Superbosses and You
One way to appreciate the immense impact superbosses have on employees and organizations is to experience their absence, or to watch someone close to you experience it. I had an opportunity to do the latter in 2014, while I was in the midst of writing this book. My daughter Erica had graduated from college about eighteen months earlier and had gotten a job at a midsize consulting firm in New York City. She was lucky; her first boss was a good one, intuitively exhibiting many of the superboss practices I’ve been talking about in this book. She took time to understand Erica and give her challenging assignments, and she went out of her way to create opportunities for Erica to interact with clients and the firm’s senior management. On many occasions, she taught Erica aspects of the business, and thanks to her open-door policy, Erica always felt free to approach her with informal questions as they arose. On those occasions when Erica took the initiative with an assignment and did more than had been required, this boss was genuinely pleased, leaving Erica with a feeling of satisfaction and a drive to do even more.
Under this boss, Erica learned a lot in a short time and she looked forward to working with her for years to come. But it was not to be. After Erica had been working at the firm for about a year, her boss unexpectedly left the company to pursue a bigger opportunity elsewhere. A new boss came in, a woman I’ll call Tracy. Tracy was much different from Erica’s former boss—she was actually a weak, even incompetent manager. She seemed to distrust Erica from the beginning, assuming that it was Erica’s fault whenever something went wrong. Tracy insisted that Erica write her a detailed email every morning containing an hour-by-hour plan of activities for the day, and she never seemed to be around to coach Erica or handle her questions. In addition, she dictated minute details about how Erica should work, showing little flexibility and offering no opportunities for Erica to demonstrate any personal initiative. When Erica asked to talk about her progress, Tracy would say, “Sure, let’s do that, of course,” but never followed through. Weeks went by, and there was no interaction between Tracy and Erica aside from those morning emails and the harsh directives.
Erica soon found herself hating her job. At first she couldn’t put her finger on it, but over time she realized she didn’t like her firm’s culture and, bottom line, she didn’t like Tracy. She was working twelve-hour days, but nothing Tracy said or did made the effort meaningful for her. She didn’t seem to be learning much, nor was she working toward any personal development goals. She came to see herself as unappreciated, downtrodden, pretty much clocking in and clocking out without anyone noticing. But like other bright millennials, Erica was not about to linger and work in a pointless job. Within a matter of months, she began to look for a new position, and found one at a boutique consulting firm. When the offer came in, she didn’t hesitate to say good-bye to Tracy. And she didn’t look back.
Watching Erica’s story play out, I couldn’t help but connect it with my work on superbosses. The difference between a superboss-style manager and a fairly inept traditional boss was stark, as were their impacts on Erica and the organization. The superboss-style boss had energized Erica, galvanizing her to work at her best and to grow. The traditional boss had undone all that, eroding any commitment Erica had. When Erica’s initial boss left, the organization experienced what we might call “good” churn due to employee growth and advancement; but when Erica herself left, that was definitely bad churn—the loss of a promising young employee who had become needlessly frustrated. I’ve remarked on the positive nature of churn and the willingness of superbosses to accept it, but Erica’s experience reinforces the notion that superboss-style bosses are actually quite effective at helping organizations retain more of their best talent. Over time, an organization filled with managers like Erica’s first boss will become flush with great talent, developing a reputation that attracts even more talent. An organization filled with managers like Tracy will find that the great people it hires constantly slip through its fingers.
Erica’s experience brought home to me how urgent it is for more managers to study and learn from superbosses, and also for more senior leaders to identify the superbosses in their organization, encourage them, and find ways to spread their practices. Although many organizations today boast talented and devoted bosses, organizations in which most bosses are superbosses are few and far between, if they exist at all. An up-and-coming employee like Erica can’t just jump onto a job-search board, look for open listings, and hope to find a superboss-rich organization to work for—it can be hard enough to find or come across a single, individual boss who is a superboss.
