We all have a list of things we know we ought to do: listen better to our colleagues or be more patient with our children, to name just a few common ones. And yet months or even years go by, and we don’t do them.
My role as an executive coach and business educator is to help people change their behaviour and become the people they want to be. The process is straightforward and simple — but simple doesn’t mean easy.
If I’ve learnt one thing after more than three decades doing this work, it is that changing behaviour is hard. Very hard. I like to say that it’s one of the hardest things for sentient human beings to accomplish.
Why is it such a struggle? Very often, it’s because we underestimate the power of the triggers in our environment. A trigger is any stimulus that reshapes our thoughts and actions. As I argue in my book, ‘Triggers: Becoming the Person You Want to Be’, in every waking hour we are being triggered by people, events, and circumstances that have the potential to change us.
They can be major moments, like a car accident, or as minor as a paper cut. They can be pleasant, like a teacher’s praise that elevates our discipline and ambition, or they can be counterproductive, like an ice-cream cone that tempts us off our diet or peer pressure that confuses us into doing something we know is wrong.
The successful leaders I know don’t want to be pushed and pulled by fate. They want to chart their own course. I have learnt a great deal coaching some remarkable leaders, among them Dr Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank; Dr Raj Shah, administrator of the US Agency for International Development; and Alan Mulally, the former CEO of Ford Motor Company.
One reason these leaders responded so well to coaching was their willingness to acknowledge the power of triggers and take the steps to stay on track. When I speak to groups and teach (I am a professor of Management Practice at the Dartmouth College Tuck School of Business), I use them as examples to show that while changing behaviour is hard, it is also eminently possible — and can produce striking results.
Take Alan Mulally, famous for his turnaround of Ford. He believes, as I believe, that we do not get better without structure. Alan’s Business Plan Review, a highly structured meeting format, has been widely hailed as critical to his success at Ford. When Alan retired from the company in 2014, ‘Fortune’ magazine rated him the third greatest leader in the world, behind Pope Francis and Angela Merkel.
I am always eager to talk about the benefits of structure. One of the most effective is the Daily Questions.
My ritual goes like this: at a pre-arranged time, I get a phone call from a person who I have hired to give me a brief test. The questions (43 of them, at last count), which I wrote myself, function as a simple checklist of my life’s main priorities. They ask whether I’ve done my best to exercise, set goals, have positive interactions with others, etc. My caller listens politely, perhaps offers a few general words of encouragement and hangs up.
This process keeps me focused on becoming a happier, healthier person. It provides discipline I sorely need in my chaotic working life, which involves travelling 180 days of the year.
I encourage students to try it for themselves by writing their own questions. To date, almost 5,000 have completed an online version of the Daily Questions. Many others have emailed me seeking guidance on how to write questions of their own.
I have observed an interesting paradox during this research. Successful people are usually eager to adopt structure when it comes to organising a calendar, learning a technically difficult task, managing other people or improving a quantifiable skill. But when it comes to honing our interactions with other people we prefer to wing it — for reasons that sound like variations on “I shouldn’t need to do that.”
But we do, if we want to overcome the effects of triggers to become better listeners, more patient parents — or whatever our goals happen to be.
Dr Marshall Goldsmith writer is an executive coach.
