A Thinkers50 Ranked Thinker since 2021, Sanyin Siang received the Thinkers50 Coaching & Mentoring Award in 2019 and was inducted into Coaching Legends in 2023. More recently, she was awarded the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, joining an exclusive group of former US presidents, Nobel Laureates, and royalty.
In this captivating interview, Sanyin sits down with executive coaching icon Marshall Goldsmith (Thinkers50 Hall of Fame) to uncover the hidden dynamics of exceptional leadership. Sharing her breakthrough insights, she reveals the surprising truth about “leadership superpowers” – the unique talents that energise you but might actually be your biggest blind spots.
This candid exchange between two coaching masters also covers the critical importance of people development: The sign of great leadership, says Sanyin, isn’t just about your successes in the present; it’s about how well the team performs once you have stepped down.
WATCH THE FULL CONVERSATION WITH SANYIN SIANG AND MARSHALL GOLDSMITH:
Des Dearlove:
Hello, I’m Des Dearlove, co-founder of Thinkers50, and I’m delighted to be here today to introduce our Coaching Legends Series. In these sessions, we talk to exceptional coaches, individuals who have worked with top business leaders. Our aim is to bring you insights and learnings from their experiences in the C-suite that can help make you both a better leader and a better coach. Now, this is a collaboration between Thinkers50, 100 Coaches, and BetterUp. And today, we have a real treat for you, not one, but two Coaching Legends, and I’ll be introducing them in just a minute.
But for those of you who don’t know Thinkers50 so well, our mission is to be the world’s most reliable resource for identifying, ranking, and sharing the leading management ideas of our age, ideas that we believe can make a positive difference in the world. That mission dates all the way back to 2001 when we published the first-ever global ranking of management and business thinkers, and we’ve published a new ranking every two years ever since. In 2011, we introduced our Distinguished Achievement Awards and Gala, which the Financial Times calls “the Oscars of management thinking.” Shortly after that came the Thinkers50 Radar – a list of 30 exciting up-and-coming thinkers, which we publish every January – and the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame – which honours the careers of exceptional thinkers. In 2023, with our friends at 100 Coaches and BetterUp, we added our Coaching Legends list, which recognises and honours the lasting influence and contribution of exceptional coaches.
So what’s the red thread that connects all of our work at Thinkers50? Well, I like to think that Thinkers50 connects the most practical thinkers with the most thoughtful practitioners. So our mantra is, “Thinkers + Doers = Impact,” and that’s what this series is all about. Coaches play a vital role in developing leaders. As well as being originators of ideas, coaches are the honeybees of best practice, cross-pollinating the leadership world with the best ideas wherever they come from.
And bees don’t come any busier than our Coaching Legends co-host, Marshall Goldsmith. Recognised as corporate America’s most influential executive coach, Marshall has written three New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers, including one of my all-time favourite book titles, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. Now, after more than a decade in the Thinkers50 Ranking, in 2018, he was inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame.
Marshall, it’s great to see you.
Marshall Goldsmith:
It’s wonderful to see you. Always happy to be here. I always love working with Thinkers50. And again, thank you for the wonderful work you’re doing for the, number one, people like me, the thought leaders, but number two, leaders who you are really playing a key role in helping leaders develop. So thank you, number one.
Number two, I’m here to introduce one of the wonderful coaches of all time, my great friend Sanyin Siang. Sanyin is an amazing person. She is the first winner of the Marshall Goldsmith Award for the number one coach, most influential coach in the world, well deserved. She has a phenomenal track record of working with leaders, all different types of industries. She’s specialising on family business leaders, which is a hugely important area around the world where that is a large part of all business around the world: CEOs and future CEOs. She’s done tons of volunteer work, and she just won an award I’m so proud of, the Ellis Island Award.
Sanyin, can you just take just a second and tell us what the award is?
