Worth His Weight in Gold

David Goldsmith maps the road to success.

It's been happening more and more lately. Colleagues are laid off and the remaining workers, overwhelmed, aren't sure how to get a handle on their crushing workload. Enter David Goldsmith.

Goldsmith is no-nonsense; one of his talks centers on why people can't and shouldn't be asked to give 110 percent (simple point of fact: It's impossible to give more than 100 percent and if you try, you're going to burn out). Instead of pure motivation, he advocates a practical approach in which managers adopt systems and structure, strategy and tactics, that make sense.

"Ask people what a strategy is and what a tactic is and you're going to have 1,000 different answers, which means 1,000 different ways to attack a situation," says Goldsmith. It's the strategy of the tactics that gets to the heart of the problem—the section in the middle in which you explore how to accomplish a strategy—"that's where you start to bounce ideas around and look at how you're really going to accomplish something." Managers need to develop a plan, which he says should be complete enough that that the entire project could be handed to someone else and they would understand what needs to be done. That degree of certainty helps support a system in which employees are empowered and motivated.

These tools are particularly important in today's economy. Goldsmith often asks his audiences, "What will business be like in 2015? People say X, Y, and Z, and I ask, 'for any of these ideas, when would you have had to start planning to be successful with this?' The answer is 10 or 15 years a lot of times." His goal then with groups is to kickstart strategic, tactical thinking and help attendees build a roadmap toward future success.

Goldsmith typically speaks to business owners and upper- and mid-level management because, "There's no sense giving people on the front line the message if there's no understanding from management," he explains. He has spoken to groups as small as 12 and as large as thousands, but generally speaks to roughly 250 and audiences have run the gamut from interior design firms to health care specialists to the aerospace industry.

"In business we tend not to lose by a mile," he says. "It's win-by-a-nose, lose-by-a-nose. Take a look at your business and identify those core areas in which you're losing by a tiny fraction. Small tweaks create a real difference."

And as for change—which is hitting employees from all sides today—Goldsmith notes: "People love change. We often say that people don't love change, but they do—they want a vacation, a raise, new furniture—what we don't like is change that's unexpected or negative and most change in business is both." He says it's up to management to flip the scenario so that change is well reasoned, well explained, and has some sort of incentive for employees.

Originally published May 1, 2009

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