The resistance of Generation Z to ascend to management positions has put leadership and its capabilities at the center of the labor debate. Steve Jobs’ Apple also had to face this dilemma when, in the early 1980s, it began to become a large technology company. Jobs learned important management lessons from that stage.
In an interview recorded in the mid-90s, the co-founder of Apple said that, given Apple’s growth potential, its managers agreed to opt for what they called “professional management.” That is, professional and well-trained managers who led the Apple teams.
“It didn’t work at all,” Jobs said in his interview. “Most of them were stupid. They knew how to run businesses, but they didn’t know how to do anything.” Jobs maintained that those people who did not want to lead teams, They ended up becoming the best leaders in the long term.
Professional managers without “vision”
Steve Jobs explained in his remarks that the employees under these leaders were more likely to learn from them how to do things, rather than simply applying management techniques. “Why would you want to work for someone you can’t learn anything from?” said the Apple founder.
Jobs had a particular theory about who the best managers were for his teams: “Do you know who the best managers are? They are the great individual contributors who never wanted to be managers, but decide they have to be because no one else is going to be able to do a job.” as good as they are.”
Although this theory may have worked in many specific cases, the general tendency to reward the best workers (or those with the best internal relationships) does not always produce the best results, inducing what is known as the Peter Principle.
One of those success stories was Debi Coleman, a member of the original team that developed the Macintosh who, as she herself acknowledged in the interview, did not have the necessary training for the position. “There was no way anyone else would give me the opportunity to run this type of operation. I am aware of the fact that there was an incredibly high risk, both for me personally and professionally, and for Apple as a company, to put a person like me in this job.”
However, Steve Jobs hit the nail on the head with his appointment. Coleman first became CFO of the Macintosh department, then ran finances for the entire company and became Apple’s head of tax and treasury until 1992. Until her death in 2021, Coleman was considered one of the company’s chief financial officers. most prominent technological financial companies. “We wanted people who were extraordinarily good at what they did, but they weren’t necessarily seasoned professionals at doing it.”
One of the keys for the Steve Jobs leadership strategy was successful and did not end up with managers disoriented and disconnected from their teams was that, under Jobs, Apple was organized like a startup in which everything revolved around a “common vision.” The ability to discover and communicate that joint vision turned managers into leaders who led the way for the brightest employees.
“Brilliant employees manage themselves. They don’t need to be managed. Once they know what to do, they will discover how to do it, they don’t need to be managed. What they need is a common vision,” Jobs said during his interview. “That’s what leadership is: having a vision, being able to articulate it so that the people around you can understand it and come to a consensus on a common vision.”
Choose the right employees
That approach continued for decades, and in another interview in 2010, Apple’s founder stated: “There is tremendous teamwork at the top of the company, which trickles down through the entire company. Teamwork depends on trusting others to do their part without having to watch them all the time”
Esa Jobs’ trust in his employees It was based on a solid recruitment system in which candidates had to demonstrate a certain attitude towards Apple’s technological potential and what they could contribute.
“You get to a point where you decide who you let into that group. That’s why I consider the most important job for someone like me to be recruiting. The best thing that can happen is when you get a group of 10 excellent people,” Steve Jobs recalled during his interview.
The Apple employees who formed the Macintosh development team recalled their involvement in the recruitment process of new candidates to join their team.
The candidates They talked to all the members of the teamnot only with the personnel department, and together they decided who was hired. If they did not show real enthusiasm for what was shown to them, they were left out. “If they were bored or just said ‘Oh, that’s a good computer,’ we didn’t want them. We wanted their eyes to light up and they were really excited. So we knew they were one of us,” confirmed Andy Hertzfeld, one of the responsible for the Macintosh operating system.
In WorldOfSoftware | Tim Cook learned from Steve Jobs something that very few leaders practice: to change your mind without fear
Imagen | Apple, Unsplash (Andriyko Podilnyk)
