Motivating Exceptional People to Do the Impossible
If you had walked into the Bloomingdale’s on the corner of Fifty-Ninth and Lexington in New York City during the early 1970s and proceeded past racks of suits, slacks, and ties to the center of the men’s store, you might have noticed an attractive man in his early thirties inspecting displays of clothing. Another man might have been dutifully assisting him, rearranging shirts on a shelf, moving a display of ties from one place to the next. At this time, menswear was usually sold according to classification, with individual departments for ties, shirts, and suits. That’s how JCPenney did it. That’s how Filene’s did it. That’s how every local department store did it. And that’s how Bloomingdale’s did it—until now.
This area of Bloomingdale’s was visually set off from the rest of the men’s section, like an individual boutique inside the larger department store. It brought together a whole line of clothing items and was designated for one brand: Polo Ralph Lauren. Featured prominently was a new product: a casual sporting shirt similar to the old Lacoste shirts people used to wear, the ones with the crocodile insignia. This new shirt was of a higher quality than those Lacoste shirts. It sported a tiny polo player instead of a crocodile and came in twenty-four dazzling colors. The polo player and the quality of the material marked this shirt as “high end.” In fact, the entire boutique embodied what many lower – and middle-class Americans aspired to: wealth and distinction.
The young, good-looking guy checking his wares was none other than Ralph Lauren. Since the early 1970s, he’s become a fashion icon and billionaire several times over. Before Lauren, designers made either formal wear or sportswear; Lauren combined the two into a cohesive collection that reflected a new, aspirational American lifestyle. He believed that his customers (like him) wanted different outfits for work, home, and travel, so he brought them together for the first time. He created a mythical world of class and prestige that middle-class customers could buy into simply by wearing the proper clothing—his clothing. A writer for the New York Times once proclaimed Lauren “the ultimate producer of a completely packaged, perfect life.”1 But it may have been designer Joseph Abboud who best captured Lauren’s contribution not only to fashion but to American culture: “No one has done a greater job of inventing the myth of Ralph Lauren than Ralph Lauren.”2
Who was that man assisting Lauren at Bloomingdale’s back in the early 1970s? It wasn’t Abboud or fellow designers Vera Wang, Jeffrey Banks, or John Varvatos, although all of them worked for Lauren at some point. It was a young designer and merchandising specialist named Sal Cesarani. Cesarani would go on to win multiple awards for his own designs, have New York Times articles written about him, and become known to some as “New York’s Dean of Good Taste.”3 Between 1970 and 1972, though, he served as Lauren’s right-hand design assistant, involved in “literally all aspects” of the design process—from fabric selection to showroom display to sketching Lauren’s design ideas.4 It was an exciting job, a wonderful learning experience—and indescribably intense.
As Cesarani remembers, he and Lauren would work late into the night and walk home together, discussing designs. Lauren was “always so soft spoken” yet managed to exert an incredible amount of pressure to perform—he was “demanding but in a non-demanding way.”5 If Lauren asked you to do something, you did it because you wanted to please him, and above all, not disappoint him. “You felt the need to do it simply to receive his recognition or because you knew it was the right thing to do. . . . He made you feel you were so much a part of the business.”6 Some bosses inspire so much affection that employees are willing to do anything for them—even take the metaphorical bullet for him or her. Lauren was that kind of boss. “If you were to talk to [any other former employees of Ralph Lauren],” Cesarani says, “they would tell you the same thing: they would have given him their lives.”7
Much as you might have loved Lauren and feared disappointing him, sometimes you had to; the 100 percent commitment he demanded was too onerous for most people to sustain. Cesarani left Lauren because he had a wife and children at home, and the “ungodly” hours were exacting a heavy toll. He remembers it as an excruciating decision: “Lauren never jumped up and down but he would shake his head in disbelief that I would have betrayed him, because he always felt that I was there for him. And I really took enormous amounts of stress to decide what I wanted to do.”8 Even years later, the very memory of leaving Lauren seems to arouse sadness and regret in Cesarani; his voice hung heavily during our interview.