Imagine what it would be like if your company, division, unit, or department were populated from top to bottom by individual bosses who lived the superboss playbook. Think of how innovative the organization would be, how resilient, even dominant. Think of how much fun individual employees would have, how much more productive they’d become, how much more loyalty they would show even years after they’d left the fold. Think how much further and faster employees would progress. Applying superboss practices isn’t always easy, but if we actively disseminate them, we can give work the incredible meaning and vitality that it should have but all too frequently does not. Everyone has the potential to be a superboss. And every organization has the potential to become stocked from top to bottom with these extraordinary, talent-generating bosses.
Manage like a Superboss
Let’s suppose you’re a midlevel manager seeking to become a superboss. You’re already a good boss. You keep up to speed on “best practice,” and you take care to apply those practices on the job. Still, you want to become even better. How best to proceed? First, study the superboss playbook presented in this book. Learn from it. Challenge yourself to integrate it into your existing management practices. But don’t feel that you have to do everything at once. Pick two or three elements and try them out. You might experiment with a “superboss day” in which, for twenty-four hours, you adopt every part of the playbook. Or you could hold a “superboss meeting” or a “superboss business trip” during which you communicate and behave as superbosses would. See how it feels and see what works for you. And see if others around you notice a difference. I bet they will.
As you get started, it’s a good idea to pause and take an honest look at who you already are and how you currently operate as a boss. A great tool to try out is what I call the superboss quotient. Of course there’s no way to gauge with absolute precision whether you are a superboss, much less whether you’re an Iconoclast, Glorious Bastard, or Nurturer. But asking several carefully chosen questions, paying close attention to the answers, and even calculating a numerical quotient can help you assess your affinity for superboss practices as well as compare yourself with other bosses.
Here are ten sample questions (or bundles of questions) I’ve used, corresponding to the main elements in the superboss playbook. Feel free to adjust the language to fit your own style, but do your best to get at each of these critical issues. And, by the way, these questions are not just for seasoned managers; younger, first-time managers can dial into the same benchmarks:
1. Do you have a specific vision for your work that energizes you, and that you use to energize and inspire your team?
2. How often do people leave your team to accept a bigger offer elsewhere? What’s that like when it happens?
3. Do you push your reports to meet only the formal goals set for the team, or are there other goals that employees sometimes also strive to achieve?
4. How do you go about questioning your own assumptions about the business? How do you get your team to do the same about their own assumptions?
5. How do you balance the need to delegate responsibilities to team members with the need to provide hands-on coaching to them? How much time do you usually spend coaching employees?
6. When promoting employees, do you ever put them into challenging jobs where they potentially might fail? If so, how do you manage the potential risk? And what happens if they do fail?
7. How much affection or connection do members of your team feel with one another? Do people tend to spend time out of the office socializing? What is the balance of competition and collaboration on the team?
8. Do you continue to stay in touch with employees who have left to work elsewhere?
9. Have any former employees of yours gone on to have particularly noteworthy careers, either here or elsewhere? If so, how many? Any examples?
10. What is the culture like in your team with respect to how much energy you devote to nurturing or developing individuals versus getting the job done?
After you frame initial answers to these questions, go back and really think about how “superboss-like” your responses were. Rate your answers using a three-point scale: weak (one point); okay (two points); or strong (three points). As you determine your score, consider other relevant factors that bear on each question, but that the question itself did not directly elicit. Did you happen to think of a former employee who had gone on to great success elsewhere? In talking about vision, did you simply reference the organization’s overall vision, or did you also translate or personalize that vision as a motivational tool for your own purposes? How did you handle the delegation versus coaching question? Was it an either/or answer, or did you emphasize the importance of both? Be honest and go as deep as you can. Add up your points. It’s hard to be too precise, but there’s a big difference between a score of 25 or better (that’s a superboss!) and one that comes in closer to 10 (the “anti-superboss”).
