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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Marshall Goldsmith is a happy man. He started out happy, he worked on his happiness, and now, at the age of fifty-three, he is very happy. He is, in fact, a happiness professional.
His official job description is "executive coach": he trains executives to behave decently in the office, by subjecting them to a brutal regimen. First, he solicits "360[degree sign] feedback" -- he asks their colleagues and sometimes their families, too, for comprehensive assessments of their strengths and defects -- and he confronts them with what everybody really thinks. Then he makes them apologize and ask for help in getting better. It's a simple method -- "I don't think anybody's going to say I'm guilty of excessive subtlety," he says -- but it works. It had better work. If it doesn't, the client gets his money back.
Goldsmith is so extraordinarily buoyant and extroverted (he scored a perfect E on his Myers-Briggs personality test) that he seems to enter a room in a tinkle of magic dust. If he were shorter (he is nearly six feet), he would look like a leprechaun. His head is round and pink and bald, his eyes are blue, and his chin juts out and upward to meet his nose, like the chin of a wooden puppet. He skips more than walks, and when he is in a bouncy mood (which he usually is) he dances along with his arms straight out and swinging. When he laughs (which he does often), he sounds like a goose. He wears the same outfit every day: green polo shirt, khakis, and moccasins. His favorite movie is "The Wizard of Oz," and his favorite song is "Over the Rainbow." He ends his e-mails and his conversations with what has become his signature phrase: "Life is good!"
The leprechaun quality is one of the reasons Goldsmith is successful. It is a rare executive, after all, who welcomes a man sent by his boss to reform his personality. But people who have worked with Goldsmith call him "disarming," and say that he seems so happy with his life that when he says he is not judging them personally they believe him.
Goldsmith won't take on a client who doesn't want to change -- someone who, as he puts it, has not a skill problem but a don't-give-a-shit problem -- but, short of that, the more obnoxious the better. "My favorite case study was in the 0.1 percentile for treating people with respect," he says. "That means that there were over a thousand people in that company and this person came in dead last. This person would be in an elevator and someone would come up and say, 'Hey, how's it going?,' and he wouldn't even respond. He was hardworking and brilliant; he didn't lie, cheat, or steal. He was just a complete jerk. The case was considered hopeless, but in one year he got up to 53.7 per cent.
"You know how I helped the guy to change? I asked him, 'How do you treat people at home?' He said, 'Oh, I'm totally different at home.' I said, 'Let's call your wife and kids.' What did his wife say? 'You're a jerk.' Called the kids. 'Jerk.' 'Jerk.' So I said, 'Look, I can't help you make money, you're already making more than God, but do you want to have a funeral that no one attends? Because that's where this train is headed."
When Goldsmith started executive coaching, in the early eighties, he was a pioneer. Coaching really came into its own as an industry about five or six years ago, when employee retention became a serious problem. Prosperous baby boomers were retiring early, and members of Generation X were looking for variety and fulfillment rather than security. Human-resources departments, meanwhile, were calculating the cost of losing an important employee (between one and two times the employee's annual salary and benefits, according to one estimate), and had discovered that one of the two main reasons that people left jobs was that they hated their boss (the other being the general failure of the company). Clearly, it was foolish to lose talent for no better reason than that a vice-president appeared to his subordinates to be insufficiently interested in what they had to say. Moreover, a bad attitude on the part of senior management was held to be detrimental not only to retaining employees but also to the formation of strategy. The old-fashioned leader, with his bulldozer personality and his single-minded certainties, was thought to be too arrogant to lower his ear to the ground and listen for changes coming. Thus, the executive coach.
Coaching being still in its chaotic, juvenile phase, there are, as yet, no licensing requirements of any kind. Anyone can call himself an executive coach, and thousands do. Schools are springing up everywhere: Coach Universe and Coach U conduct classes by phone; CoachVille.com trains coaches for a seventy-nine-dollar lifetime-membership fee. For this reason, first-to-market coaches like Goldsmith, who already have solid reputations and have received notices in the business press (he was listed as one of five top coaches by Forbes, and in the top ten by the Wall Street Journal), are flourishing. Goldsmith's current clients include ChevronTexaco, Motorola, Thomson, and Pitney Bowes. Some executives remain suspicious of coaching, thinking of it as a reproach or as enforced psychotherapy, but more often these days the offer of a coach is taken as a compliment -- a sign, since the service is expensive, that a person is being groomed for significant promotion.
One of Goldsmith's clients is an executive in a large corporation. He is high-ranking -- only a step or two from the top. None of Goldsmith's clients are far from the top -- his services are too expensive to waste on mid-level managers. (He won't say how much he charges, but it is reported to be in the high five figures per client per year, which makes him one of the best-paid coaches in the field.) On a recent visit to the executive's office, Goldsmith ran into his client in the hallway, where the two of them were spotted by a little white-haired man wearing a red bow tie.
"Who's getting their head shrunk today?" asked the white-haired man in a jovial tone. The executive gave him...
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