The master-apprentice relationship is fundamentally a teaching relationship, isn't it? The leader, the boss, the colleague is teaching and the protege, the employee, the team member is learning. The truth is there's learning and teaching going both ways, but I want to focus in this video predominantly on giving you some tips on how you can become a more effective teacher because really, the best leaders are great teachers. Now, I'm going to give you some ideas, but I want to tackle right up front a complaint that I have heard, just I wanted to spell it right from the start. The complaint is, who has time or nobody ever did that for me. These are pretty bad explanations or excuses. No one ever did that for me doesn't tell you anything. Just because somebody didn't help you get better, doesn't mean you don't want to help other people get better. But more to the point, who has time? Well, wouldn't you want your team to keep getting better and better and better? That type of investment and it's not like day and night that you're doing this. It's occasional. You're picking your spots, you're looking for your opportunities and have some thoughts on how you can do that. It'll help your team be more accomplished. In the last video, I mentioned this challenge of delegating how some people don't want to delegate to their team because they don't trust them as well as much as they can and they can get burned out. Well, if you teach and you help those people on your team get better, of course you're going to trust them more. So it becomes really a classic win-win. What is it that they teach? What do super boss leaders do? Well, great leaders teach on a range of topics, but their best lessons so relevant and useful that the people that worked for these super boss leaders years later are still applying and sharing them later fall into three buckets. Number 1, professionalism. A manager who worked for real estate CEO investor Bill Sanders told me that Sanders often gave advice on conducting oneself professionally. He explained how to effectively prepare for meetings, how to communicate a vision when attempting to sell, and how to look at the industry not as it is, but as it could become. That's a really big one. How do you look at an industry not as it is today, but as it could become? Other managers spoke of learning from their leaders the value of emphasizing integrity of high ethical standards. Number 1, what do super boss leaders teach? They teach professionalism and there's a lot more things they teach, and that gives you a couple of examples. They also teach points of craft, like really some detailed things about running, doing your job or how the industry works. Mindy Grossman, who was the CEO of Weight Watchers, was a former executive at Polo Ralph Lauren, and she remembers standing in show rooms with Ralph Lauren and listening to him explain how to achieve authenticity and integrity in fashion, whether they were creating a $24 T-shirt or a $6,000 crocodile skirt. That's something, $6,000 crocodile skirt. Similarly, Jim Sinegal, who is the co-founder and now retired CEO of Costco, recalls the way his former boss, who was Price Club founder Sol Price, routinely tried to build his employees expertise in the details of retailing. He said, ''We were tested every day and if something wasn't done properly, Sol Price would be certain to show us how to do it.'' You're able to teach no points of craft. Even as a third example or third category of what you might teach, life lessons. Great leaders don't limit themselves to just teaching about work. They also proffer, well, sometimes deeper wisdom about life. That might seem, to some, like a little bit of overstepping, but I discovered that managers, and I interviewed and talked to hundreds of managers as part of the super boss project, they found that extremely helpful. For example, an HCA physician, Hospital Corporation of America physician, that was interviewed by my research team remembered his former boss, the super boss Tommy Frist, who was the CEO of HCA. He remembers how he showed him a note card on which he had written his near-term goals, his intermediate term goals, and his long-term goals. Imagine that. He had in his pocket this card and these were my goals, short-term, intermediate term, long-term. These are my goals for different things that I care about from work, from personal life, even spiritual life as it turns out, and it's a lesson that doctor never forgot. Tommy Frist explained that he would refine these goals. It wouldn't just be a sheet, the little index card and it would never change. He would refine these goals every week and he was actually surprised that more people didn't perform such an exercise, and you can see the value of that. It's a lot. There's no limit really to what you teach, but they are constantly teaching and these leaders, they think at their jobs as teachers. When do they teach? Let's tackle that question because, who has time? Well, they teach on the job. When Jim Sinegal, he's the Costco founder, when he was working with Sol Price at Price Club, he knew that lesson could come at any time. According to Jim Sinegal, Sol Price "spent day and night teaching''. Whether giving advice on retail tactics or discussing how to be a better manager, there was always an opportunity and he just found it. He just created the time. It's not like you're taking time away for everyone to go to a seminar for an hour or two or a week. It's like in the daily give-and-take of whatever it is you're doing, their brains are clicking. I said earlier, these super boss leaders, they're always talent spotters and opportunity spotters where they're also spotting opportunities for teaching as well. Chase Coleman, someone I'll talk about in a little bit more detail in a subsequent video in this module, he was a protege of Julian Robertson, the hedge fund guru and Chase Coleman had his own fund. He said that Robertson, he was similarly ''out to teach you a lesson in every interaction'', showing "how to do things and how to run a business". Imagine that you as a leader, you as a manager, even as an individual contributor can think about sharing and teaching to others things that you know. I mean, that culture I think is such a powerful thing because it becomes a culture of learning. A lot of people say, "How do you create that? Don't we want to create that?" Of course we want to create that, but it starts with teaching. The other time in which super boss leaders take the time to teach is they manufacturer moments, they create the opportunity, and these can come from anywhere. For example, K. V. Kamath, who is the founder of ICICI Bank, he would share an Uber or a taxi with someone and they're going wherever, they're going into a meeting or what have you, and he would talk and he would look for an opportunity to create a teaching moment. Or Jean Roberts, who was from the Philadelphia Inquirer, the longtime publisher from the Philadelphia Inquirer, he would do it over dinner. Or Tommy Frist from HCA visiting customers or Ralph Lauren, especially in the earlier days, he would take these long walks around town and he would talk to people on his team. It would typically be a one-on-one and it would help Ralph himself think things through. This last one, all of these you can do, but this last one is really easy to do and I've done it myself quite a bit, talking to a colleague or someone who's working on my research team, or a student who wants some feedback or advice about careers, just take a walk. It's healthy. It could be 20 minutes, it could be an hour, it could be longer, and you have a chance to talk informally and the opportunity is there. So these are these manufactured moments. The master-apprentice relationship requires each of us to become and embrace this idea of being a teacher and to be a great leader, you really need to be a great teacher, and these are some of the ways in which you, yourself, might become a better teacher.