Sanyin Siang:
So the Ellis Island Medal of Honor is a award that is given out each year. Others that won it included eight US presidents, Nobel Laureates, and then there’s honorees this year. Fellow honorees include Queen Silvia of Sweden, Princess Reema of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, who’s the ambassador from Saudi Arabia to the US, Christiane Amanpour. And it’s to celebrate those who work for the betterment of society and who also embody, in our own personal stories, the immigrant story. And so I’m so proud of this award because being an immigrant, coming here at age seven, and from that point of view of building belonging and inclusion for so many people, is core to my perspectives.
Marshall Goldsmith:
You know, Sanyin, now number one, since now you’re on this award with royalty, princesses and queens, et cetera, now I want to verify you are still going to speak to me after getting the award. Is that correct?
Sanyin Siang:
Marshall, you are my number one honorary dad. See, your picture is up there on my wall next to Frances Hesselbein’s and Coach K’s. These are all the people I look at, so you are my family. I think of you as my family.
Marshall Goldsmith:
And you’re my honorary daughter, so I couldn’t be prouder of an honorary daughter.
Now, the world is changing. Question one, the world is changing, what kind of leaders do we need now?
Sanyin Siang:
All right, so let’s start with how is the world changing? The world has become far more complex. What that means is the type of problems that we have can’t just be broken down into 100 different parts, you solve each part, bring it together, problem solved. It’s complex, meaning all the parts connect with each other.
So when you think about that, say you are in the healthcare industry, you can’t just only look at what’s in the healthcare industry anymore. When you’re leading your organisation, you can’t just only look at what is happening in your organisation, but you have to think about it in terms of what’s a larger ecosystem? What are even non-adjacent type of industries that might impact your own industry?
So that is one way the world is changing, and another way is we have five generations of the workforce in the workforce, and every generation is different. So leadership, it’s calling on leaders to be a lot more tailored in their approach to build what I call range. So just being able to speak not only to someone who’s 20, but also to be able to resonate with someone who is 50, right? And on the complex part, what that means is, as a leader, if the things are happening in non-adjacent industries are also impacting your own, a lot of what I do with the leaders I work with is expand their mindset. Let me connect you with, say, this military general because what they’re looking at geopolitically, the way they think about things, or let me connect you with that sports champion of an athlete because the way they think and the way they connect, it’s bringing in outside perspectives, it’s bringing in language.
And by the way, when I work with a leader, I’m not just working with them; I’m working with the entire context of who’s around them and I’m looking at earnings calls and I’m looking at annual reports because that context is so key to success. It’s not only what you bring as an individual, but it’s also your contextual awareness and how are you going to manage that context and bridge that with what you’re trying to do to enable success?
Marshall Goldsmith:
I love that. Now, one thing that you’ve really been working on, which is exciting, is leadership superpowers, and you’re trying to help leaders go from being good leaders to great leaders. I love that. That’s my whole life, helping great people get better. And that’s really what you’re focused on, superpowers to make that leap from being a good leader to a great leader. What do you mean by that?
Sanyin Siang:
All right, so let’s back up a little bit, and I’m going to actually do something different. I’m not going to hold everyone in suspense, I’m just going to give everyone the punchline of superpowers.
So the punchline of superpowers is that we are the secret sauce. You’re like, “What does that mean? That’s not very novel.” But when we think about superpowers, the things that are either innate or we’ve done them so much that they are instinctual, it’s hard to copy superpowers, and every single person has at least one superpower, if not more, right? So it’s not easily imitable and superpowers, when we use them, give us a lot of energy.
What I’ve discovered is superpowers are often our greatest blind spots. Marshall, when I sit down with a leader and I’ve done the 360 report and I said, “Okay, let’s go over the things that you are extraordinary at and here’s the opportunities for improvement,” everyone, high-achievers, I notice, want to skip over that first part and say, “oh, let me jump to the opportunities for improvement.” And I say to them, “Wouldn’t you want to know what you should keep on doing, what you should double down on?” And when we dive into that part, they discover surprises. So it led me to realise that among our biggest blind spots are the things that make us extraordinary, and if that’s true, how do we unlock blind spots? We need help from others. So the way we discover our superpowers is by asking others to help us see, in that context, what are the superpowers that are being the differentiating contributors?
