way to extract more satisfaction and benefit from it.
It’s such a simple strategy that it’s tempting to discount its utility. But you’ll be surprised at how effective it is in increasing the happiness and meaning in your life. Let me give you a couple of related examples:

Life is good.

Marshall

MOJO: How to Get It, How to Keep It, and How to Get It Back When You Lose It!
What Got You Here Won't Get You There

http://www.marshallgoldsmithlibrary.com/mojo

Sunday, January 24, 2010

My Mojo Scorecard

Here’s my personal Mojo scorecard for a typical day in my professional life:

Task 1: The first discrete measurable “event” of my day was a three-hour teaching session, from 8 A.M. to 11 A.M., that I conducted for a group of thirty human resource professionals in Stamford, Connecticut. I love teaching. It is probably what I do best. I didn’t learn as much from teaching on this day as I learned from some of the other elements of my job (hence the lower score on learning), but I found this teaching experience to be both meaningful and rewarding. I gave a lot to ‘it’ and it gave a lot to ‘me’.

Task 2: From 11:30 A.M. to 12:30 P.M. I made scheduled phone calls to clients. I love interacting with my clients—and this was one of those times when everything seemed to go just right.

Task 3: From 12:30 to 1 P.M. I engaged in “housekeeping” chores via the phone with my San Diego office while riding to the airport for a flight to Chicago. This is something that I may need to do, but don’t love doing. Upon reflection, what I learned from my score is that I don’t have to do all of this myself. (A benefit of the Mojo scorecard – it causes us to question the elements of our lives that are just not working.)

Task 4: Devoted two-hour flight to Chicago to writing MOJO: How to Get It, How to Keep It, and How to Get It Back When You Lose It!. On this day, writing was very tough for me. I got distracted—and didn’t do a good job.

Task 5:. Had early dinner with a coaching client, the chief operating officer of a family-owned manufacturing company. This session went well, but by the end of the dinner I was tired—and not sure I should have scheduled this meeting—at this hour.

Task 6. Originally scheduled two hours for writing time on MOJO: How to Get It, How to Keep It, and How to Get It Back When You Lose It!, but then spent first hour of the time answering e-mails. This is an activity that I felt I needed to do, but didn’t love doing. My scores show it.

Task 7. Spent second hour of planned “writing time” surfing the internet. This was not really a ‘professional’ activity—so I didn’t score the ‘professional Mojo’ boxes. Upon reflection, it wasn’t even personally rewarding; it was largely a waste of my time. My learning point—beware of mindless net surfing!

Task 8. Phone calls to my family. This was one of the most meaningful and rewarding parts of this day.

Task 9. Regular 10 P.M. telephone check-in with my “coach” to review checklist of my goals. On this day, my session with my coach was both personally and professionally rewarding.

While I am often described as an executive coach, it is clear from my Mojo scorecard that my life is filled with a variety of activities.

When looking at the scorecard, I noticed I experienced high levels Mojo when I was teaching or coaching. I also loved learning and communicating with my family. My job as a writer is very important to me, but much more challenging. I tend to be extroverted and love interacting with people. It is tough for me to spend the ‘alone time’ needed to be a great writer. Over the years I have improved—but still believe that I have a lot of work to do in order to write at a level of quality that my readers deserve.
When I was dealing with the basic chores of maintaining my business life, my Mojo scores dropped significantly. Like most humans, I just wasted part of the day. On this day, ‘surfing the net’ didn’t bring me any professional benefit—and wasn’t even that much fun. It was just a waste of my time!
We can learn a lot about ourselves from our Mojo scorecard. We can learn where we may need to spend more time—and where we should try to find others to help us. We can learn when we may need to ‘adjust our attitude’ in situations where we may have to do something that we don’t normally enjoy.
I’m not trying to paint complexity into my work life. In many ways I lead a simple life. I teach leaders in group sizes that run from several hundred to just one person. I talk on the phone alot. I sit at my laptop and write. And I spend an inordinate amount of time in airport lounges and on planes getting from one place to another. Different tasks, different roles. But each of those activities represents a different facet, a different part of my life. I need to account for this when I ask myself, “How am I doing?”
In reviewing the complexity of my life, I’m not that much different than most successful multitasking businesspeople in the twenty-first century:
• The hard-charging executive, who’s still single and spends much of his free time taking care of his aging parents, has two major roles, one professional, the other personal: businessman and son.
• The creative director at an advertising agency wears more hats than she can count: She writes, she illustrates, she pitches for new accounts, she manages people, she nurtures talent, and she is often the high-profile public face of the entire agency. That’s at least six roles, perhaps more.
• The founder of a small business who can do (and has done) every job in the company, from the shop floor to the back office to the showroom and the front office, could conceivably lay claim to so many roles that we would simply give up and lump them all into one macro-job that we’d label entrepreneur or owner.
Everyone’s day requires different skills with different levels of Mojo. That’s why the first step in establishing or recapturing your Mojo is a test to determine what you bring to each activity in your day—and what each activity brings to you. Without the test, you might never pinpoint all the daily tasks that gobble up your time, or realize whether these tasks actually matter to you. Also, you might never appreciate that each activity, in some form or another, represents a different facet of you, a different part of your life. Once you add up the numbers on your Scorecard, you might finally be forced to pause and ask yourself, “Is this what I should be doing?”

