The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company

by Robert Iger

Tom and Dan were the perfect bosses in this regard. They would talk about valuing ability more than experience, and they believed in putting people in roles that required more of them than they knew they had in them. It wasn’t that experience wasn’t important, but they “bet on brains,” as they put it, and trusted that things would work out if they put talented people in positions where they could grow, even if they were in unfamiliar territory.

There’s nothing less confidence-inspiring than a person faking a knowledge they don’t possess.

Their focus on the small thing in the distance became a problem. They grew impatient with where they were. They didn’t tend enough to the responsibilities they did have, because they were longing so much for something else, and so their ambition became counterproductive.

The dynamics between a CEO and the next person in line for his or her job are often fraught, though. We all want to believe we’re irreplaceable. The trick is to be self-aware enough that you don’t cling to the notion that you are the only person who can do this job. At its essence, good leadership isn’t about being indispensable; it’s about helping others be prepared to possibly step into your shoes—giving them access to your own decision making, identifying the skills they need to develop and helping them improve, and, as I’ve had to do, sometimes being honest with them about why they’re not ready for the next step up.

There’s no rule book for how to manage this kind of challenge, but in general, you have to try to recognize that when the stakes of a project are very high, there’s not much to be gained from putting additional pressure on the people working on it. Projecting your anxiety onto your team is counterproductive. It’s subtle, but there’s a difference between communicating that you share their stress—that you’re in it with them—and communicating that you need them to deliver in order to alleviate your stress.

I knew the board would demand solutions, and, as a general rule, I don’t like to lay out problems without offering a plan for addressing them. (This is something I exhort my team to do, too—it’s okay to come to me with problems, but also offer possible solutions.)

At some point over the years, I referred to a concept I called “management by press release”—meaning that if I say something with great conviction to the outside world, it tends to resonate powerfully inside our company.