The kind of attachment Cesarani felt—a loyalty so strong that it lingers decades later—is common among protégés of superbosses. Numerous times, I came upon what is akin to a Stockholm syndrome of leadership: employees push themselves to their limits for their superbosses, but rather than resent the superboss for it, they feel even greater loyalty. They’ll do anything to keep from disappointing this larger-than-life figure and they yearn to please him, not only because they’ve completely bought into the boss’s vision but also because they want to feel that their boss was correct in selecting them for the job.
Ron Marston, who worked with Tommy Frist for years before becoming CEO of Health Care Corporation of America (HCCA), told me, “You never wanted to let Tommy down. If you did, you were harder on yourself not because of anything he did or said but because you knew you failed to live up to his standards.”9 Joseph Abboud recalls that working for Lauren was “very much like a cult. You wanted to be part of it. Ralph was our hero. We believed the myth; we dressed the myth. We were the legions. It was all-consuming, and you were sucked into it.”10
Think for a moment how powerful this kind of motivation is. Many companies today measure how engaged or emotionally connected members of their workforce are. In all too many companies, engagement is disappointingly low. For superbosses, engagement is the least of it. They know that to succeed they need the world’s best team, which doesn’t mean engaged talent; it means energized, supercharged talent. One reason Lauren was able to build his great fortune was because for decades he had people like Cesarani working their hearts out to do the impossible. His people wanted to excel and, as a result, they were able to blow past preconceived constraints of what they could do.
If you manage others, imagine what you might accomplish if all or even just a few of your team members felt this internal drive to succeed. And if you’re just starting out in your career, think of how satisfying it might be to feel that kind of commitment to your work. Most millennial employees you talk to get this. Survey after survey11 indicates that they want to feel part of something meaningful. They’re not interested in a “job”; they’re looking for passion. Regardless of how the over-forty crowd might perceive it, the millennial train has already left the station, so if you want to tap into the most highly educated, mobile-enabled generation ever (and secure the future of your organization), you’d better start thinking about how to bring some of that superboss motivation and inspiration to your own people.
Perfect Is Good Enough
So how do superbosses do it? The first thing to know is that all superbosses, even the more supportive Nurturers, drive their people exceptionally hard. “Everybody knew that Bill demanded results,” said Ronald Blankenship, president and CEO of the Verde Group and longtime associate of Bill Sanders, “and if you were going to work with him, you needed to be prepared to make that the primary focus in your life.”12 Victor Campbell, senior vice president at Hospital Corporation of America, remarked of Tommy Frist: “You were expected to get done what needed to get done and get it done in a timely fashion.”13 Comedian Andy Samberg remembers that after working for Lorne Michaels at Saturday Night Live, acting in movies was a “cakewalk.” “The pressure doesn’t really seem that high. You’ve dealt with this thing that’s SNL, which is just this crazy, intense, beautiful pressure cooker.”14
Superbosses don’t want merely strong performance; they expect world-class performance. As one protégé remarked of Larry Ellison, his great strength was “to make exceptional people do the impossible,”15 accomplished in part by setting the impossible as a clear goal. As Carmen Policy, former president and CEO of the San Francisco 49ers and Cleveland Browns, remembered, “Bill Walsh came to the 49ers with a hunger, a vision, and a strong desire to do more than just ‘coach’ the team. He wanted to create a dynasty.”16 Bill Sanders wanted his real estate investment company to have the national footprint and reputation of Goldman Sachs, so anything less than extraordinary effort from his staff just wouldn’t cut it. “One of the things Sanders taught me,” said Don Suter, former managing director at Sanders’s Security Capital Group (SCG), who went on to become CEO of M3 Capital Partners, a multibillion-dollar real estate investment and advisory company, “was 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.”17
What does “perfect” mean, exactly? Suter told me about a time when he had to persuade the CEO of a public company to buy into an important financing deal involving SCG. He had prepared “for three days for this forty-five-minute meeting.” He wound up doing a great job—such a great job, in fact, that the CEO agreed right then and there to what Suter was proposing. But Sanders still wasn’t happy. After the CEO left, Sanders came into Suter’s office and shut the door. “I thought he was going to give me one of those pats on the back.” He had nailed the presentation, hadn’t he? Instead he got an earful because he had spoken too informally at one point, using the term “you guys” to describe the CEO’s company. “Sanders said, ‘If you ever use the term “you guys” again in a meeting, I’m sending you back to Kokomo [where Suter is from].’ That is Bill’s obsession with making sure whatever you do is perfect.”18
