He paid his managers to contradict him, not to obey him.

We tend to think of the CEO of a company or the leader of a team as the person in charge, who imposes its criteria and, basically, that person is the one who orders what his team should do. According to Steve Jobs, that is one of the worst mistakes of a leader.

In the 90s, Steve Jobs shared a lesson 72-minute masterful presentation of his vision of what a management team should be like in a talk at MIT. Jobs paid his managers not to do what he said, but he paid them so that they would contradict him when I was wrong. 33 years later, his theory is still as valid today as it was in 1992.

He didn’t pay them to prove him right.

In his talk in front of MIT students, Steve Jobs explained that during his time at the head of NeXTafter his expulsion from Apple, hired very talented managers not to tell them what to do, but to get them to contribute their judgment about what decisions to make really.

Steve emphasized that the value of the management team It’s not that he strictly abides by the CEO’s criteria.but to suggest other alternatives, even if these contradict the leader’s opinion, thus avoiding teams that limit themselves to saying “yes, boss” to everything.

“I had never believed that if you are on the same management team and you think differently about something, then one has to convince the other to change their mind. Because look, when you do that you are paying someone to do what they think is right, and then you try to convince them to do what they don’t think is right. Sooner or later a conflict ends up breaking out,” Jobs assured the MIT students.

According to Jobs, the best strategy to reach the correct decisionIt is not about managers giving in to others’ arguments about whether they are wrong or not. The key is to get them all together in a room and make a consensual decision in which everyone gives in a little, smoothing over the edges, but without giving up what they think is right.

This idea is based on recognizing that well-paid managers must think independently, generating debates that avoid costly mistakes and promote better collective results.

The NeXT Eight

At NeXT, Jobs formed a team of eight managers who were in charge of precisely that: opposing him when his point of view was not appropriate and debating the important decisions of the company. This group did not debate minor day-to-day issues, where they had full decision-making capacity, but rather focused on critical issues for the company that allowed them advance aligned.

“We pay people a lot of money and we expect them to tell us what to do. So you shouldn’t do certain things if there are people who don’t agree with it,” Jobs reflected to the students.

According to Jobs, the “NeXT eight” They didn’t spend the day together debating decisions, but rather focused on the really important ones. “We can have about 25 things to decide on in a year, that’s not many,” Jobs insisted, because they knew exactly what decisions should be made by unifying common points of view, not the opinion of a single person, no matter how much that of the boss.

In this way, they avoided future conflicts by ensuring that everyone involved in the execution shared the vision, strengthening the commitment and involvement of the group.

His best school was Apple

Although Apple was not Jobs’ only business success (he was in charge of convert to Pixar into the animation giant that it is today), without a doubt the company with the bitten apple logo was his best business school.

During his time at Apple, Jobs learned to adopt a long-term leadership vision with your team. To do this, he had to repress his famous tendency to micromanage his employees by resisting the impulse to correct errors immediately so that the teams they made mistakes and they would learn for themselves.

“When I see something that is not being done well, my first instinct is not to fix it. In other words, we are building a team that is going to do great things over the next decade, not just this year,” said the Apple founder.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy summarized in one sentence what Steve Jobs wanted to convey to the MIT students who attended that conference in 1992: “An intelligent man is one who knows how to be smart enough to hire people smarter than him”, although Jobs had probably added the tagline “…and he listens to them.”

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Image | Bernard Gotfryd (The United States Library of Congress)