Recognizing Your Needs

By Marshall Goldsmith

Many top leaders refuse to acknowledge that their needs are often aligned with those of their employees. 

I have found that the Life Plan Review, or LPR, helps them confront this, because it creates an atmosphere where people can ask for help, and can understand that they are one among many, even if they are accomplished in their fields. 

The process in Life Plan Review, or LPR, helps people overcome the obstacle of asking for help. 

The LPR makes us more accountable for our behavior by making us answerable on a regular basis to other people. It also allows us to ask for help. It’s got four steps: 

1. weekly meetings where you answer fixed questions with a partner to improve your life 
2. self-monitoring between weekly meetings
3. a weekly plan review based on its relevance and your personal need
4. the importance of not doing it alone 

For many years now, helping leaders accept and emphasize their needs has been a big part of my coaching. Sometimes, it’s the only advice they need. 

I started coaching Hubert Joly in 2010 when he was CEO of Carlson, the privately owned hospitality giant in Minneapolis. I did my usual setup routine: I interviewed Hubert’s direct reports and the Carlson board of directors, distilling their feedback into two reports. 

First, I sent Hubert the report of all the positive feedback, advising him to appreciate it. The next day I sent the longer report about his negatives, telling him to digest it slowly. Although he was already a respected leader, of the 20 executive bad habits I’d listed in What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, Hubert, by his count, was guilty of 13. His big issue was thinking he always had to add value, out of which flowed his other issues, such as needing to win too much and passing judgment. 

When we met, I saw where his excessive need to be right came from. He’d been at the top of his class at the most elite schools in his native France. He’d been a star consultant at McKinsey. In his 30s, he became president of EDS-France, and then he moved to the United States, where he eventually rose to the top of Carlson. 

He was a bit of a religious scholar who’d collaborated with two monks from the Congregation of St. John (they’d met at business school) on articles about the nature of work. He was well read not only in the Old and New Testaments, and also in the Koran and the teachings of Eastern religions, too. I liked him immediately. 

I told him to pick three bad habits that he wanted to work on and commit to improving. He chose: apologizing to colleagues for past behavior, promising to do better, asking for help, and the grateful acceptance of feedforward advice. 

Two years later, Hubert became CEO of Best Buy, where he faced one of the biggest challenges in American business: saving a big-box electronics retailer competing on price against Amazon. 

Hubert’s could have taken a victory lap and ended our coaching relationship. But he didn’t, for two reasons: 

(1) he was committed to continuous self-improvement, and 

(2) he wanted his new colleagues at Best Buy to see the self-improvement process in practice.