Insisting on perfectionism wasn’t a onetime thing for Sanders; it was a constant practice. Constance Moore, a former managing director at SCG, told me that before SCG’s 1993 annual meeting, Sanders made it clear he wanted each member of his leadership team to make a presentation before shareholders and the board. Many of these presentations were to be short—as brief as thirty to ninety seconds. Sanders insisted they practice the day before in the same venue at which the meeting would be held. During practice, each executive gave his or her presentation and received a “grade” from Sanders as well as recommendations for improvement. Later that day, each executive presented again. “For a lot of us,” Moore said, “it was an ‘oh my gosh’ moment. We all knew we were proven executives, and here we were back in school, getting a grade for our individual performance. But [Sanders] wanted to make sure that when we got up in front of his board and shareholders, we did a great job. The only way he could do that was to make sure he provided feedback through lots of practice. That is the way it was for years.”19
For years? Didn’t Moore and her colleagues ever get to relax and bask in the glory of their accomplishments? In a typical company, people who perform well do get to relax, and they often come to feel a sense of entitlement. They think of themselves as “heroes,” and sometimes even believe that their bosses and team are beholden to them. In a superboss-run company, such entitlement doesn’t fly. You can never rest on your laurels, because as high as a superboss’s expectations are, they’re always increasing. Andy Samberg explained that when his SNL digital shorts became a success, his first thought wasn’t that he was established and could take a breath; it was, “Okay, I might not get fired next year.”20 Chase Coleman, a protégé of hedge-fund billionaire Julian Robertson who eventually built a $9 billion fund of his own, described a time in his career when he had an idea that a particular company’s stock would go down, and he made a lot of money for Robertson by persuading him to bet on that outcome. Shortly afterward, Coleman was sitting in his cubicle when Robertson walked by. “I was expecting a big ‘high five,’ and he just gave me a wink. That was it.”21 That wink was Robertson’s way of saying, “Yeah, you did good, but I’ve already come to expect that of you. Let’s see what else you’ve got.”
In setting ever higher expectations, superbosses aren’t bound by last year’s figures or by a sense of what “normal” performance would be for an employee in a given position. They’re certainly not bound by what employees conceive as their natural limitations. Superbosses want to see how far people can go. They treat staff like Olympic athletes, pushing them to the limit and beyond. Jay Chiat was “always demanding of everyone to do something better than they very often knew or thought they could or were capable of,” Lee Clow, now chairman of TBWA/Media Arts Lab, told me.22 As Kenny Thomas, former Polo employee and senior vice president for Lucky Brand Dungarees, related, young designers flocked to work with Ralph Lauren because “Ralph was fantastic at giving opportunities to people who didn’t even know themselves what they were capable of.”23 Junk bond king Michael Milken summed up well the superboss’s general attitude about performance: “Maybe we set our objectives too low, in school, in our daily lives. We are all capable of performing at a far higher level than we have. Faced with a challenge, we can do it. Maybe we’re not challenging ourselves enough.”24
Note Milken’s use of the inclusive “we.” Superbosses credibly push others into their discomfort zones because they model high performance themselves. As Ronald Blankenship said of Sanders, “He is sort of a twelve – to fifteen-hour-day kind of guy, and if you are not, you probably won’t end up in senior management.”25 Lorne Michaels typically held office hours on Wednesday nights—and he held them all night. Buffy Birrittella, one of Ralph Lauren’s most long-standing employees, noted that her boss was “always hungry in the best sense of the word. Ralph challenges everyone around him to keep sharp and improve things because someone out there is looking to top you—and you have to top yourself.”26
