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June 3 - June 23, 2017
a path to extraordinary success founded on making other people successful.
The superboss playbook is not about being nice or empathetic. It’s about giving protégés the motivation, guidance, wisdom, creative license, and other elements they need to learn and grow.
Nurturers are what I’d call “activist bosses.” They are consistently present to guide and teach their protégées, and they actively engage with employees to help them reach great heights.
Superbosses all possess extreme confidence, even fearlessness, when it comes to furthering their agendas and ideas. They almost universally embrace the axiom that “there are no problems, only solutions.”
Another important attribute that all superbosses share is competitiveness. When we look at superbosses, we sense competitive blood running through their veins. They thrive on it, they seek it out, and they create it. Financier
A third, vitally important character trait shared by superbosses—and one central to their innovation—is their imaginative nature.
They think intensely about what could be and are fired up to turn their dreams into reality.
A fourth characteristic that superbosses universally manifest is integrity. I use the word not primarily to mean “honesty” in the colloquial sense, but rather strict adherence to a core vision or sense of self. Superbosses don’t play games like some leaders do; unlike Bossy Bosses, they’re not distracted by the need to satisfy their big egos.
A fifth and final attribute of superbosses, a natural extension of integrity, is authenticity. So many bosses cultivate an image for the benefit of their reports. They keep a tight lid on their personalities, saving their “true” selves for when they’re away from the office. Not superbosses. In their daily interactions with others, they let their personalities hang out.
The superboss’s quest for superstars will override everything else.
Superbosses don’t want recruits who are very talented and smart; they want recruits who are unusually talented and startlingly smart. They don’t want ordinary leaders; they want drivers of change.
Superbosses are not looking for employees who think the same way they do. They are looking for employees who, like them, can tackle problems originally and differently.
A third component of “getting it” is extreme flexibility. Although superbosses often hire people with special areas of expertise, they are not usually interested in specialists who can only do one thing. They want a kind of brilliance that can be applied to many sorts of problems.
“if you are going to hire someone, make sure they are great; otherwise don’t hire anybody.”12
Ellison had recruiters ask prospective candidates: “Are you the smartest person you know?” If they answered, “Yes,” they were likely to be given a further interview. If they answered, “No,” they were asked, “Who is?”
When people who are working for superbosses emerge as new stars, superbosses are almost always extremely pleased.
He let the position be defined by “what the player can do” instead of expecting the players to execute plays they were given.
Once you have unusually talented people, you’ve got to motivate them to excel. You have to get them to push as hard as they humanly can to achieve extraordinary results, both for the organization’s sake and to promote their own growth.
What’s the secret to such extreme motivation? Superbosses crack the whip as well as anyone, constantly raising their demands for performance.
if you are going to be in the service business, if you are going to have clients or investors, good is not good enough. . . . Perfect is good enough.”
Superbosses, by contrast, are performance mavens. They eat, breathe, and sleep high performance. There’s never a time when they’re not driving hard. As a result, it’s when they aren’t challenging you that you need to worry.
out, but those that remain respond to the constant and continually expanding pressure by developing an even deeper emotional bond with the superboss. That’s because even though superbosses keep the pressure up, they also inspire performance, emboldening employees to push themselves up. Superbosses “get” that individuals—even the most driven and talented—accomplish so much more when high expectations come with a message of possibility. They understand that people will work their hardest to become bigger, better, tougher, more resourceful, and more creative when they first see themselves as
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One important way superbosses inspire is by instilling self-confidence in their protégés. Again and again, protégés told me that the greatest strength of their superboss was to make staff members believe in themselves.
Regardless of your position in an organization, you’ve got to craft a vision to energize your team and spend lots of time effectively communicating it.
If your schedule is filled with meetings, how much time do you actually spend doing what superbosses do—asking opinions, affirming abilities, establishing employees’ status as members of an A team, alerting them to the underlying purpose behind shorter-term priorities and objectives, and so on?
Ask yourself these crazy questions: Why does your organization exist? Why does your team exist? Can you communicate it succinctly and in a way that really hits home? Can you connect it to specific items on your agenda for this year, this quarter, this month?
mission. In everything superbosses say and do around their protégés, they are authentic.
Superbosses are astoundingly successful because they willingly and eagerly change anything and everything, so long as it doesn’t contradict or dilute their inherently innovative vision.
