Which Workplace Habits Do You Need to Break to Become More Successful?

Renowned leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith shares his insights on how successful people can achieve even greater accomplishments.

Higher levels of achievement are attained not only by learning and honing new behaviors or skills, but also by putting a stop to one or more of 21 annoying workplace habits! This excerpt from Marshall Goldsmith's new book, What Got You Here Won't Get You There, can help you identify the behaviors that may serve as a roadblock to higher achievements.

With successful people likely to focus on their successes rather than failures, there are four key beliefs regarding success that actually prevent us from changing our ways and achieving even greater success, as described below:

* Belief 1: I Have Succeeded-Successful people believe in their skills and talents.

* Belief 2: I Can Succeed-Successful people believe they have the capability within themselves to make desirable things happen. People who believe they can succeed see opportunities where others see threats. They're not afraid of uncertainty of ambiguity. They embrace it. They want to take greater risks and achieve greater returns. Given the choice, they will always bet on themselves.

* Belief 3: I Will Succeed-Successful people have an unflappable optimism. They not only believe that they can manufacture success, they believe it's practically their due.

* Believe 4: I Choose to Succeed-Successful people believe that they are doing what they choose to do because they choose to do it. They have a high need for self-determination. The more successful a person is, the more likely this is to be true.

These four success beliefs-that we have the skills, confidence, motivation, and the free choice to succeed-make us superstitious. Psychologically speaking, superstitious behavior comes from the mistaken belief that a specific activity that is followed by positive reinforcement is actually the cause of that positive reinforcement. The activity may be functional or not-that is, it may affect someone or something else, or it may be self-contained and pointless- but if something good happens after we do it, then we make a connection and seek to repeat the activity. Superstition is merely the confusion of correlation and causality. Any human, like any animal, tends to repeat behavior that is followed by positive reinforcement. The more we achieve, the more reinforcement we get.

One of the greatest mistakes of successful people is the assumption, "I behave this way, and I achieve results. Therefore, I must be achieving results because I behave this way." This belief is sometimes true but not across the board. That's where superstition kicks in. I'm talking about the difference between success that happens because of our behavior and the success that comes in spite of our behavior. Almost everyone I meet is successful because of doing a lot of things right, and almost everyone I meet is successful in spite of some behavior that defies common sense.

Identifying Your Most Annoying Interpersonal Issues

What we are dealing with here are challenges in interpersonal behavior, often leadership behavior. They are the egregious everyday annoyances that make your workplace substantially more noxious than it needs to be. They don't happen in a vacuum. They are transactional flaws performed by one person who is relating to other people. These 21 habits, described briefly below, stand in the way of great leaders reaching higher levels of accomplishment:

1. Winning too much: The need to win at all costs and in all situations-when it matters, when it doesn't, and when it's totally beside the point. Winning too much is easily the most common behavioral problem that I observe in successful people. There's a fine line between being competitive and over-competitive, between winning when it counts and when no one's counting-and successful people cross that line with alarming frequency. Winning too much is the number one challenge because it underlies nearly every other behavioral problem.

2. Adding too much value: The overwhelming desire to add our two cents to every discussion. It's common among leaders used to running the show. It is extremely difficult for successful people to listen to other people tell them something that they already know without communicating somehow that "we already knew that" and "we know a better way."

3. Passing judgment: The need to rate others and impose our standards on them. There's nothing wrong with offering an opinion in the normal give and take of business discussions. You want people to agree or disagree freely, but it's not appropriate to pass judgment when we specifically ask people to voice their opinions about us.

4. Making destructive comments: The needless sarcasm and cutting remarks that we think make us sound sharp and witty. They are different from comments that add too much value-because they add nothing but pain. We don't think we make destructive comments, but the people who know us disagree.

5. Starting with "no, " "but, " and "however": The overuse of these negative qualifiers, which secretly say to everyone, "I'm right. You're wrong. " When you start a sentence with "no," "but," "however," or any variation, no matter how friendly your tone or how many cute mollifying phrases you throw in to acknowledge the other person's feelings, the message to the other person is, "You are wrong." The general response from the other person is to dispute your position and fight back. From there, the conversation dissolves into a pointless war. You're no longer communicating. You're both trying to win.