You might wonder if superbosses push themselves and others too far. Although some employees might nod in agreement, superbosses would strongly disagree. “I don’t think I should be criticized for working hard,” Michael Milken once said. “Some people like to play basketball. Some like to play golf. I like to work hard.”27 Bonnie Fuller, former editor in chief at Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Us Weekly, and other magazines, is well known in the magazine business for her sparkling record of success. Recognized twice by Advertising Age magazine as “editor of the year,” she doubled Us Weekly’s newsstand sales in less than a year,28 and then went on to double the subscription base of Star magazine.29 Meanwhile, her protégés have gone on to big jobs of their own, playing leadership roles at such magazines as Glamour, Us Weekly, Real Simple, Seventeen, Maxim, and Cargo. Yet some former employees have chastised Fuller for her perfectionism and overall intensity, perceiving it as “rudeness” and “imperiousness.”30 Some of her ex-employees have been so angry that they went public with their complaints, joining a now-defunct website called isurvivedbonnie.com. The site, founded in 2003, was for “former and current employees of American Media editor Bonnie Fuller to discuss how they coped and survived her reign of tyranny.”31
Superbosses don’t fear criticism like this, as evidenced by their utter refusal to moderate their standards. If you can’t meet a superboss’s expectations, he will simply invest less of his energy into pushing you forward. Or he might drop you. As John Griffin told me, Julian Robertson would “cut his losses very quickly if he had hired someone and that person wasn’t the person he thought they would be.”32 According to Scot Sellers, chairman and CEO of Archstone, Bill Sanders could “be very tough on people he perceives to not be pulling their weight. . . . You either survive that and move up, or you get washed out.”33 Such “up or out” accountability is surprisingly unusual in many traditional businesses. Bosses tend to let performance slide for extended periods, “getting tough” only when serious problems arise. 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.
The Ladder of Confidence
Isn’t all this hard-charging, whip-cracking perfectionism ultimately counterproductive? Doesn’t it lead to employee burnout and disenchantment?34 In many traditional “high-performance” cultures, that is exactly what happens. Investors and boards apply pressure at the top of the organization to boost productivity, and this pressure cascades downward as bosses at each level tighten the screws on their reports. Managers are told they have a number they need to hit. They hit that number, and as a reward, the target goes up the following year. When they hit that number, the target goes up even more. The demands just never seem to end, leaving employees feeling as if they were on an endless treadmill. You’re punished if you succeed, but you’re punished even more if you don’t. Add in the pressure to be “always on,” thanks to mobile technology, and it’s easy to understand why large percentages of employees report that they dislike their jobs—and eventually leave them.35
Some employees at superboss-led companies do drop 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 these things. And they sense that it is their paramount job as leaders to inject a strong and unforgettable sense of possibility in their workforce.
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. As I unraveled how superbosses did this, I found that they actively modeled self-confidence. The gumption of a Lorne Michaels, who “seemed to have no doubt that Saturday Night Live would be a television landmark,”36 or of a George Lucas, who stuck with Star Wars even when people predicted it would fail—this rubs off on people. Protégés notice and feel elevated by it, more aware of their own greatness by virtue of their proximity to the superboss.
Lucas protégé Howard Roffman remembered that when he first took the position of head of licensing at Lucasfilm, Star Wars had already lost traction in the market. Roffman’s job was to sell people on the film again and get them excited about it. When he met with retailers, licensees, and other industry players, however, he found that they weren’t buying it. “Every one of them looked at me like I was crazy,” telling him that “Star Wars was dead.” Roffman feared having to go back to George Lucas with this message in hand—“I thought the ‘wrath of God’ will come down on me.” But Lucas just laughed it off. “[Star Wars isn’t] dead,” he said, “it’s just sleeping. Just give it some time. . . . Someday all those people who saw it are going to have their own kids and are going to want to introduce them. We can try to make a comeback then.” That ability to sustain confidence in the face of deep industry disbelief made such a profound impression on Roffman that it jumped to mind decades later during our interview.37
Coach Bill Walsh’s confidence made a similarly powerful impression on former San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Dwight Clark. “There was just an attitude. He walked with a strut almost. He was very confident in what he could do—not cocky, just very confident. When you were around him, you started feeling it, too. . . . He made us confident despite ourselves. He made us believe just by being that way.”38
Sign Me Up!
Imagine you’re relatively new to a company and you attend a planning meeting with your work group. The group leader outlines a problem that the team has been wrestling with. It’s not hopeless, but the best solution anyone has come up with so far is mediocre at best.
