What is the "best" way to lead others? The answer may surprise you.

The basis for powerful, effective leadership comes from within—from understanding the people, ideas, and events that have shaped your worldview and how these influences express themselves in your leadership style. In Manage Yourself to Lead Others, leadership expert Margaret Andrews helps you understand yourself and translate this understanding into effectively managing yourself, leading others, working with your boss, and making better decisions.

Andrews has taught thousands of executives in her professional development course at Harvard, and she shares her insights, practical tips, and questions for reflection here. This book will allow you to identify the kind of leader you want to be, the behavioral patterns that help get you there or stand in your way, and what it takes to develop new leadership capabilities. Whether you've just been promoted or you've been leading a team for decades, Manage Yourself to Lead Others is essential reading for all leaders.

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The Best Person You’ve Ever Worked For

Let’s do a brief exercise that will take less than five minutes and give you a better sense of what effective leadership looks and feels like. 

Begin by thinking of the best manager you’ve ever worked for.  

Before reading on, make sure that you have a person in mind and just one person. It might be the person you report to right now, the person right before that, the manager you had in your first job, or anyone else you’ve worked for during your career. Make sure that it’s someone you know and have worked with, not a historical figure or someone famous you would like to work with or anyone else that you don’t know. It should be someone you have worked directly for, not someone else in the organization you wish you had worked for. 

Now that you have this one person in mind, think of the reasons they were (or are) the best person you’ve ever worked for. What is it about them that made you choose them over other people you’ve worked for? Write down all the reasons—the big ones and the small ones—why you chose this person over all the other people you’ve worked for. Try for a list of at least eight reasons. 

I’ve run this exercise with thousands of people over the years and have heard many reasons that someone might be our Best Boss. It could be that your Best Boss was the smartest person you’ve ever known or worked with. It could be that they were the very best at some technical or functional skill that made them succeed at their job (e.g., programming, accounting, bench science, search-engine marketing, fundraising, risk assessment, technical writing, financial-statement analysis, carpentry, engineering, sales, surgery, etc.). It could be that they cared about you as an individual, challenged you, were good at listening, had a good sense of humor, pushed you to be better, supported your decisions, had vision, recognized unfulfilled potential in you, or nurtured your career. Or a host of other reasons. What are the reasons behind why you chose the person you did as your Best Boss? Before reading on, create a list of all the reasons—the traits, attributes, and behaviors behind why you chose this person as your Best Boss.  

Now go back through that list and select the top three reasons. Exactly three. No more and no less. These are the three reasons that really made the difference in how they led and that caused you to choose them over other managers you’ve worked with. To get the most out of this exercise, please make sure to have your list of three reasons before reading on. 

Now that you have your top three, let’s look at these traits, attributes, and behaviors of your Best Boss. Answers for this exercise typically fall into three main categories: 

• Intelligence. If you thought, “This is the smartest person I’ve ever worked with” or “This was the smartest person on the team,” you’re noting an intelligence attribute. How many of your top three reasons relate to this person’s intelligence as being a factor in why you chose this person as your Best Boss? 
• Technical or functional skills. Your Best Boss may have been very good, perhaps the best, at some of the “hard skills,” those technical or functional skills that helped them succeed in their job. Whether it’s auditing or animal husbandry, drafting or data science, policing or programming, research or retirement planning, marketing or machining, you may have chosen the person you did because you admired their technical or functional skills. How many of your top three reasons relate to this person’s nonmanagement-related job skills? 
• Interpersonal skills. These skills go by many names, including soft skills, relationship skills, smart skills, emotional intelligence, and even superpowers. These are the skills that are key to forming effective, sustainable relationships, the human-to-human skills that help us live and work with others. Answers in this category may be about how they cared about you, coached or mentored you, could build rapport with people, were open to new ideas, could find common ground between people in conflict, communicated well, gave you a lot of autonomy in how you did your work, were politically astute, or a host of other answers. Generally, if an answer doesn’t belong in the intelligence or technical/functional (“hard”) skills categories, it belongs in the interpersonal skills bucket. How many of your top three reasons relate to this person’s interpersonal skills? 

Do you have one of your traits and attributes in each of these categories, or is one category overrepresented in your responses? If you are like most people, the third category, interpersonal skills, is overrepresented. 

I’ve run this exercise countless times in classes and programs across the world, and the answers are always weighted toward interpersonal skills rather than intelligence or hard skills. By a very large margin. This is true across countries, industries, functional areas, genders, leadership levels, and age groups. Although the weightings may change slightly in any given group, the overall trend is the same, with a cumulative average of 85 percent of reasons that someone is a Best Boss coming from the interpersonal skills category. The remaining 15 percent of answers are relatively evenly split between the intelligence and hard skills categories. Interpersonal skills are always the most important factor, by far, in every group I’ve ever worked with. 

About the Author

Margaret C. Andrews is a seasoned executive, academic leader, speaker, and instructor. She has created and teaches a variety of leadership courses and professional and executive programs at Harvard University and is the founder of the MYLO Center, a private leadership development firm. Her clients include Amazon, Citi, the United Nations, Walmart, and Wayfair. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.