Rich Old Men hate losing money. A fantastic idea.

Marshall Goldsmith recently spoke about how most of his coaching classes over the years have been a bunch of rich, old men. With a laugh, he said that there is a common misconception that rich, old men don’t mind losing small amounts of money. Funnily enough, rich old men HATE losing money. Any money, even small amounts. They just hate losing and Marshall says it is shocking how well this works around the world.

Marshall’s quick lesson in how to use small amounts of money to create large changes of behaviour in a leader.
Destructive comments. In HR we often talk about breaking down silos, creating a one-(insert your company here) approach to the business and about working harmoniously across divisions and functions in the organisation. But what happens to all that fluffy HR talk when we go and stab another employee in the back? Destructive, negative comments have no positive impact whatsoever so how can you break the bad habits of destructive comments?

Marshall said that it was something that he wanted to work on himself, so he said to his staff “if you ever hear me say a destructive comment about someone, I want you to come to me and I will pay you ten US dollars”.
He gave them a pep talk about how important it was because he didn’t want them to feel uneasy about asking for the money. Turns out the speech was unnecessary as they even went as far as tricking him into saying nasty things to get the money!

In the first hour he’d lost about $50 so he locked himself in the office and refused to speak to anyone. Steep learning curve hey?

He then asked us if we had made any unnecessary, negative comments about anyone in the last month. If we had, we were asked to put $1 on the floor (which was then donated to the Breast Cancer Foundation).

Surprisingly, Marshall said that he has raised over $450,000 for charity over the years playing these games with clients.
I think I’m going to place a jar on my desk at work and/or start a tally with my partner. It’s something I’d like to work on myself. I’d like to think that I’m not a huge gossip in the workplace because quite frankly I just don’t care enough, but I do like to vent when I am cranky. That’s where I have to learn to settle a bit and consider exactly what my destructive comments will achieve. Although I am fairly reliant on my eftpos card so I’ll probably have to write a lot of I.O.U’s lol.