Then someone leaning on the wall just inside the door asks a question. You turn and recognize the company’s founder and CEO. You met him when you were being interviewed, but haven’t seen him in several weeks. When no one seems able to answer his question, the company’s founder starts talking about the vision he had that led him to start the company. At first, what he’s saying hardly seems relevant. It’s as if he’s reminiscing about an earlier time. But gradually you realize there is a connection. The founder is talking about what the company delivers to its customers. He is describing things the company does that distinguishes it from its competitors. He is explaining how the company has regularly been able to provide new features without large increases in cost. It sounds simple and clear.
You realize the founder has just redefined the problem the group was wrestling with and expanded the options available for dealing with it. All of these new options are going to require more changes than the group had been considering, but what had looked like a problem is now beginning to look like an opportunity for delivering more value. “Wow,” the group leader says, articulating the feeling of everyone in the room. “If we can put this together, it’s really going to pay off, isn’t it?” You can’t help smiling and shaking your head in wonder. You are now participating in the kind of pioneering effort that has made the company special since its inception. And you can’t wait to get started.
We’ve heard a lot of talk in recent years about the importance of vision for organizations. Yet vision still tends to get lost at most organizations. At best, people see it as something that managers transmit from the very top of the corporate pyramid, a notion that can be so far removed from everyday work that it seems meaningless. When I work with management teams, even relatively high-performing ones, I ask them about vision, and more often than not they aren’t even able to articulate what their organization’s vision is. They need to look it up on the company website. Vision becomes mere window dressing rather than what it should be: motivational, compelling, energizing. The idea that every competent boss needs to craft a unique vision for her own team is also nonexistent. And if vision plays such an unimportant role for managers, imagine how employees see it. I have to think that much of the time it barely even enters their consciousness.
Superbosses become talent magnets not only because of their track record as bosses but also because they envision future possibilities in a way that is utterly compelling. Take Lorne Michaels. As longtime NBC executive Dick Ebersol remembered, when Saturday Night Live was in the planning stages, “Lorne just took my breath away in the way he talked about things, how he wanted to have the first television show to speak the language of the time.”39 Bill Sanders likewise struck colleagues as someone who could “see around corners.” Scot Sellers related that Sanders “would lay out his vision and he would say, ‘I would like you to be a part of it.’ You were so honored to be asked to be part of this great vision that you just wanted to jump in and say, ‘Sign me up!’”40
Superbosses’ visions are without exception unique, authentic, and consistent. As one of his protégés excitedly related to me, George Lucas “changed the way movies were made with Star Wars.”41 Another emphasized that Lucas “was the guy who pioneered digital sound and digital imaging. It was all analog. He started Pixar. . . . He is not afraid to think of the way things might be and how different they will be from the way they are today.”42 Still another, Michael Rubin, the author of Droidmaker and a young member of Lucasfilm’s Graphics Group in the 1980s, recalled that hearing George Lucas talk about his vision of technology was transformational. “I heard him explain what the future could be like and I was infected with that at age twenty-two. I believed him. And it changed my career.”43
Superbosses aren’t just trying to make money or become famous. They want to have an impact; they want to change their industry and even the world. Miles Davis wanted to “reach as many people as I could through my music.”44 Alice Waters wanted to “educate ourselves and the public” about food.45 Gene Roberts wanted to publish high-quality, hard-hitting stories that would improve society. Such visions make everything on the job more meaningful. It gets employees fired up to think harder, reach higher, and go further.
