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Ten Questions A Superboss Should Ask


Here are ten questions (or bundles of questions) you should ask yourself to ensure you are thinking and acting like a superboss. These are from Sydney Finkelstein's new book, Superbosses.

  1. Do you have a specific vision for your work that energizes you, and that you use to energize and inspire your team?
  2. How often do people leave your team to accept a bigger offer elsewhere? What's that like when it happens?
  3. Do you push your reports to meet only the formal goals set for the team, or are there other goals that employees sometimes also strive to achieve?
  4. How do you go about questioning your own assumptions about the business? How do you get your team to do the same about their own assumptions?
  5. How do you balance the need to delegate responsibilities to team members with the need to provide hands-on coaching to them? How much time do you usually spend coaching employees?
  6. When promoting employees, do you ever put them into challenging jobs where they potentially might fail? If so, how do you manage the potential risk? And what happens if they do fail?
  7. How much affection or connection do members of your team feel with one another? Do people tend to spend time out of the office socializing? What is the balance of competition and collaboration on the team?
  8. Do you continue to stay in touch with employees who have left to work elsewhere?
  9. Have any former employees of yours gone on to have particularly noteworthy careers, either within your organization or elsewhere? If so, how many? 
  10. What is the culture like in your team with respect to how much energy you devote to nurturing or developing individuals versus getting the job done?

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