Self-assessments are helpful, but I’m sure many people are reading this and saying, “Well, what about other points of view?” And that would be exactly right. It might take a little courage, to be sure, but it’s no different from any other 360-degree-type feedback many managers are already doing. Superbosses love feedback; you can model this behavior by soliciting multiple perspectives when assessing your superboss quotient, as well as those of your reports who also manage people. Keeping track of superboss quotients is particularly important for senior leaders who know they can’t win without building superior teams. Human-resources professionals should also deploy regular monitoring of superboss quotients to track talent in their organizations.
In evaluating yourself, it helps to reflect on the basic compact employees make when working for superbosses. Employees are asked to take a chance on the superboss, work incredibly hard, help the superboss hit it out of the park, and become part of his or her merry band of brothers and sisters. In return, the superboss implicitly pledges to give protégés the “keys to the kingdom,” conveying invaluable skills as well as social connections and reputational capital that will open doors to even bigger opportunities. The superboss also pledges to give employees a chance to make a difference—to be part of something bigger, something that matters. Are you really offering this kind of deal to your employees? You may be demanding extreme performance, but are you offering enough in return?
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that becoming a superboss is impossible. It’s not. Yes, we all have key performance indicators (KPIs) that govern our work lives, but if we spend time on the superboss playbook, our performance will improve. Yes, the superbosses profiled in this book are extraordinary people—forces of nature—but there’s no reason any of us can’t become at least a little bit more like them. Yes, there are many parts to the playbook, but there’s no reason you need to check off every part at once. Yes, the culture of our organizations often seems like a formidable force working against us, but you do still wield considerable influence over your own team—enough to make a real difference.
Put aside the excuses and instead focus on teasing out what fits your personal style and what works best in the context of your organization. Here are some ideas and action items that will get you started on making the superboss playbook happen for you. Pick the ones you like best and try them. As with many things in life, the most difficult step is usually the first one.
The most important task of all is to start to think like a superboss on a daily basis. It’s amazing what a simple change of mind-set can accomplish, and how it can show up in small ways. For instance, over the course of my time researching superbosses, I’ve found myself actually becoming more innovative. I’m always thinking of new ways of solving a problem in ways I wasn’t before, and in meetings I’m always asking people to give me their craziest idea. I now regularly ask administrative colleagues whom they’re developing on their teams who can take over their responsibilities when they’re ready to take on a new challenge themselves. When I work with research assistants—and there have been many involved in my research for this book—I spend time ensuring that they understand my vision for the book and feel they are making a difference in how that vision comes to life. I’ve also noticed that I’ve become more alert to the importance of inspiring others. When I teach our very demanding first-year course on strategy and leadership to MBA students, not only do I pile the work on but I also tell them they’re “chosen people,” fully qualified to be in the game, to be great leaders. It might seem logical that a professor would look to energize students, but I had never quite done it the same way before. Yes, I had always maintained high expectations, but I never accompanied those expectations with explicit inspiration, as superbosses do. Now, thanks to my exposure to superbosses, I have become just a little bit more effective in my ability to boost others’ development.
Open yourself up to internalizing superboss wisdom. In a business context, whereas ordinarily you might have delegated a small task to a team member and left her entirely alone, you might find yourself gradually stepping a little closer to coach in real time. You might find yourself keeping an eye out for new opportunities that your highest-performing employees might tackle. You might find yourself taking more time to get to know your reports informally or foster collegial relationships between reports. You might find yourself welcoming new thinking and experimentation, and being more forgiving if employees’ great new ideas don’t exactly work out. You might find yourself articulating your powerful vision for the business more clearly. Whatever the case, just a small shift can produce noticeable results in how employees view you, themselves, and their jobs. Becoming a superboss is a marathon, not a sprint. And a little bit of superboss really does go a long way.
Finding Superbosses in Your Midst
What if you’re a senior leader seeking to populate an entire organization with superbosses? The first thing you’ll want to do is figure out how many leaders on your roster already practice parts of the superboss playbook, and determine exactly who these leaders are. That way, you’ll be in a position to begin to learn from these superboss types, reward them, and celebrate them.
