Gen Z’s resistance to taking on management roles has put leadership, as well as the abilities needed to be a good leader, front and center. Steve Jobs’ Apple also faced this dilemma when Apple started to turn into a big technology company in the 1980s. The Apple cofounder learned from important lessons about management from this era.
“It didn’t work at all,” Jobs said in an interview in the mid-1980s. “Most of them were bozos. They knew how to manage, but they didn't know how to do anything.
Instead of professional managers, Jobs believed that the workers who didn’t want to lead teams ended up being the best leaders in the long run.
Professional Managers Without “Vision”
At that time, Jobs explained that it was more likely that the employees reporting to these managers would learn how to do things instead of limiting themselves to applying management techniques.
Jobs had a particular theory about who the best managers were for his teams.
“You know who the best managers are. They're the great individual contributors who never ever want to be a manager, but decide they have to be a manager because no one else is going to be able to do as good a job as that,” he said.
Although this theory might have worked in many specific cases, the tendency to reward the best workers (or those who have the best internal relations with others) with a promotion doesn’t always work. As the Peter Principle demonstrates, this can sometimes mean promoting someone to incompetence.
One of Apple’s success stories was Debi Coleman, a member of the original team that developed the Macintosh who, in her own words, didn’t have the experience necessary for the role.
“There's no way in the world anybody else would give me this chance to run this kind of operation,” Coleman said. “I don't kid myself about that there's an incredible high risk—both for myself personally and professionally, and for Apple as a company—[to] put a person like myself in this job.”
However, Jobs hit the nail on the head when he named Coleman a manager. She became the first finance director of the Macintosh Department and would later go on to manage the entire company’s finances as the Chief Financial Officer until 1992. Coleman was considered one of the most successful CFOs in the tech world. She died in 2021.
Jobs said he wanted employees who were “insanely great at what they did” but “not necessarily those seasoned professionals.”
One of the keys for success of Jobs’ strategy was managing Apple as a startup that worked around a “common vision. This ensured that the company’s managers didn’t end up lost or disconnected to their teams. According to Jobs, the capacity to both discover and communicate that vision turned managers into leaders and marked the path for the best employees.
“The greatest people are self-managing. They don’t need to be managed. Once they know what to do, they’ll go figure out how to do it. They don’t need to be managed at all. What they need is a common vision,” he said. “That’s what leadership is. Leadership is having a vision, being able to articulate that so the people around you can understand it, and getting a consensus on a common vision.”
Choosing the Right Employees
Apple maintained this approach to choosing managers for decades. In another interview, Jobs said, “There’s tremendous teamwork at the top of the company which filters down to tremendous teamwork throughout the company. Teamwork is depending on trusting the other folks to come through with their part without watching them all the time but trusting that they’re going to come through with their parts.”
Jobs’ confidence in his employees was based on solid recruitment system. Candidates had to demonstrate a determination for Apple’s potential and what they could contribute to the company.
“The neatest thing that happens is when you get a core group of 10 great people,” Jobs said. “It becomes self-policing as to who they let into that group. So, I consider the most important job of someone like myself [to be] recruiting.”
In fact, the employees that formed part of Apple’s Macintosh Development team said they were involved in the recruiting process for new members of their team.
Candidates talked to all of the members of the team, not just the recruiters, and the team would decide who would get hired together. If the candidate didn’t demonstrate real enthusiasm for what the Macintosh prototype were shown, they were cut.
“If they were just kind of bored, or said, ‘This is a nice computer,’ we didn’t want them,” Andy Hertzfeld, one of the architects of the Macintosh’s operating system, said. “We wanted their eyes to light up and for them to get really excited, and then we knew they were one of us.”
Images | Ben Stanfield
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