Superhero School

“Build a team that deliv­ers bet­ter results than you, with­out you.” — Chap­ter 10, Your Oxy­gen Mask First

I have the great for­tune to work with many CEOs and exec­u­tives who are seen in the same light as super­heroes. They are smart, dri­ven, sol­id peo­ple who have the abil­i­ty to solve chal­leng­ing prob­lems and cre­ate incred­i­ble results when it mat­ters most.

We idol­ize the super­heroes in our cul­ture. The ath­lete, the CEO or exec­u­tive with an out­stand­ing record of suc­cess. The work­ing par­ent who rais­es a fam­i­ly, thrives in their career and con­tributes to the community.

They are role mod­els for excel­lence and the capa­bil­i­ty of the human spir­it, and all of us can be inspired by what they create.

The down­side is that we mis­tak­en­ly believe that suc­cess only looks like a soli­tary, moti­vat­ed per­son who works hard to make a dif­fer­ence in the world. But, soon­er or lat­er, these super­heroes hit a ceil­ing because one per­son can only do so much.

Super­hero Syndrome

I worked with an amaz­ing exec­u­tive – a guy who could make things hap­pen like I’ve nev­er seen.

He was the best of the best – and even had the Super­man cuf­flinks to his match his per­sona. He had a large team but kept max­ing out because he thought he was the super­hero. The per­son who had to car­ry the weight of the world on his shoulders.

After seri­ous­ly burn­ing out for the third time, we worked on how he could do things dif­fer­ent­ly. And I got him to clear­ly see that his job wasn’t to do it all. It was to build team of super­heroes who could earn their own their super­hero acces­sories. He need­ed to switch his ener­gy to how the peo­ple on his team could grow their powers.

I got through to him using the metaphor of par­ent­ing. He could be the best dad ever to his kids, but they wouldn’t be the best ver­sion of them­selves and strong, capa­ble adults if he did every­thing for them. His job, as a par­ent, was to make them strong, inde­pen­dent, and equal­ly or more capa­ble than him.

He got it and, with­in a cou­ple of years, had built a team of super­heroes who were just crush­ing all their projects and cre­at­ing leg­endary achieve­ments of their own.

The Chal­lenge

• Where do you notice that you (or some­one on your team) are stuck in the mind­set of being a superhero?
• What can you do to shift that and put the ener­gy into build­ing a team of superheroes?

PS – For more insight — and some prac­ti­cal tech­niques — read Chap­ter 10 of my book, Make Your­self Useless.