Life is good.

Marshall

MOJO: How to Get It, How to Keep It, and How to Get It Back When You Lose It!
What Got You Here Won't Get You There

http://www.marshallgoldsmithlibrary.com/mojo

Friday, January 22, 2010

The Mojo Scorecard

In thinking about flight attendants and waiters, it’s clear that the job itself does not define Mojo. After all, the great and not-so-great flight attendants are doing identical jobs. Mojo has to be about something else, I concluded. But how do you measure it?
That’s when it hit me. We all have two forms of Mojo in our lives: Professional Mojo, which is a measure of the skills and attitudes we bring to any activity, and Personal Mojo, which is measured by the benefits that a particular activity gives back to us.
Within this framework, it was easy to construct a simple test we can use to measure our Mojo when preparing for any specific activity. Five qualities we need to bring to an activity in order to do it well are: motivation, knowledge, ability, confidence, and authenticity. Likewise, five benefits we may receive from the activity after doing a job well are: happiness, reward, meaning, learning, and gratitude.
Here’s the test. Think of a typical day in your life. Pick one of your more important activities. Rate yourself on each of the ten questions on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest. A perfect Mojo score would be 100.

Professional Mojo: What I Bring to This Activity

1. Motivation: You want to do a great job in this activity. (If you are just “going through the motions” when you are engaged in this activity, your score would be low.)

2. Knowledge: You understand what to do and how to do it. (If you are unclear on processes or priorities, your score would be low.)

3. Ability: You have the skills needed to do the task well. (If this activity does not fit your talents or competencies, your score would be low.)

4. Confidence: You are sure of yourself when performing this activity. (If you feel unsure or insecure, your score would be low.)

5. Authenticity: You are genuine in your level of enthusiasm for engaging in this activity. (If you are “faking it” or being insincere, your score would be low.)

Personal Mojo: What This Activity Brings to Me

6. Happiness: Being engaged in this activity makes you happy. (If it is not stimulating, creates misery or is otherwise non-joyful, your score would be low.)

7. Reward: This activity provides material or emotional rewards that are important to you. (If the activity is unrewarding or if the rewards do not matter to you, your score would be low.)

8. Meaning: The results of this activity are meaningful for you. (If you do not feel a sense of fulfillment or that you’re contributing to a greater good, then your score would be low.)

9. Learning: This activity helps you to learn and grow. (If you feel that you are just “treading water” and not learning, your score would be low.)

10. Gratitude: Overall, you feel grateful for being able to do this activity and believe that it is a great use of your time. (If it seems like a poor use of your time or you regret doing it, your score would be low.)

That’s it. A fairly simple test: ten questions that you can answer in a short period of time.
One caveat: Although it’s a simple test, it’s not necessarily easy—largely because it’s a self-assessment test, with no right or wrong answers. You determine your own score. But that virtue is precisely what makes it hard. Many successful people have a tendency to overestimate their strengths and underestimate their weaknesses. We often think we’re smarter, better looking, and more accomplished than the facts may bear out. Keep that in mind as you assess your Mojo. If, for example, you award yourself a 10 for knowledge or ability in a specific activity, that 10 may be a red flag that you’re letting ego trump the truth. Most of us have room for improvement, especially when it comes to knowledge and ability. Even Tiger Woods might hesitate giving himself a 10 in ability for certain aspects of being a golfer. So step back and ask yourself if your colleagues would award you the same score. If you still believe it, so be it. Remember, no one else is seeing the test results. They’re for your eyes only. There’s no good reason to lie to yourself. This is for you!
This is not a one-time test. Because it takes so little time, it’s something you can—and should—do throughout the day as you participate in different activities. (In fact, you can download a Mojo Scorecard at mojothebook.com.) The Mojo Scorecard is no different than a golfer’s scorecard. In golf you write down your score against par after every hole, then add up your strokes at the end of the round to gauge how you did. The card lets you see where you did well during the round and where you faltered. You can do the same with the Mojo Scorecard. After every discrete event or project during the day—whether it’s a two-hour lunch meeting, a five-minute phone call with a customer, a half-hour session to return e-mails, or the end of a long trip—jot down your scores in all ten areas. When you finish your next activity, score yourself again. Do this until the end of your working day. Then add up the scores and divide by the number of activities to determine your average Mojo score for one full day at work.
Do this for a few days and patterns will emerge. You’ll see areas of strong Mojo and areas of weakness. You’ll also discover which recurring activities provide you with the most satisfaction.

Life is good.

