Steve Jobs hired some of the best employees at any company in the world, and he says there was something common to many of them.
Steve Jobs said that the best people don’t need to be managed. “ The greatest people are self managing,” he had said in an interview. “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,” he said.
“What they need is a common vision. And that’s what leadership is. What leadership is, 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,” he explained.
“We wanted people that were insanely great at what they did. But we’re not necessarily those seasoned professionals, who had at the tips of their fingers and in their passion, the latest understanding of where technology was and what we could do with that technology. And who wanted to bring that to lots of people,” he added.
“So, the neatest thing that happens is when you get a core group of ten great people, it becomes self policing as to who they let into that group. So I consider the most important job of someone like myself is recruiting,” he said.
Steve Jobs seemed to be saying that employees who ended up making the most impact didn’t need to be managed, or told how to do things. All leadership teams needed to do was to tell them what their overall vision was, and they could then executive it independently, and figure out how to get past problems and roadblocks on the way. Thus leaders chiefly had two jobs — hiring such people who were experts in their field who wouldn’t need to be managed, and then communicating their vision to them. These employees would then what was required to take the company to where it needed to be.