Now, when you think about that, superpowers then isn’t just about us. It’s about us in connection to others. Flip that around. As leaders, we also have a responsibility to help others see what makes them special. Great leaders, great leaders do this. They call out, “You are really extraordinary at this. It’s unusual.” And most people would say, “Wait, really?” “Yes. And here’s why and here’s how it’s contributing.” Because our superpowers are only effective in the context of other superpowers, in dynamism with other superpowers.
So now teams are the atomic unit of success in every organisation. If we take that to be true, how do we build the collective superpowers and how do we unlock “we” as a secret sauce? And part of that is helping every member of the team through conversations, through discussion, through positive feedback, understand what they should be doubling down on, what makes them extraordinary. And when it comes to energy, let’s face it, no one ever suffered from overappreciation, right?
Marshall Goldsmith:
That’s exactly right. And a couple of thoughts based on what you just said. One is one thing I love about what you have done over the past, and I’ve tried to do the same thing, is really get leaders from different backgrounds together. I just love what you said about getting leaders from different… And a lot of people have never thought of this, but getting leaders from the athletic team, the military, the nonprofit, the for-profit, getting them all in the same room to talk, which I’ve done over and over again, you’ve done over and over again. To me, it is such a positive thing because they’re not just learning about their own industry, they’re learning about the world, and they often get different perspectives.
Sanyin Siang:
And in addition to different perspectives, because at the Coach K Leadership and Ethics Center, which is also, that’s my… I co-founded it with Coach K, Doug Breeden, Sim Sitkin, Tejumade Ajasa. A big part of what we do, how we started, to build insights for what’s coming up next is to build, bring together curated curation and connection, because you know knowledge is ubiquitous, connection is what’s rare, so the curation of that for these leaders to be able to be vulnerable and share with each other what they’re thinking, not only is it broadening their perspectives, but it’s also giving them different language.
So for example, a coach or someone from the sports world might use a language of visual. You have to give them word pictures, word pictures. Well, that in the corporate world is how do you bring an abstract idea or make the idea and the why behind it so clear that it empowers people to act upon it? So it expands language, it expands our range, and then you realise, “I’m not alone.” When you’re vulnerable and you’re sharing and asking, listening, sharing, connecting, I think that’s one of the biggest pieces is we think the problems we’re trying to solve are only specific to us, but when you’re hearing others, you’re like, “Oh, I’m not alone and others are wrestling with this too. We can help each other,” and it gives us a hope and a pathway for solving it.
Marshall Goldsmith:
As an example of this, one of the people that you and I both met is Telly Leung. Telly, a Broadway star, was star of Aladdin, just a wonderful person. But I had him come in because at a children’s hospital, I was a volunteer working on how they can authentically communicate with empathy, and he gave a talk. It was just mind-blowing how good it was.
Well, nobody would’ve thought about an actor coming in telling a children’s hospital about the topic of empathy, but it was fantastic. And I think what you’re doing really is inspirational in that way of getting people from so many different places together. And I would think that is one of your superpowers, is this ability to connect people from all kinds of different places. I don’t know anyone in the world that does that better than you.
Sanyin Siang:
Oh, wow. Thank you for that. Thank you for that insight. One of the most special things we can do for others is help them see not only possibilities that they don’t yet realise, which you have done for me, but also telling them what’s special and about what they do. So thank you for that gift of feedback.
Marshall Goldsmith:
And one of the things that both of us focus on is getting people to ask for help. Now, as you know, historically, leaders have not done this, and Peter Drucker said, “The leader of the past knew how to tell. The leader of the future is going to know how to ask.” You and I are both really big on this, ask for help, listen, and learn. And advice is not a dirty word here. Learn from people, get suggestions, and don’t be so egotistical you don’t think you can learn. And one of the things we both believe in is feet forward. You don’t have to do everything people suggest, but you learn to listen and thank them.
Talk about some ways that you highlight asking in your coaching.