And as we’ll see in chapter 6, superbosses likewise will not hesitate at times to get their hands dirty and immerse themselves in the details of daily work. They keep their vision current and vital by bringing it in touch with on-the-job realities.
superboss Norman Brinker “would challenge you. He would say: ‘What do you think you could do there? What is working? Go try something. . . .’ It was very empowering because it gave you a license to say, ‘We can do some things differently!’”
Brinker drove success by constantly adapting to shifting consumer trends. “Norman would always say to you that the trick is to be riding the wave.” Former Steak and Ale COO and Burger King CEO Lou Neeb explains, “Not in front of the wave to be crushed or in back of it, where you get left behind. The thing you always believed with Norman was that he understood the way the industry was and where it was going.”
“you’ve got to always be open to what’s new, what’s happening at the moment. You have to be able to absorb it if you’re going to continue to grow and communicate
The image of a shark always on the hunt is apt for every superboss I studied. They all had an inexhaustible drive to improve, in part a reflection of competitive pressures.
They teach protégés to take what exists and bravely go not one, not two, but many steps beyond. And they teach them to do this obsessively.
When they hire, they know they are giving an employee a chance to learn a craft at their feet. Staying in the trenches with protégés and serving as something akin to a player-coach, superbosses use this informal manner of instruction not only to convey knowledge but also to exert a powerful, almost parental influence on their protégés.
Superbosses often work side by side with protégés, coaching them in unmediated ways.
But to superbosses, sacrificing a bit of order is well worth it if, in the process, you obtain the innovation, creativity, and dynamism that accompany informal relationships.
To a superboss, the ultimate goal is never to be simply a manager to an employee. It’s to be a perceptive, responsive, authentic master to an apprentice.
If you’re a manager, you cannot and should not just toss out formal training programs. You can’t spend all of your time interacting one-on-one with people—keeping
Remaking processes and structures incrementally so they’re closer to those of superbosses can yield significant results. See if room exists to dial back formality or to spend more unstructured time with your people. The point is not to allow hierarchy and bureaucracy to dominate. Let structure influence how you organize workplace relationships, but don’t let it constrain them unduly.
Underlying superbosses’ constant opportunity spotting is an expansive view of what people can accomplish. Many bosses place arbitrary limits on the potential of their employees: you have to be a certain age or of a certain background before you can take on more responsibility.22 You’re typecast, relegated to a niche—despite your broader aspirations. Superbosses will have none of this. Their core belief is that the people they hire can and should do anything, and, further, that their protégés should continue to develop rapidly and in new directions throughout their careers.
Customized development of talent requires a lot more effort. As one former player noted of Bill Walsh, he “put in the extra work to figure out each of [his player’s] personalities and what drove each.”26 Customized development also requires fearlessness, a willingness to depart from the fixed “road map” and make an unorthodox decision that might just be perfect for this particular employee.
As a boss, you need to give subordinates real responsibility, and you can’t stand over them, second-guessing and editing. “When you hire an artist to do a job, you let him do the job,”
Superbosses are able to constantly and rapidly propel their protégés to new heights because they are the consummate delegators, relinquishing a degree of authority and oversight that would make many ordinary bosses cringe.
Superbosses don’t merely listen; they relentlessly ask employees their opinions as well. When facing decisions big and small, Ralph Lauren would ask even the receptionist’s and cleaning staff’s opinions. Robert Green, former fashion editor at Playboy, remembered that Lauren “would ask your opinion as though he couldn’t make a move without it.”
Some other bosses seem content to shrink into the background, sometimes more passive than anything else. Superbosses are neither of these. They can have enormous, larger-than-life personalities. They’re opinionated, zealous about their beliefs, aggressive, and competitive. They’re often type-A people who love to win. They’re the last people we would expect to step aside so that younger talent can claim the spotlight—yet that’s exactly what they do.
Unlike many other bosses, superbosses are so confident, they don’t need to constantly dominate others. This frees them up to enjoy other big personalities and to even take responsibility for helping younger colleagues rise up and become big personalities themselves.
Bill Walsh “used to say, ‘Part of your job as manager is to make sure that the people under you are successful.’”
Superbosses aren’t about to sit there spewing wisdom for their protégés to collect and marvel at passively; they expect their people to ask questions, seek out knowledge, try to get better, and actively jump toward the next stages of their careers.
superbosses expect protégés to fully step up, to confidently go after responsibility rather than wait for it to be dangled in front of them. Superbosses are 100 percent committed and always pushing forward—protégés have to be, too.
