Steve Jobs: Inspiration or Task Master?
Posted on October 08, 2012 by Paul Monahan, One of Thousands of Performance Coaches on Noomii.
What was Steve jobs really like? A Great Inspirational leader? Or the Best Task Master ever?
My clients and I spend a lot of time talking about a concept called Core Energy Leadership, which is centered upon seven levels of core thought which either serve us, or not throughout the day. I thought it would be fun to look at Steve Jobs, and discuss how his leadership engagement style served him at Apple ( or maybe did not).
One of the fascinating things about reading the Steve Jobs biography was learning the range of emotions that Jobs would go through in any given day. He could experience the euphoria of launching a project in one minute, and the anger of battling with a competitor in the very next.
But as a leader…did he INSPIRE higher levels of core thought? And if he did, HOW did he do that? Or did he simply ride his team(s) so hard that they HAD to give him what he wanted.
I believe that those around him would acknowledge a little of both. Inspiration from the many visionary ideas that seemed to resonate with consumers. Fear and pleasing when Jobs flew into caustic and catabolic engagements and went into task-master role.
For example, he often insisted that people could do something that they believed they could not. He was a master at seeing possibility in others that they could not see. (Level 5, Anabolic) One could argue, however that he didn’t exactly INSPIRE high performance, he DEMANDED it…which is more Level 2 Catabolic.
Guy Kawasaki, author and former Apple executive worked for Jobs twice. I asked him recently why Apple engineers were able to produce so many incredible successes. He said: " We lived in fear of Steve."
So was it simply that he created a culture whereby he got great results from the beatings? In one sense …YES. His highly-catabolic style was (at least early on) inflicted on a group of highly-intelligent, yet sometimes socially awkward people who wanted a charismatic leader to follow. So they put up with his Catabolic leadership. Or they left.
But most leaders work in more dynamic settings where Catabolic leadership does not serve them.
It turns out that most of the people who were INSPIRED by Jobs were not inspired through their engagements with him, but rather by the example he was to them of what it meant to be a visionary, and to see what is TRULY possible.