Sanyin Siang:
Ooh, so I want to connect this. Two of my demographics, one is, of course, the CEOs and the influential leaders. I love working with them because of the scale of impact that they have. The other population that as a, I’m going to put on my Duke University professor hat, as a faculty that I love working with is our undergraduate and MBA population and graduate population. So I am going to be teaching a course next fall, and it is… We have 15 weeks. So I say, “Okay, instead of just knowledge transfer, 15 weeks is enough time to form habits.”
Here are the three habits I want them to form. One is how to give help and ask for help. Two is reflective practice because in the moment, on a day-by-day basis, the progress is increments, so we feel like we’re failing all the time. But if we look back and we’re starting that, we realize, “Wow, we’ve actually made tremendous progress over a period of time.” The true progress is over a period of time. And then the third habit is having a sense of wonder, but it’s not only having a sense of wonder for nature or cherry blossoms, which are blooming outside, but it’s having a sense of wonder for each other, for people. Right?
And so when you look at all those three habits, there’s some virtues that come out of that. Generosity and vulnerability, that’s a giving and receiving help. Courage, it takes courage. Let’s just acknowledge that. It takes courage to say, “I don’t know, but I can figure it out together.”
So with leaders in the coaching, asking for help just starts with, “Let’s just practice. How do you get better at it? Let’s just start. So here’s some ideas. You are wrestling with how to… this new challenge. Here’s one thing that you do. You pull your team together and you share with them the reality of the situation. That’s a vulnerability. But you also give them a sense of hope by saying, ‘Among us, we have the smartest people in the world, the most experienced. You are on this team and we are a team. Let’s figure out how to solve that together.'” That’s a way of asking for help by helping each other see that they can ask for help from each other.
And then the third thing that that does, as you think out loud the problem and you’re taking your approaches and you’re seeking feedback on those approaches, you are giving your team an understanding of how you think. I would tell leaders, “Give them a trip inside your head because they are not mind readers. Give them a trip inside your head and you’re sharing out, ‘Here’s how I’m thinking, my decision points, here’s what I’m wrestling with.'” You’re also, guess what, developing those around you because they’re going to be apprentices learning from, “Oh, this is how you think. Oh, okay, that’s a priority to you,” or, “oh, you approach it this way. I didn’t think about it that way. Ooh, let me borrow that best practice from you.”
Marshall Goldsmith:
I love that.
I just, I love what you’re doing and I love the whole idea about asking, and as you say, not just asking the team, but getting input from those people like Telly or the Broadway star, the general, these are other very smart people, yet we can all learn and it’s fun.
Sanyin Siang:
It is fun!
Marshall Goldsmith:
It’s also cool. It’s cool to hang around such neat people and to learn from these people.
Now, Sanyin, as you know, I just had my birthday, age 76, and as you know, I’m no longer on the road traveling around, which of course is my wife’s greatest nightmare. So I’m no longer…
Sanyin Siang:
Oh my gosh.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Yeah, I’m no longer on the road traveling around all the time. And one of my missions is not to just do coaching by myself. I’m not doing that anymore. What I really want to do is work with other coaches, people, great people like you. Now, you and I have had the privilege of working together before. It’s always so much fun for me to work with you. Such an enjoyment.
Well, what advice do you have for coaches? Now, you mentioned some superpowers for leaders. What about for coaches of leaders? Because really, probably moving forward, for me, that’s going to be a large part of my life.
Sanyin Siang:
Well, one, I love when we team coach a leader. Not only is that leader getting more perspectives, more ideas because we have different experiences, we are also learning from each other. I have learned so much from working with you, and it is so much more fun because I’m watching how you work, you’re watching how I work, so we’re all expanding each other’s learning and growth.
I will start off sharing the mistake I made early on when coaching or mentoring, CEO mentoring or student mentoring, coaching. The mistake I made early on is I tried to prove how smart I was. I started because I go into a call and I think, “Oh, I have to demonstrate. I have to demonstrate how smart I am. I have to prove how smart I am, how much value I’m adding.” So started like, “Okay, this is what I know. This is what you can do.” And that does not work. That does not work.
