In my 10 years as a board member of the Peter Drucker Foundation, one of the wisest things I heard him say was, “We spend a lot of time teaching leaders what to do. We don’t spend enough time teaching leaders what to stop. Half the leaders I have met don’t need to learn what to do. They need to learn what to stop.”

Drucker’s words have served as a potent source of inspiration for me in my work coaching C-level leaders at corporations around the world. Through my experience I have identified 20 common faults among leaders. Here I will focus on three of them:

1. Adding too much value. The overwhelming desire to add one’s two cents to every discussion is common among leaders used to running the show. They still retain remnants of the top-down management style where their job was to tell everyone what to do. It is extremely difficult for a successful person to listen to other people’s ideas without communicating (a) “I already knew that” and (b) “I know a better way.”

What’s the effect of this? Imagine you’re my CEO, and I’ve just come to you with an idea that you think is very good. Rather than say, “Great idea!” and stop there, you instead say, “Good idea, but it’d be better if you tried it this way.” You may have improved the content of my idea by 5 percent, but you’ve reduced my commitment to executing it by 50 percent because you’ve taken away my ownership of it. My idea is now your idea—and I walk out of your office less enthused about it than when I walked in.

The higher up you go in an organization, the more you need to make other people winners and not think so much about winning yourself. For bosses, this means closely monitoring how you hand out encouragement. If you find yourself saying, “Great idea” and then continuing with a “but” or “however,” try cutting your response off at “idea.” Even better, before you speak, take a breath and ask yourself if what you’re about to say is worth it.

2. Making destructive comments. Destructive comments are the cutting, sarcastic remarks we spew out daily, with or without intention, that serve no other purpose than to put people down, hurt them or assert ourselves as their superiors.

Press people to list the destructive comments they have made in the past 24 hours, and they will quite often come up blank. But the objects of their scorn remember. In the feedback I’ve collected, “avoids destructive comments” is one of the two items with the lowest correlation between how leaders see themselves and how others see them. In other words, leaders don’t think they make destructive comments, but the people who work with them strongly disagree.

Destructive comments are an easy habit to fall into, especially among people who habitually rely on candor as an effective management tool. Trouble is, candor can easily become a weapon. People permit themselves to issue destructive comments under the excuse that they are true.

Before speaking, ask yourself:

§          Will this comment help our customers?

§          Will this comment help our company?

§          Will this comment help the person I’m talking to?

§          Will this comment help the person I’m talking about?

If the answer is no, don’t say it.

3. Exalting our vices as virtues. Each of us has a collection of behaviors that we define as “me.” These are the chronic behaviors, both positive and negative, that we think of as our inalterable essence.

If we’re the type of person who’s chronically poor at returning phone calls, we mentally give ourselves a pass every time we fail to get back to callers. “Hey, that’s me. Deal with it.” If we are incorrigible procrastinators who habitually ruin other people’s timetables, we do so because we’re being true to “me.”

To change would be going against the deepest, truest part of our being. It would be inauthentic. This misguided loyalty to our true natures is one of the toughest obstacles to making positive long-term change in our behavior.

When you find yourself resisting change because you’re clinging to a false—or pointless—notion of yourself, remember that effective leadership, in the end, is not about you. It’s about what other people think of you.

Adapted with permission from What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful! by Marshall Goldsmith with Mark Reiter (Hyperion, 2007). Goldsmith is an executive coach who has worked with more than 80 CEOs in corporations around the world, and he is on the faculty of the executive education program at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business.

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