To get a handle on your current stock of superbosses, you might once again deploy the superboss quotient questionnaire, interviewing managers to probe for superboss practices, or if you lead a large organization, having your HR department perform the interviews. You might wish to go further than the questions I presented earlier. After all, if you’re hunting for superbosses, you’ve got to have the right ammunition to bag one. Here are some others to think about posing:
1. Have you answered the “why do we exist” question for your team? Could all of your team members share this answer with me right now?
2. Do you have people on your team who have followed nontraditional paths to their jobs, or do you find yourself attracted to cookie-cutter backgrounds?
3. Are people on your team energized to come to work in the morning? How would you even know?
4. Do you have deep knowledge of the projects each of your subordinates is working on this month? Are you thinking about how you can effectively delegate to team members at the same time as you’re actively coaching them?
5. What percentage of your time do you spend in formal meetings or working alone in your office? How does that compare to the percentage of time spent in the trenches, working with team members informally?
6. How often do people leave your team to take a job in another part of your company or in another company? Are they leaving for “good” reasons (i.e., they’re ready to move on to bigger responsibilities) or “bad” reasons (i.e., they’re just not that good or they’re plagued with an inept boss)?
7. Do you get angry or feel wounded when your people leave?
8. How often do potential employees reach out to you directly to see if you’re hiring?
9. Are you inspiring people to believe that they can achieve great things?
10. Are you removing the bureaucratic barriers and hierarchy that get in the way of meaningful interaction and getting the job done?
11. How often do you actively teach people how to do something, as opposed to just telling people what to do?
12. Are you doing all you can to continue helping former employees in their careers? Are you capitalizing on the power of your network, or have you let it become a nonentity?
As before, put a little meat on the bones and score managers to gauge how they’re doing. Have them focus on their weak areas, and then create a plan to fill in the gaps. Check back in with this test after six months, a year, or two years. Have their superboss quotients improved? Do certain areas remain better or worse than others? It’s great if you administer this assessment to many different managers. How do their superboss quotients compare, and how well do certain departments collectively do relative to others? If one manager’s or department’s score is much lower, why is that, and what should they—or you—do about it? Better for you to find out how your people rank on the superboss quotient than to blindly think everyone is a top-notch boss when they might not be.
When you’re assessing the superboss quotient of bosses in your organization, don’t fall into the trap of assuming you’re looking for a male superboss, not a female one. The number of female superbosses is on the rise, and it should continue to soar as more women gain power in organizations. You can already find important female superbosses in many fields (in politics, for instance, former Texas governor Ann Richards1 may well have rivaled Hillary Clinton as a godmother). A business leader like Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg has already mentored all-star executives at both Google and Facebook, such as Emily White (who went on from Google and Facebook to become COO at Snapchat), among others. Even Lady Gaga has spoken of her desire “to be the ‘grandmother of pop music,’ bringing up new bands, nurturing their talents, watching them grow.”2
Even if bosses you evaluate seem to practice some parts of the playbook, be sure to ask questions of younger colleagues for confirmation. Who in the company has a reputation for putting employees on the fast track? Does anybody? Many companies list job openings. Ever notice that the manager leading one team barely has an opening before it’s filled, while the manager of another can’t seem to find anyone?
As a leader, make it your business to pay attention. Ask questions. Look for opportunities across the broader ecosystem of the company to converse informally with bosses down the hierarchy. Take your time in performing due diligence; you’ll be far more likely to uncover superboss types who operate in plain sight as middle and upper managers. And start your investigations early—in fact, almost immediately upon joining a new company, division, office, or team. Even if your bosses generally manifest strong superboss tendencies at the outset, you might find that opportunities exist for them to do even more, or to spread their practices even further. Every quarter that goes by with specific superboss practices lacking is a quarter in which the organization and its people failed to deliver on their innate potential.