So my advice to coaches is start with showing the person you’re working with, or trying to help, that it’s in service of them. How can you best be helpful? Well, how you can best be helpful is start by caring about them. They won’t care what you know until they know that you care. I learned that from General Bob Brown. So start by caring. What will you do when you’re trying to demonstrate care? Well, you will ask questions. Ask about what’s important to them. Ask them about their hopes, their dreams, their fears. And when you ask, here’s the second thing to do, then don’t answer. Stop. Listen.
Marshall Goldsmith:
I love that. And one thing that I’m working on right now is I was a volunteer coach for the head of the Mayo Clinic, Dr. Noseworthy, and I learned so much working at the Mayo Clinic. I mean, that is an amazing organisation. And what they do is they come in, they do an intake, then they actually have a team of doctors who work together, study what you need, and then work together to help you.
Now, this sounds like, “Well, that’s simple.” No, it’s simple, but it’s not easy. According to Dr. Noseworthy, over 1,000 hospitals have sent representatives to Mayo Clinic to copy their model with virtually no success. And you know why? Two words: ego and money. Ego and money.
In the Mayo Clinic, the way they compensate doctors is they’re not compensated for getting people out the door. They’re on a yearly pay grade so they just want to do what’s right. So the money issue, they figured out how to deal with that. And the hardest part for them is the ego issue because you can imagine these are very high-end medical doctors. The idea, “I’m working with a team and everyone doesn’t assume that I’m the best authority on this,” well, it can be a little hard to swallow.
What I’m working on right now, as you know, is I’m working on a whole new idea about coaching using the Mayo Clinic model, which of course you are invited to be, I think the first person to be invited to join me on this effort. And our whole idea is clients come in, we talk to them, but we don’t tell them what they need. We try to figure out what they need. And most coaching, unfortunately, is a hammer looking for a nail. “This is what I do, therefore this is supposed to be what you need.” Well, maybe not. Maybe what I do is not what you need.
So our goal then will be to really, a lot of this model is based on what I learned from you, a lot of this is really putting together an incredible team of people with varied backgrounds and being willing to go outside that team too to actually say, “What do you need? Let’s find some experts to help you.” What are some of your reflections on this idea?
Sanyin Siang:
Oh, gosh, there’s so many. So one, I love the idea of team of experts. So actually, that leads to another piece of advice for coaches growing their practice. You may not be the right fit for that person. So as you’re listening to whatever their goals are, don’t try to be an expert on something that they don’t need or don’t try to be an expert on something that you are not an expert at that they need. So I have said no. Know what to say yes to, know what to say no to. And when I say no, I will recommend others. Right?
Marshall Goldsmith:
Right.
Sanyin Siang:
I know we have networks, but great coaches also have other great friends who are great coaches. Recommend them. So this is an extension of that idea.
And then two, more heads are better than one. So when I’m working with a leader, and when I think about coaching, mentoring, I might be pulling from some, just introducing them to others, pulling them in. I’ve had, for example, when I worked with a… There was a leader I was working with who wanted to get more creative. And I said, “Well, guess what? Let me bring in for a session this friend of mine who is actually one of the leading experts on creativity,” and then I’m learning something as I’m engaged and watching them.
So I think if you’re really in service of the client, because client first, the client, I learned from you, the client is the one who does all the hard work, in service of a client and we believe in what they do, and we believe in helping them be the best leader they can be for their people and for themselves, this has to be part of the frame.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Well, I’m really looking forward to the new world of coaching because I think what it’s going to do is build upon what you’ve said. Rather than saying, “I am a coach. I do this, therefore you must need this. I’m going to sell it to you,” which has been, to be fair, that’s been 95% of all coaching, take it a totally different approach, like the Mayo Clinic, “What do you need? What do you need?” And then really putting together a team of experts. And one thing you’ve taught me is being willing to get help from the outside.
For example, as both of us know, you’re working in family businesses. Hey, sometimes what these people need are relationship issues. Maybe they need somebody who’s a specialist. Sometimes they just need to be happy. And for example, a family business, one of the big problems is let’s say the father or mother wants the kid to be in the business and they come home every night talking about how miserable they are, and you wonder why the kid doesn’t want to be in the business.
