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    Helping Successful People Get Even Better

    By Marshall Goldsmith

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    The Challenge: Helping Good Leaders Get Better

    Executive coaches often work with highly successful leaders who are intelligent, dedicated, and committed to their organizations. These individuals are not working out of necessity but out of a desire to contribute and achieve. Intellectually, they understand a critical concept: the leadership behaviors that created yesterday’s results may not be the ones needed to drive tomorrow’s innovation.

    The Paradox of Success

    While most people can easily identify the need for change in others, we have great difficulty changing ourselves. This challenge is magnified by success. As management thinker Charles Handy noted, the “paradox of success” is the need to initiate change before circumstances force you to. However, when an organization or individual is performing well, there is often no perceived reason to change, creating a powerful resistance to evolution.

    As leaders become more successful, it seems to become even harder for them to change their own behaviors. Their past and current success reinforces their existing methods, making it difficult to embrace new ones.

    A Gap in Behavioral Research

    This leadership challenge is a unique field of study. Most research on behavioral change has historically focused on dysfunctional behaviors with clear negative consequences, such as addiction or eating disorders. A great deal has been written on why successful people succeed, but very little addresses the counter-intuitive and distinct challenge of helping already successful people get even better. The entire concept runs contrary to the common assumption that if something is working, it does not need to be fixed.

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