It helps that superbosses are masters at communicating their visions. Journalists, protégés, and other observers routinely describe superbosses as outstanding salespeople. As Emmy Award winner and SNL writer Tom Schiller said of Lorne Michaels, “He has the power to galvanize people around him who can help him realize his dream.”46 As I discovered, even just listening to former superboss employees describe their boss’s vision is inspiring. Linda Lewis, former executive at Bill Sanders’s Security Capital Group, recalled, “Seeing Bill speak, you wish you could have joined the company last year. You didn’t want to wait, there was a train moving and you wanted to be part of it.”47 Remembering his initial encounters with George Lucas, film director and special-effects producer Phil Tippett said, “It wasn’t a calculation on any level [for Lucas]. It was like, ‘I’m going to do this stuff until somebody shoots me.’”48 For one of winemaker Robert Mondavi’s many disciples, working for his superboss seemed akin to what employees of a company like Google might say today: “You felt you were on the zeitgeist of a new era in which an exciting, groundbreaking business was being born. . . . Robert Mondavi was truly the fuel behind that fire.”49
Superbosses take for granted that employees buy into their visions. As a result, they don’t need to constantly monitor their employees to make sure they’re putting out their best—alignment with the vision does that naturally. Many employees I spoke with reported being utterly riveted to their work, so much so that almost nothing could tear them away. Joyce Goldstein, the James Beard Award–winning chef at Chez Panisse in the early 1980s, remembers that she was “there from five in the morning till six at night. I worked six days a week. I inventoried on Sunday and I did the ordering for both restaurants [the formal dining room and the café]. But I was in love with food. I discovered that I loved the business and I never watched the clock.”50 Employees of superbosses never watch the clock, and they’re not in it for the fame, the glory, or the money. They’re in it because they see what the superboss sees. And it’s irresistible.
It’s Hard to Go Back to Being Ordinary
Superbosses are geniuses at motivation. Unlike some bosses, they don’t want 80 percent of the attention and dedication of their people. They want 100 percent. And they get 100 percent. But not by waving big bonuses in front of their people. As we saw in chapter 2, many protégés eagerly accept jobs with superbosses even though they often pay less. Don Suter remembers that when a member of Security Capital Group achieved something great, Bill Sanders would come by his or her cubicle to offer congratulations. He’d tell them how important their contribution was to the firm and how grateful he was to know that they were doing a good job. That, Suter said, meant more to the people he hired than an extra $10,000 in bonus at the end of the year, because being singled out by Sanders said it all: you were making a difference.
In a capitalist society, money is a perfectly fine thing to strive for, and many superbosses and their protégés do become very, very wealthy. In Robertson’s case, almost all of his people have become multimillionaires, some even billionaires.51 But money doesn’t fully motivate most people. By contrast, people know when they’re working for a special boss—someone who is changing the rules, is unafraid to take risks, deeply cares about achieving a higher objective, and invites employees to be a part of it. When a boss like that is giving orders or, as is more often the case, pushing and inspiring you in a powerful way, you don’t perceive the pressure to perform as tedious or unwelcome. You perceive it as part of a gigantic, unbelievably important and exciting mission.52 You thrive on this pressure. And, just like your boss, you lose yourself in the mission.
It is the superboss’s combination of big-time expectations and aspirations, then, that enables the exceptional people under their wings to do impossible things. An upward spiral of performance takes root among protégés of superbosses: as they become accustomed to surviving and thriving in an intense environment, their ambitions only increase. They become so addicted to success that they seek out ever more challenging assignments. And they feel so great upon meeting or exceeding the superboss’s expectations that they want to do it again and again. They yearn to be even closer to the superboss, his inspiration, his energy, and they will do whatever it takes to stay in his orbit. It’s a cyclone of pressure, success, acknowledgment, rising confidence, and even more success that makes the protégé, the superboss, and the superboss’s organization utterly unstoppable. An employee of Jay Chiat summed it up well: “He left something in people that makes it hard for you to go back to being ordinary. Once you feel it, you can’t change it.”53
Inspiring People Like a Superboss
Understanding how superbosses motivate and inspire people can give you a framework for understanding your own boss a little better. Perhaps you have an extremely demanding boss—one who is working all hours of the day or night or who assigns you gargantuan tasks—and yet you find, strangely, that you don’t mind all that much. Your boss might just be a superboss or share some superboss characteristics. Or maybe you’ve just started a new job and your boss suddenly piles on an incredible amount of work and sets crushing performance goals. Is he a superboss who will change your life or just another drill-sergeant boss who will burn you out? You can find out by asking yourself a few quick questions: Does your boss articulate a vision for why you, your team, and your organization are doing what you’re doing? Is that vision energizing, exciting, and important? Is it clear how you fit in? If the answer to these questions is yes, then you just might be in for a life-changing experience. If it’s no, then you might find yourself on a soul-deadening performance treadmill.