A Superboss Culture
Once you’ve taken stock of superbosses, there are a number of things you can do to spread their influence throughout the organization, encouraging more managers to embrace what they do. One way to proceed is by taking a single department, function, region, or product division and teaching the entire playbook to managers. Alternatively, you can start with one part of the playbook and roll it out across the entire organization. If you choose the latter, the question then becomes which part of the playbook to pick. For many organizations, it might seem easiest or most straightforward to focus first on changing how you spot and hire talent. However, you might want to start instead by having leaders craft a vision. Asking “Why do we exist as a company or organization?” seems obvious, yet many leaders just gloss over the question. Drilling down to the teams that managers have responsibility over is just as important. Are your team leaders inspiring all those people your organization spent so much time hiring? Taking it seriously and spending time on it are powerful ways to begin bringing the superboss’s magic into your own organization. Your goal is to energize people to pursue subsequent parts of the playbook while also facilitating execution (it’s a lot easier hiring and motivating unusual talent, for instance, when you’ve already gotten behind a clear, compelling vision).
Whichever path you wind up taking, make sure to point to the superbosses in your midst as positive role models. Identify them and publicize their methods, much as I did with superbosses in this book. Celebrate their accomplishments openly in your corporate communications. Give them a platform (e.g., webinars, articles, teaching opportunities) to communicate internally, so that other managers can understand what they do. And grant them wide latitude to impact others, remembering that impact is ultimately what superbosses at any level care about most.
In addition, you might wish to make the organization more superboss friendly by creating processes, structures, or cultural norms that in some way embody superboss practices. Early in its history, PayPal was known as a prolific spawner of talent. When studying the company’s secrets of success, I noted, among other things, a number of formal and informal policies in place at the company that were designed to erode hierarchy and formality, in turn enabling apprenticeship-style interactions to take place. Everyone at PayPal was encouraged to challenge executives. As VP of Engineering Jeremy Stoppelman3 remarked, “I was a 22-year-old whippersnapper, and I remember firing off this e-mail that disagreed with the entire executive staff. I didn’t get fired—I got a pat on the back.”4 Former PayPal COO David Sacks5 also implemented a no-unnecessary-meetings policy. He would just walk into a meeting for a few minutes, decide whether anything useful was going on, and if not, end it on the spot.6
The top-tier consulting firm McKinsey provides a classic illustration of how an organization can systematize parts of the playbook related to the building of alumni networks. Outgoing people stay on the company payroll for up to three months on full salary and with only light office duties, while they search for a job. One of the big assets McKinsey provides is access to their alums as part of this process. Partners and other colleagues will also often connect departing employees to helpful contacts in their networks. “The amount of love and partnership you get when you say you’re leaving is unbelievable,” one McKinsey veteran told me. “I got more calls when I said I was leaving the firm than when I got elected partner.”7 McKinsey alums also enjoy support from McKinsey staff and communication resources dedicated to alumni management, which comprises “a large infrastructure to make sure they have the best careers going forward. Everyone who walks out the door could be hiring the firm in the future.”8 Smart, isn’t it?
You can go even further by integrating the superboss playbook into any leadership or competency models or frameworks that are already in use. Start to measure how many employees of specific bosses are promoted to bigger jobs, inside or outside the company. Make sure your KPIs are facilitating implementation of the playbook, not getting in the way. Emphasizing people development in your KPIs sends a strong signal to the entire company, and it reduces the odds that you will inadvertently drive away any existing superbosses and would-be superbosses. The bottom line is that if you don’t create metrics that measure and reward the playbook, you’re going to have a hard time incorporating it into your culture.