Sanyin Siang:
And sometimes it’s about connecting them with others who are doing certain aspects of that family business dynamics very well, and so that’s the other leaders I work with. If you’re serving your clients, serving your leaders well, connect them because they also learn from each other.
Marshall Goldsmith:
And one thing both of us learned from Alan Mulally is you don’t have to be the expert. I mean, our friend Alan has a great discipline. He was the CEO of Ford for those of you that don’t know him. The stock goes from $1.01 to $18.40, CEO of the year of the United States, 97% approval rating from every employee at a union company. Just an amazing man. But Alan had a great discipline that ties into everything you teach. Anytime somebody asked him for a suggestion, what he’d say, “Does anyone in the company know more about this than me? If the answer is yes, why don’t we talk to them? Why don’t we just talk to them?” It’s such a discipline.
Sanyin Siang:
So I want to bring that back to the idea of superpowers. What does it mean to unlock “we”? So what we tend to think about superpowers as the analytical superpowers, the things that we were great on throughout our entire school years. Or physical superpowers. For example, you can be a musician with great pitch. You can be an athlete with great… being able to make that basketball shot, or like Telly be able to have musical, amazing musical gifts.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Or like me, be incredibly handsome.
Sanyin Siang:
Oh, yes, exactly. I mean, physical superpowers.
The magic of where I’m diving into is we really don’t have words or we don’t yet value relational superpowers, relational and also virtue superpowers. So virtue superpowers are like vulnerability, curiosity. We are all born with it. We just have… They can all be accessible superpowers, courage, if we practice and also surround us with others who have those superpowers, right? That’s how we get better and have them become superpowers.
The relational superpowers are ones that if a team is the atomic unit of success, if we need each other, then they’re the ones, the type of superpowers, you come into a room, we all know those people, they come into a room and they up the joy capital. Hey, that’s valuable. That’s energy, right?
Marshall Goldsmith:
Right.
Sanyin Siang:
Other people… You shared “connector.” Thank you for that, saying, “Sanyin, you are the best connector I know.” Well, for a long time when I started this work, people had shared, “Oh, you’re a connector.” And I said, “No, I… What? I don’t want to be a connector. I want to be brilliant. I want to be smart.”
Or actually, you’ll laugh at this. We are partnering up with Leaders50, which is another aspect of Thinkers50. That’s the 50 most inspiring leaders. And on the Thinkers50 press release, they talk about the partners and they said, “Oh, yes. And Sanyin, who is effervescent,” and I remember seeing that and thinking, “Effervescent? I don’t want to be effervescent. I want to be known as brilliant.” We all do that, but we forget that the connection superpowers, the energy-upping superpowers, those are incredibly valuable today, and we just don’t yet have a language for them.
So what Alan, going back to that story about Alan, you don’t have to be the expert, you don’t have to be the analytical, your superpowers in that moment don’t have to be the analytical superpowers. It can be connective, the curatorial, the ability to make people vulnerable so they will be able to share ideas with you. You can’t discount that as a type of superpowers, as a type of expertise. That’s powerful.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Yeah, I love that. And also recognising you don’t have to be the best person at everything. And one of the things we both know is adding too much value. I mean, Alan is smart. If somebody asked him for a suggestion, he’s the CEO, he says, “Hey, have you thought of this?” they’re just going to salute the flag and go do it. That’s the worst possible outcome.
Sanyin Siang:
That’s right.
Marshall Goldsmith:
That is the worst outcome. Now, I’ve got a concern. Oh, that’s for you. I’ve got a concern. Are you ready?
Sanyin Siang:
Yes.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Now, when the legends of coaching started, who was the first legend picked? That was you. You, you, you. Now, on the good news and bad news, you’re pretty young. So what’s it mean to you to be a legend of coaching, and especially you’re also a young legend of coaching?
Sanyin Siang:
One, first of all, I’m so humbled. I know the field. I know the coaches in the field, and I look up to so many of them and have learned from so many of them, continue to learn from so many of them. So for me, being inducted into the Coaching Legends is, it’s humbling and it’s a tremendous honour.