Marshall

MOJO: How to Get It, How to Keep It, and How to Get It Back When You Lose It!
What Got You Here Won't Get You There

http://www.marshallgoldsmithlibrary.com/mojo

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Measure Your Mojo

How much Mojo do you have? How do you know if you have any at all? How can you measure your Mojo? Before you start measuring your Mojo, let’s focus on understanding what Mojo is—and isn’t—and what its absence looks like.
You know that definition of Mojo I tossed out so casually in the previous chapter? The one that said “Mojo is that positive spirit toward what we are doing now that starts on the inside and radiates to the outside”? I didn’t come up with it blithely or quickly. It took me some time.
For a while I thought of Mojo as another word for momentum—merely a function of direction (how do I become who I want to be starting from where I am now?) - and speed (how quickly can I make that happen?).
But then I realized that this definition assumed that to have Mojo people had to striving to be different or better than they are now. Not true. There are plenty of people who demonstrate great Mojo and are not trying to change—they are finding happiness and meaning in their lives right now. How do we account for that?
I also realized that there are people who by all external measures—money, respect, power, status—are “winning.” They are outpacing their peers and competition quite handily, thank you. And yet inside they derive little satisfaction or meaning from their job or achievements. I suspect that we all know someone like this: seemingly set for life on the outside yet dissatisfied on the inside. How do we account for that?
That’s when I realized that Mojo is not merely about the rush we feel when we’re on a winning streak. It’s not only about the direction we’re heading in, nor is it about the pace of change we’re creating around us. Mojo is an expression of the harmony—or lack of harmony—between what we feel inside about whatever we are doing and what we show on the outside.
That’s the thinking behind my operational definition of Mojo. I stress the phrase operational definition, which may not be familiar to you. It’s a concept I learned from my mentor Dr. Paul Hersey, one of the pioneers in the field of organizational behavior. When Dr. Hersey discussed broad terms such as “leadership” or “management” in his classes, he would always begin with an operational definition of each. Paul knew that such open-ended terms were ripe for semantic debate and that different people ascribed different meanings to them. Without clear, operational definitions, he might be talking about one thing while his students might be hearing something else. He made no claims that his definitions were better than anyone else’s. He merely noted that, for the purposes of his class, these definitions were what he meant. I was amazed at how much time and energy Dr. Hersey saved by never arguing about the “right” or “best” definition. That’s one reason Paul is such a great teacher: When he speaks, his students always know what he’s talking about.
So please imprint the following operational definition for Mojo in your mind.

Mojo:
that positive spirit
toward what we are doing
now
that starts from the inside
and radiates to the outside.

I’ve divided the sentence into parts, as if it were poetry, haiku, because each deserves some special attention.
Positive spirit is unambiguous. It’s a feeling of optimism and satisfaction. It conveys both happiness and meaning.
Toward what we are doing focuses us on the fact that we’re dealing with an activity or a task—as opposed to a state of mind or a situation. For example, when we assess our Mojo at work, we’re not assessing the size of our office, the proximity of our parking space, or the digits on our paycheck. Those are conditions, not actions. We’re assessing the various layers of our engagement in the job we are doing. We can assess Mojo at home as well as work in considering activities that involve our friends and family members.
Now’s meaning is obvious, though its importance cannot be overstated. When we are measuring our Mojo, we do so in the immediate present, not in the recent past or vague future. Our Mojo in the past is over because, for better or worse, we’ve changed since then. It’s like reading week-old news. Our future Mojo is impossible to measure because it hasn’t happened yet. It’s a fantasy, still unreal. Happiness and meaning can’t be experienced next week, next month, or next year. They can only be experienced now. That’s why the most successful professionals are always “on” when they’re engaged in their craft. They’re not distracted or saving themselves for later. In their professions, it is always now for them. They love what they are doing when they are doing it. They are finding happiness and meaning in the present.
That starts from the inside is my reminder that measuring Mojo is an exercise in self-assessment. There are no “right” or “wrong” answers. No instructors handing out grades. Only you know what you’re feeling. Only you can score yourself. It also reflects a lesson I’ve learned from my executive coaching: Nobody every gets better because of me. I can provide help and point the way, but the improvement from my clients is self-generated; it has to come from inside them—not inside me.
And radiates to the outside is my nod to the cause-and-effect dynamic between what we feel inside, how much of it we show, and how it is perceived by others. People who love what they’re doing but somehow never show it are doomed to be misunderstood. Their Mojo and their careers do not reach their full potential. Likewise, people who hate what they’re doing but manage to paint a convincing picture of positive spirit on the outside are phonies—and their inauthentic act usually catches up with them.
No single segment of this definition of Mojo is more important than the others. Remove one and the concept crumbles. But the unifying element is radiates to the outside. To everyone who has to deal with you, this is the part that makes all the difference.

Life is good.

Marshall

MOJO: How to Get It, How to Keep It, and How to Get It Back When You Lose It!
What Got You Here Won't Get You There

http://www.marshallgoldsmithlibrary.com/mojo