Employees dreaded getting into an elevator with Steve Jobs. As soon as the doors closed, he would start grilling them about what they were working on, and they knew they’d better have a good story. Some of those encounters have become legendary. Most notably, an anonymous woman who, according to Ed Niehaus, inadvertently stepped into an elevator with Jobs and heard, just a few floors later, “We are not going to need you.”
These kinds of stories have created an image of Steve Jobs that lingers in the minds of many business leaders, but are they accurate? Are they fair?
Ed Catmull, President of Pixar, worked with Steve Jobs for twenty-five years—longer than anyone else—beginning when Jobs was fired from Apple in 1985. According to Catmull, the Steve Jobs he knew was not the emotionally abrasive tyrant who fired people on the spot in elevators. In the final decades of his career, Jobs had become a very different person. He no longer possessed the fearsome personality that the biographies and Hollywood movies attribute to him.
Steve Jobs learned from his experiences and developed a different leadership style.
Sadly, many CEOs, especially in tech, reference those Steve Jobs biographies and say, “Ah, I’m on the right track. I’m an abrasive asshole, too. If it worked for him, it’ll work for me.”
I can relate. In order to succeed as a leader, I had to get over my need to be right all the time.
Even if the CEO is the smartest person in the room, they don’t have to prove everyone wrong all the time in order to grow a great company. Leaders must abandon the desire to
constantly build up their own self-image. It’s okay to admit when someone else has a better idea. It took me a long time to learn that.
The Smartest Person in the Room
When leaders become successful in the early stages of growth, they tend to start believing their own hype. They are the ones who know just what to do in every circumstance. They have the best ideas, and everyone looks to them for answers.
It’s a slippery slope that picks up speed as the company grows.
In a small company, your ideas might indeed be the best (statistically speaking). The CEO of a small company is often the one who knows the most and is closest to the data, but as the company grows, the CEO gets removed from the front lines. They stop being the one with the closest view of the data.
This makes sense. A small startup probably can’t afford to hire a highly experienced, super intelligent executive worth half a million dollars, which makes it easier for the CEO to be the smartest person in the room, especially when all of the other employees are young and early in their careers. Unfortunately, it’s during those early days that the CEO develops their self-image.
It became a real problem for me because I held onto this notion for a long time. Once the company grew, I started hiring some very intelligent, very experienced people because I now had the budget for it, but I kept right on believing I was the smart guy with all the answers. That attitude from a leader drives away talent and can, if not corrected, stifle growth. According to research in Harvard Business Review, many leaders become less empathetic, more arrogant, and more convinced of their own rightness as their company grows.
“Hey, I’m the big boss. Everyone comes to me with their problems, and I give them the solutions. That’s how it works. The company continues to grow, so clearly my solutions are the best.”
This kind of thinking makes it hard for leaders to start listening to other people. They never discover if other people on the team have better solutions, which reinforces their unhealthy self-image.
Without a wake-up call, it’s hard to stop the momentum of this downhill freight train.
This sometimes leads to an even more destructive idea, as the CEO starts to think, “The only way to get things done around here is if I do them myself. I wish I could just replicate myself and have ten mini-me’s working here. Then we’d accomplish a lot more.”
These kinds of leaders insist on having the last word in meetings. Even when someone offers a good idea, they feel compelled to respond, “That’s not bad, but here’s something better.”
They must be the first to talk and the last to talk—always, in every conversation.
A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
The CEO’s self-image becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because their attitude repels a lot of highly gifted people. The CEO truly is the smartest person at the company, but only because they’ve driven away or repressed so much talent. Employees who work for that kind of boss, if they endure, start to lose the muscle for problem-solving. They give up and just start letting the CEO solve every problem.
“Hey, Boss, what’s your idea? How do you want to solve this?”
That attitude is understandable. Consider what employees go through to get to that point.
You walk into a meeting, propose an idea, and the CEO shoots it down. After this happens three or four times, you start to say, “I’m just not going to share my ideas anymore.”
This is how you get employees to “quit and stay.” They simply give up, so now the CEO truly is the one with the best solution (the only solution) to every problem.
How can you rid yourself of this destructive need to be the smartest person in the room? The first and most important step is to recognize the tendency in yourself. Are you feeding your own self-esteem constantly?
Reframe your leadership role. You aren’t the one who has all the solutions. You’re the one who finds the problems, brings the team together, and tells them, “I want to hear your solutions.”
Think of yourself as a symphony conductor. The conductor might lean over and gesture for the strings to speak up. Then the conductor might lean the other way and gesture for the woodwinds to speak up. By doing so, beautiful music is created. For a deeper look at CEO secrets for tapping unseen potential, check out my book, Seeking CEO Secrets, coming this summer.