And two, I see it as a indicator of feedback for me that what I’m doing is what I should be doing. I love enabling greatness in others. That’s my mission and purpose in life. And so coaching, mentoring, teaching, mothering, I’m a mom of three, that’s all about that mission of enabling greatness. And the award is a signal back to me, “Sanyin, you love this on and you’re good at it, keep on doing it.”
And then three, it’s a platform for me to be able to do more good, for me to now, being in Coaching Legends, all the Coaching Legends are no longer eligible for part of that coaching number one coaching, and I’m excited about that because that means I get to highlight others who are, because we’re all different, highlight others who are helping to make that impact of the world because we’re all in the same business of improving society by helping people become better, the best leaders that they can be.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Yeah. I mean, as just in the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame, which I like, I like it. I’m not in a contest. I’m not trying to compete with anybody else. I mean, you’re in the legends of coaching. You’re not going to get in the double legends of coaching.
Sanyin Siang:
Oh, and I’m also very proud to also be in… Yeah, I’m still in the Thinkers50 Ranking. That was also very special, but I love to highlight others.
Marshall Goldsmith:
And look at who the other coaches are in the Coaching Legends. I mean, the people that won the award, Nankhonde, just an amazing woman, Michael Bungay Stanier, just wonderful people. And I mean, for us, such an honour just to be able to sit in a room with all these other people who are in the legends of coaching, to learn from each other and then figure out, are there ways we can help those younger coaches?
Sanyin Siang:
Yes.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Now, I’m going to finish with two questions for you. One is, if you look at your job, I want one advice for the leaders of the future, and then two, but we’ll just take one at a time, what are your advice for the coaches of the future?
Sanyin Siang:
Actually, it’s the same advice. It’s based on something I’ve been thinking a lot about, which is succession. And you’ve also written a book about succession. It’s one of my favorite books of yours, actually. And the reason I’m thinking about that is we had, three years ago, one of the legendary leaders and sports coaching Coach K, Mike Krzyzewski, another one of my great mentors, he retired from coaching. And the successor as the Duke basketball coach is Jon Scheyer.
Jon is in his third year and he’s won the ACC championship, our Duke basketball team is ranked number one, and we are in March, as of this recording, we’re in March Madness. That is the most successful coach-to-coach succession. Coming after a legend and to be able to get the support from, they ask for help from each other to give help to each other, to have that level of trust and support, it’s like what we have as well.
The sign of great leadership isn’t just what you do in the moment and the successes that your team enacts right now when you’re present. It’s also how well is the team able to do when you step down or you retire. How well is the team able to do? And so that takes, talking about ego, most people want to say, “No, no, I want to show that the company is successful only because I’m here,” but if you really care about your people and the company, you want it to be successful perpetually, continually, and so you’re developing your successor. You have done that for me and so many others.
And so the advice I would give to coaches as they’re moving forward, and also leaders as they’re moving forward, develop others after you, be a people developer. And by the way, when we’re developing others, that’s when we grow too. And so I’ve been so lucky when I think about great mentors, I’ve been mentored by Frances Hesselbein, you, the greatest coach, executive coach ever, Coach K, another great coach, great leader, Marty Dempsey. I mean, these are… I feel responsibility to then take all that you have shared with me and my love song back to you all is to be able to share that with others behind me. Succession.
Marshall Goldsmith:
In closing, I just want to say thank you so much. I’m so proud of you. It is my honour to know you. I’m so proud of you. And back to your superpowers, one thing that you just stand out on is generosity. You’re not greedy. You’re not selfish. You’re sincerely focused on making the world a better place and helping other human beings. So it is my honour to be able to talk to you today. Thank you very much.
Sanyin Siang:
Thank you, Marshall.
Thinkers50 Limited
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Thinkers50 Limited
The Studio
Highfield Lane
Wargrave RG10 8PZ
United Kingdom
Thinkers50 Limited
The Studio
Highfield Lane
Wargrave RG10 8PZ
United Kingdom
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