Sublime

“Bill, your title makes you a manager; your people make you a leader.”

One company policy is that all leaders must spend 10 percent of their time helping employees develop—including the CEO, Thom Crosby. “The core part of every manager’s job is to be an educator,” Crosby has said.9

I learned from that. Steve couldn’t be a good leader until he became a good manager.” So when we met Bill in our weekly coaching sessions, what we discussed first and foremost was management: operations and tactics. Bill rarely weighed in on strategic issues, and if he did, it was usually to make sure that there was a strong operating plan to accom

The best leaders are the best learners. They learn from their failures and their successes.

Indeed, a key feature of what is really going on is that the instructor is mindful that most of the group equate authority with leadership and depend on his functioning within that expectation.

Disney, John Andrew Rice, and Steve Jobs not only headed Great Groups, they found their own greatness in them. As Howard Gardner points out, Oppenheimer showed no great administrative ability before or after the Manhattan Project. And yet when the world needed him, he was able to rally inner resources that probably surprised even himself. Inevitabl

Truly great leaders create an environment where the employees feel that the CEO cares more about the employees than she cares about herself. In this kind of environment, an amazing thing happens: A huge number of employees believe it’s their company and behave accordingly. As the company grows large, these employees become quality control for the e

Taylor was the epitome of the leader as facilitator. He understood the wisdom of an observation that Xerox’s chief scientist and PARC advocate Jack Goldman had clipped from a newspaper and hung in his office: “There are two ways of being creative. One can sing and dance. Or one can create an environment in which singers and dancers flourish.”

In this approach, the teacher remains the authority in the class-room—providing orientation and maintaining equilibrium in the group. But the teacher is also practicing leadership—skillfully allowing enough disequilibrium (confusion, frustration, disappointment, conflict, and stress) to help the group move from unexamined assumptions about the prac