If you’re a boss focused on getting superior performance from your team and you’re struggling, maybe it’s time to stop doing what doesn’t work and start doing something new. Cracking the whip does not a leadership philosophy make. At some point, if you don’t instill a sense of possibility in your people, the engine will grind to a halt. 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. Vision is not just for CEOs. As an exercise, try performing a quick audit of how you’re spending each day. 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? If you’re already pushing people to their limits and you can’t push any harder, you might find that spending more time on the “softer stuff” of meaning, purpose, vision, and identity will result in even greater performance. Inspiring others is not an incidental activity for superbosses. Rather, it’s at the core of what they do.
In many organizations, the “why” of work gets lost as teams focus on hard, financial performance metrics. Employees forget why they need to sell a thousand more service contracts, for instance, or extract $486 per customer interaction as opposed to $483. Getting those extra contracts or dollars might be a big deal—if it’s linked to the fundamental purpose of the team and organization. If you find yourself thinking less and less about the fundamental purpose, chances are your employees are, too. 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?
Any company can get energized around a purpose. Any department within a company, too. An internally focused, process-oriented department like accounting may seem especially far removed from lofty ambitions. Can managers really frame an inspiring vision for this department? Of course! A business needs to get its numbers right. Financial filings must be accurate and professionals doing the work must follow appropriate procedures. If an accounting team isn’t doing its job and mistakes happen, the whole company might be at risk, and with it, the larger purpose it serves. The accounting team is linked to the organization’s calling. It contributes vitally to work that affects people’s lives. If you are a superboss-style manager or leader, your role is to explain this to your accountants, underscoring how each of their specific jobs factors in and how they might innovate to do their job even better. Maybe there’s an early-warning system that could be deployed to catch mistakes. Or new procedures for interacting with others during audits. Whatever the case, the time to get your people fired up about what they do is now.
If you want to slack off and bide your time, then a job with a superboss is not for you. But if you’re willing to attack your job as if nothing else matters, then you’ll find having a superboss as a boss is truly invigorating. I know, because as a graduate student at Columbia University, I worked for a superboss myself. My supervising professor, Don Hambrick, gave rise to a generation of scholars in my field and he lived almost all of the behaviors described in this book. Nobody worked harder than Don—and that’s probably still true today, thirty years later. He had a quiet confidence that was infectious. He also had a vision for our research that transcended any other project or study I might have been doing. He wasn’t afraid to boost my confidence and tell me he believed in me. And you know what? I internalized his words of support because I could tell he was speaking from the heart—that what he said was genuine and not just lip service to get me to work harder.
This suggests one additional lesson about performance we can learn from superbosses. Don’t just evoke possibilities for your people because you think it might result in an extra market-share point or an extra percentage increase in revenue. Do it because you really feel passionate about your people and your mission. In everything superbosses say and do around their protégés, they are authentic. They’re not reading from a script or playacting. They’re not framing a vision because they think they should, “checking the box” and moving on to something else. Superbosses know such machinations only backfire, as most people are smart enough to recognize a fake when they meet one.
Remember Sal Cesarani, Ralph Lauren’s right-hand man during the early 1970s? Thirty years later, he remains utterly taken with his boss, seeing him as head and shoulders above any other fashion icon. Other former protégés agree. A former Polo executive has remarked, “The thing that set Ralph apart was his single-mindedness of purpose. Everybody else moved from place to place, from trend to trend. He wasn’t trendy. . . . It’s the single most important thing about him.”54 That single-minded purpose came from deep inside Lauren, as it does with every superboss. His people sensed this. They knew what he said and did counted. They knew he had a special mission to fulfill, and he’d chosen them from among many qualified candidates to help him. And they rose to the occasion.
Lauren didn’t merely inspire his people to perform exceptionally well. He also got them to break new ground in fashion, to do things that nobody else in the business was doing. He got them to work creatively, to take risks, to inject their own talents and insights into their work. Most organizations today are looking for ways to foster creativity, and many, sadly, are coming up short. Without exception, the superbosses I studied had cracked the code. And as we’ll see in the next chapter, it all comes down to their masterful and, at first glance, puzzling way of giving up control over their employees’ work, and at the same time asserting it more uncompromisingly than anyone.