Policies, systems, and structures are of course no substitute for creating an influential phalanx of individual superboss-type bosses. So be sure to concentrate on finding ways to nourish superboss-like behavior among managers. And don’t forget to take steps to discourage bosses from behaving in decidedly un-superboss-like ways. Many companies will tolerate egotistical bosses who run roughshod over their people simply because they are high performers who drive business results. What these companies don’t fully account for is the collateral damage that occurs when good people exit the organization because of their interaction with such bosses. In effect, a talent vacuum is created as the alleged “high performer” gets promoted; the traditional boss’s former team then stumbles and reverts to poorer performance, erasing all gains—a pattern that continues every time the “high performer” moves up. More broadly, bad bosses erode an organization’s talent brand, making it difficult to attract the best people, and preventing the organization from getting the best out of people who do come onboard. It takes guts for senior leadership to remove bad bosses who hit their numbers, but it almost always pays off over the long term; the company can now better groom its next generation of leaders for success, building that success not solely on a single superstar who hogs the spotlight.
Whenever you celebrate individual superbosses and promote their practices, make sure your expectations are realistic. The superboss playbook takes time to implement, and any changes need to be authentic. You can’t just ask a manager to embrace a vision for her team, department, or division; she has to really believe in it and be willing to align her people around it. You also have to give managers the resources they need to attract the best, most creative people they can find, and give them sufficient room to properly manage them once they’re onboard. Beyond that, you need room inside your organization for your people to grow. Superbosses create fast tracks for their protégés, and unless the larger organization can absorb that advancing talent, your managers will lose their all-stars too quickly. Growth solves a lot of problems, including this one. But superboss-driven talent machines will also generate big-time growth, creating a win-win virtuous circle. Superbosses produce great talent, and great talent produces winning, even dominant, business.
In disseminating superbosses and their practices, don’t disregard line employees. Since many of them will have worked for traditional bosses, they’re going to need to adjust as more superbosses and superboss practices permeate the organization. What should they do to succeed under a superboss? Here are some basics that I would impart to them:
Employees who’ve served in the military might find these steps even easier and more natural than the average person. In my teaching of graduate students, I’ve found that veterans invariably connect with the idea of superbosses. It makes sense, since many elements of the playbook also come up big in military contexts. Like protégés of superbosses, military personnel work extremely hard in high-pressure situations. They form deep bonds with colleagues, if not necessarily with every commander they’ve worked for. They are given incredible responsibility at a young age, in some cases commanding dozens of battlefield troops before the age of twenty-five. Further, making the cut in elite military units like the Navy SEALs comes down to adaptability, open-mindedness, and creativity—classic superboss attributes. Ask employees who have military backgrounds to think about how some of the practices they’ve adopted in the service might carry over to serving under a superboss. Of course, that’s not to say they’re the only employees who can succeed or intuitively understand a superboss system. The steps I’ve outlined above will give any team member a running start to fast-tracking his or her career and helping the whole organization function better.
One final word of wisdom to leave with employees: they should pay attention to how quickly they’re moving up, and to how much attention they’re getting from their superboss. Traditional bosses will either give you formal feedback or fire you when you’re not doing well. Superbosses are all about giving feedback anywhere and everywhere, and if employees don’t get it, they’ve got a problem. This is one of those situations where no news isn’t good news.
The Making of a Superstar
In 1984, a nervous young theater actor arrived in Chicago. He had attended college in Virginia, studying philosophy, before transferring to Northwestern University in Chicago because he felt it would benefit his career. Now in need of money, he started working at the box office for Second City, one of the nation’s most respected comedy theaters. He enrolled in Second City’s comedy classes, which were free for employees. He wound up auditioning and getting selected to join the Second City touring company. He toured with them for two years before being promoted to the company’s main stage in Chicago.9
From Chicago, our young comedian moved to New York City, where he collaborated on a number of projects with Second City alumni. A series of gigs followed: working as a freelance writer for Saturday Night Live; providing the voice for a cartoon character on the short-lived sketch-comedy series The Dana Carvey Show; working as a script consultant; and filming a few funny segments for Good Morning America.10 By this point, a couple of years had passed without much financial or professional success. Considering the cost of living in New York City, it would have been understandable if this comedian left town, giving up his dream in order to find a “real” job. As it turned out, he didn’t leave town, and he did find a real job. On Comedy Central, as an early correspondent on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. And that’s where he stayed until 2005, when he set out with his own show spoofing Fox’s The O’Reilly Factor.11 More recently, he has appeared most nights on CBS as heir to one of late-night comedy’s great franchises. This comedian (you may have guessed) is Stephen Colbert, creator and host of The Colbert Report, host of Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and one of the greatest comedic talents of his generation.
