Here is something most leadership programmes get wrong. The people who reach the top rarely fail for lack of intelligence, strategy, or drive. What holds them back is usually something much smaller and harder to spot: a few deep-seated habits that helped them get here and are now quietly working against them.
This is the idea Marshall Goldsmith has built his career on. He is one of the world’s most respected executive coaches, and over three decades with senior leaders, he has refined a behaviour change process that is almost stubbornly simple. You will find it in his book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. No personality tests, no digging around in someone’s childhood, just behaviour you can see and the colleagues who live with it.
So how does it work, and why do so many UK organisations rely on it? Let’s walk through it.
What is Marshall Goldsmith’s 7-step behaviour change process?
Marshall Goldsmith’s behaviour change process is a seven-step coaching framework that helps already successful leaders change specific interpersonal habits and make those changes stick. The seven steps are:
- Feedback: gather honest input on how your behaviour is perceived.
- Apologising: acknowledge past behaviour sincerely to the people affected.
- Advertising: tell colleagues which behaviour you are working to change.
- Listening: pause, think before you speak, and make people feel heard.
- Thanking: express gratitude to everyone who helps you improve.
- Following up: check in regularly to keep the change visible and measurable.
- Feedforward: ask for future-focused suggestions rather than dwelling on the past.
Why behaviour change is the real work of leadership development
Technical brilliance gets you promoted. It rarely makes you a great leader. Goldsmith’s argument is that the distance between good and great is almost never about competence. It is about behaviour. The same instincts that fuelled someone’s rise, needing to win, being right, and improving every idea on the table, tend to turn sour at the top.
That is why real leadership development is often less about learning something new and more about unlearning something old. Picture a senior leader who talks over people, forgets to say well done, or always needs the final word. No strategy, however clever, survives that for long. The catch is that these habits are far harder to drop than a new skill is to pick up, which is exactly why a structured process, and usually a good coach, makes the difference.
The 7 steps explained
1. Feedback
It all starts with honest feedback, because you cannot fix a habit you cannot see. Using structured 360-degree feedback, a leader collects candid input from their manager, their peers, and their direct reports. The aim is to find the blind spots, not to rake over old ground. This is where a lot of high achievers come unstuck, because years of praise tend to drown out the awkward truths. Doing it well means biting your tongue instead of defending yourself, and treating every comment as useful rather than a personal dig.
2. Apologising
Once you can see how your behaviour lands, the next move is a proper apology. It sounds small. It is not. Telling the people affected, “I am sorry, and I am going to work on this,” draws a line under the old behaviour and shows you mean it. Goldsmith notes that high achievers tend to hate apologising, because it feels like admitting weakness. In reality, it does the opposite, and people respect the confidence it takes.
3. Advertising
Change nobody notices may as well not have happened. So Goldsmith tells leaders to advertise, to say out loud which behaviour they are trying to change. You do not get to mark your own homework here; the people around you decide whether you have changed. Telling them what you are working on turns them into allies and adds healthy pressure to follow through.
4. Listening
Listening seems easy. It is one of the things leaders get wrong most often. Goldsmith treats it as an active skill: thinking before you speak, letting go of the need to win every exchange, and making the other person feel properly heard. A useful trick is to pause before you reply and ask whether what you are about to say is worth saying at all. Often it is not. Listen well and you show respect while picking up the information you need to improve.
5. Thanking
Gratitude is the thread that ties the whole thing together. Thanking people for their feedback, especially when it stings, keeps them on side and willing to speak up again. A simple “thank you” ends an uncomfortable conversation on the right note. Do it consistently and you build a culture where honesty feels safe, which is what behaviour change needs to take root.
6. Following up
Goldsmith calls this the secret to lasting change, and his research does not mince words: people do not improve without follow-up. Checking back in with colleagues regularly, often once a month, keeps the behaviour front of mind and shows you mean business. It turns a good intention into a habit, and that steady effort is what finally convinces people the change has stuck.
7. Feedforward
The last step swaps feedback for what Goldsmith calls feedforward. Rather than picking over past mistakes, you ask people for two concrete ideas for the future. It is easier to give and to hear, because it is about what you could do next, not what you got wrong. Ask, listen, act on a few, and you have built a loop of improvement that outlasts any coaching programme.
Why this is a coaching framework, not a quick fix
This is not a one-off workshop you sit through and forget. It is the backbone of what Goldsmith calls stakeholder-centred coaching, and it usually runs over twelve to eighteen months. Leaders pick one to three behaviours to focus on, not a whole personality transplant, and the people around them stay involved throughout to keep things honest.
For most senior people, this is hard to pull off alone. The behaviours are usually invisible to the person doing them, and old habits creep back the moment you stop paying attention. That is where professional leadership coaching earns its keep, giving you an honest sounding board, a regular rhythm of follow-up, and the safety to hear things you would brush off from anyone else.
Final thoughts
Goldsmith’s seven steps have lasted because they are practical, evidence-based, and refreshingly free of jargon. The model assumes you are already good at your job, then points your energy at the handful of behaviours that matter most to the people you work with. Feedback, apologising, advertising, listening, thanking, following up, feedforward: on paper, it is a simple loop. Used consistently, it can change the way you lead.
If you are weighing up leadership development for yourself or your organisation, these same principles can anchor a coaching programme built around your people. Done properly, behaviour change is not a nice-to-have extra. It is one of the most direct routes to better relationships, stronger teams, and more effective leadership.
FAQs
What is the 7-step leadership behaviour change process by Marshall Goldsmith?
It is a coaching framework for helping successful leaders change a handful of interpersonal habits and make them stick for good. The seven steps are feedback, apologising, advertising (telling colleagues what you are working on), listening, thanking, following up and feedforward. Taken in order, they move a leader from understanding how they come across to building new habits the people around them can see.
How does Marshall Goldsmith coaching help leaders change behaviour?
His method, called stakeholder-centred coaching, brings a leader’s colleagues into the process instead of treating change as something you do quietly on your own. The coach helps you gather honest feedback, settle on one to three behaviours to work on, and check in with those colleagues regularly. That keeps you accountable, keeps your progress out in the open, and keeps the focus on behaviour people can see rather than on your personality or your past.
How does the 7-step process help leaders improve performance?
Better behaviour tends to produce better results. When a leader listens more, gives credit where it is due and stops cutting their team off at the knees, trust and communication go up, and people start offering their best thinking. The follow-up step makes sure those gains are tracked and held onto rather than fading after a few weeks. Because the model goes after the behaviours that most affect the people around a leader, even small shifts can lift team engagement and performance noticeably.
How can leaders apply the 7-step behaviour change process in daily work?
Pick one behaviour that would make the biggest difference, then ask a few people you trust for honest feedback on it. Tell your team what you are working on so they know to watch for it. In meetings, hold back for a moment before you jump in, and let people finish their point. Say thank you for the input, even when it is hard to hear. Then check in once a month to ask how you are doing and to get a couple of suggestions for what to try next.