In our culture, we tend to think of talent—and certainly all-star talent—as something mysterious and inaccessible. We point to unusually successful or inventive individuals and assume that these people are just “different” from the rest of us. They’re born with it (whatever “it” is). They’re “geniuses.” Their success is inevitable, magical. It is beyond our comprehension. It is even, depending on your beliefs, a gift from the divine.
While such genius no doubt exists, a lot more goes into an all-star career than that. People like Stephen Colbert aren’t just born; they’re also made. And the secret to success turns out to be something any of us has the potential to access. It’s that combination of personal talent, drive, and dedication, coupled with the support, inspiration, guidance, knowledge, wisdom, and professional networks of superbosses—or in Colbert’s case, of a superboss-like organization.
Whether it’s hedge-fund billionaire Chase Coleman, the legions of jazz greats who worked with and studied under Miles Davis, the food industry CEOs and presidents who came up under Michael Miles, or any of the other hundreds, if not thousands, of protégés whose stories we’ve examined, top performers in almost every field have achieved greatness thanks to their contact with a boss who had an unusual knack for helping others grow. Under their superboss’s tutelage, protégés have worked their absolute hardest to get better at what they do. They’ve moved up quick. They’ve attained or even exceeded their greatest professional dreams. And they’ve achieved the power, as all of us can, to serve as potential superbosses themselves for the next generation.
The essence of the superboss phenomenon is the transfer of knowledge, wisdom, and success from old to young—and not just know-how, but also a way of thinking, even a way of life. At its core is a deep and abiding respect that protégés have for superbosses, an admiration that helps bind together and sustain the superboss’s powerful alumni network. Superbosses function as godparents—and protégés appreciate this and feel grateful for it. To me, nothing communicates all of this better than an old, ragged poster I’ve had hanging in my office for years, long before I entered the world of superbosses. Hockey legend Gordie Howe and the younger hockey great Wayne Gretzky are sitting together on a bench, talking. Howe looks to be in his fifties or sixties, while Gretzky is perhaps in his late twenties or early thirties. The two have just worked out and are dressed in sweaty gym clothes, skates, and protective gear. Howe, probably on the way to the shower, has a white towel slung around his neck. This is how it happens: an old master taking the time to bring a younger colleague—even an especially talented one—along with the knowledge that one day, that younger colleague may well surpass him.
Superbosses serve as models for how any of us can better lead, inspire, and nurture others. And they yield a framework for making today’s organizations—which are for the most part grossly imperfect—at least a little bit better. Superbosses prove that we don’t have to settle for mediocrity in our careers or in the teams and companies we lead. We can find workplaces that don’t push us down or smother our own spark of genius. And if we’re in leadership positions already, we can help create workplaces like that, too. Our organizations will be more innovative, more sustainable, more influential, and, frankly, more fun—not to mention much more successful. The key to organizational vitality is, after all, the ability to constantly regenerate talent. Superbosses help solve the most fundamental challenge all organizations face: how to survive and thrive, year after year.
Bringing superboss wisdom into our careers and organizations takes effort and a dose of open-mindedness. Much of what superbosses do is counterintuitive, so all of us who are not currently superbosses, but who want to be, will have to learn to behave differently. Those of us looking to work for superbosses will also have to be more proactive in searching them out, and once we find them, we have to be willing to inject everything we’ve got to make it work—we have to go “all in.” Are you up for the challenge?
Crafting Your Legacy
On May 16, 2007, I helped lead a daylong strategy retreat at the global beer, wine, and spirits powerhouse Constellation Brands, owner of dozens of brands from Robert Mondavi wine to Svedka vodka. The event was held at Robert Mondavi’s ranch in California, and sixty to seventy of the company’s top executives had flown in from around the world for the occasion. It was a long day, full of heated discussion about the company’s future. The executives in the room cared about the company and had taken off the gloves as they critiqued one another’s ideas and presented ideas of their own.
At the end of the day, we all attended a barbecue dinner at the ranch, and I was seated across from Mr. Mondavi and his wife, Margrit. Mr. Mondavi, who died one year after I met him, is widely remembered as a pioneer in the wine industry, the man who helped produce the flowering of the U.S. wine industry. He is also remembered as one of the greatest talent spawners in the industry. The Robert Mondavi Winery became known as “Mondavi University” because it produced the country’s best winemakers, including those whose wines won the legendary “Judgment of Paris” tasting in 1976, signaling the arrival of California wines on the international scene.12
By 2007, as he sat at our table, Mondavi was already in physical decline. He sat in a wheelchair; he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, speak; and his wife helped him with his meal. He was still handsome, though, and dressed neatly in a well-tailored suit. As I made small talk with a few other tablemates, I saw an unforgettable sparkle in his eye. He seemed to be paying attention to our conversation.
About halfway through the dinner, people from other tables started coming up to greet Mr. Mondavi. Many of these hard-boiled executives were former Mondavi protégés, while others hadn’t directly worked for him but had still been strongly influenced by him. At first, they came up one or two at a time. Then a whisper went around the room and more people got up, standing in line for their turn to speak to him. They knelt down and touched him on the arm, a gesture of reverence and love. “Thank you so much, Mr. Mondavi, for everything you’ve done for me and for the wine business. It’s an honor and a privilege to be here with you.”
I was taken aback. None of this was planned. It was organic and authentic. Here was a man who had touched many people, and so many years later, they were still immensely grateful. Robert Mondavi hadn’t just made wines. He had made people. He had crafted careers. And now, in his old age, he had something to show for it. He had a legacy. He was, simply put, someone who mattered.
My thoughts drifted to myself. What am I accomplishing in my own career? When I’m in a wheelchair, will anyone line up to greet me?
Every single one of us has the chance to impact the world for the better. We all spend an incredible amount of time in organizations. Not just at work, but also in social and voluntary organizations, in schools, in religious institutions. What is that actually like? Do these organizations really work well? Is the immense potential of the people who dedicate their lives to the creation and ongoing operation of these organizations being met, let alone surpassed? And what are we doing about it?
Superbosses have cracked the code on how to make organizations work better by designing a playbook that helps people accomplish more than they ever thought possible in their careers, or their lives. By studying the superbosses and what they do, we now know how genuinely unusual talent comes to populate an organization. We know how to motivate and inspire people, how to energize people, and how to give people the confidence to believe they can make things happen. We know how to unleash the creative potential of people at work—or in any organization—and understand the great things that happen when you do so. We know how to create an organization that is built to change. We know how to craft a different type of relationship between bosses and employees, one that is built on apprenticeship, opportunity spotting, and learning. We know how to fashion teams that are like bands of brothers and sisters, and not just transactional work units. And we know what it takes to become a talent magnet whose network of protégés continues to create social and economic value long after they’ve moved on to new challenges.
In the end, studying these superbosses gives us a master class in how each of us can make an impact in what we do. Superbosses show us a markedly different and innovative path, one that unites the success of an organization with the people charged with accomplishing that success. From Alice Waters to Gene Roberts, Ralph Lauren to Jay Chiat, superbosses I examined have all thrived by helping those around them get better at what they do. And they have obtained immense satisfaction not just from the companies they’ve built, the awards they’ve won, or even the wealth they’ve amassed, but from building a legacy.
Robert Mondavi was certainly deeply satisfied that evening. I knew this not because of anything he said. In fact, as his protégés came up to see him, he never uttered a single word. But his eyes, redolent with wisdom and experience—they sparkled the entire time.