In 2009, investors asked Tim Cook questions about what would happen when Steve Jobs was no longer Apple's CEO. He responded with the Cook Doctrine, one of the best articulations of how culture serves as a company's DNA that transcends any one individual leader. The Cook Doctrine applies to the current CEO transition from Tim Cook to John Ternus as surely as it did to the transition from Jobs to Cook. Here is what Cook said back in 2009:
We believe that we're on the face of the Earth to make great products, and that's not changing.
We're constantly focusing on innovating.
We believe in the simple, not the complex.
We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.
We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us.
We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in a way that others cannot.
And frankly, we don't settle for anything less than excellence in every group in the company, and we have the self-honesty to admit when we're wrong and the courage to change.
And I think, regardless of who is in what job, those values are so embedded in this company that Apple will do extremely well.
– Tim Cook, Acting Apple CEO, January 2009 FQ1 2009 Earnings Call
When the DNA of a company is strong, relationships, not command and control, are how things get done. How does this work in a corporate hierarchy? Apple's culture is one that insists that leaders relinquish unilateral authority to manage this tension between relationships and hierarchy. Even though Steve Jobs often gets invoked in descriptions of "founder mode," this is an incorrect understanding of him as a leader and of Apple's culture.
I described how this works in Radical Candor. In an interview with Terry Gross, Steve Jobs explained, "At Apple, we hire people to tell us what to do, not the other way around." He famously allowed his team to overrule his view that the company should not launch iTunes on Windows, back when Apple had only about 3% of the personal computer market. If he hadn't allowed himself to be overruled, Apple would likely not have built the iPhone or the iPad.
A colleague shared an anecdote about interviewing with Steve that illustrated why this was the case. My colleague asked Jobs several perfectly reasonable questions: "How do you envision building the team? How big will the team be?" Steve's curt response: "Well, if I knew the answer to all those questions, then I wouldn't need you, would I?" Borderline rude, but also empowering.
At Apple, a leader's ability to achieve results has a lot more to do with listening and seeking to understand than it does with telling people what to do; more to do with debating than directing; more to do with pushing people to decide than with being the decider; more to do with persuading than with giving orders; more to do with learning than with knowing. That was true under Jobs, under Cook, and will remain true under Ternus, even though each will have their own unique imprint on Apple. Apple's culture will evolve, even as it stays true to its DNA.
Much has been written about culture eating strategy for lunch. However, less has been written about how a culture gets created, where that DNA came from. What, exactly, can a leader do to create or change a culture? The culture of an organization is impacted, of course, by who the leader is as a person. But the culture of an organization also impacts the leader. An entrepreneur I know once told me that some days his company felt like a funhouse mirror—he saw himself reflected in it, not always in the way he would have chosen. He had to learn how to take conscious steps to have a positive and not a negative impact on his company's culture.
Apple's DNA changed with the change of leadership from Jobs to Cook. It will change again as a result of the transition from Cook to Ternus. And yet something of the DNA will stay the same because the culture impacts the leader as surely as the leader impacts the culture.
The leader has real human relationships with each of their direct reports, and these relationships impact both the leader and whether they are able to conduct their key responsibilities: to guide a team to achieve results. Culture emerges from these interactions between the leader's character, their relationship with each direct report, and how they conduct their responsibilities.
Here is a framework illustrating how this works:
A leader's job is to build trust with each direct report. If a leader has a big organization, they can't have real relationships with everyone. But they can with each person who reports directly to them. Relationships take time, and they don't scale. But they are core to a leader's job and have an enormous impact on the culture, and culture does scale. Like at many organizations, you couldn't get things done without strong relationships. This could feel hard, since saying "no" was such an important part of the company's DNA. Cook said "We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us." At Apple University I taught a class on saying no in a way that strengthens your relationships.
Relationships determine whether a leader can fulfill their three core responsibilities:
A leader has three main responsibilities: 1) to create a culture of feedback that will keep everyone moving in the right direction; 2) to build a cohesive team; and 3) to drive results collaboratively. There is a virtuous—or a vicious—cycle between a leader's ability to fulfill their responsibilities and their relationships.
Leaders build these relationships not by having endless work dinners that rob them of personal time, but by how they execute their responsibilities. And they can't fulfill their responsibilities without good relationships. They strengthen these relationships by learning the best ways to get, give, and encourage feedback; by putting the right people in the right roles on their team; and by achieving results collectively that they couldn't dream of individually. When a leader fails to give people the feedback they need to succeed in their work, or put people into roles on the team they don't want or aren't well-suited for, or push people to achieve results they feel are unrealistic, they erode trust.
A leader's relationships with their direct reports affect the relationships they have with theirs, and thus have an enormous impact on an organization's culture.
A leader's ability to build trusting personal connections with the people who report directly to them will determine the quality of everything that follows. Their relationships and their responsibilities reinforce each other positively or negatively, and ripple out to the rest of their organization. This dynamic is what drives a leader forward as a manager—or leaves them dead in the water.
Defining the boss-employee relationship is tricky, and there's not much guidance out there from the usual places we go to explore relationships: philosophy, novels, movies, and plays. This relationship is unlike any other. The role of "manager," though pervasive today, is a relatively new one in history, so this particular relationship was not described by ancient philosophers. It's definitely not any of the four loves described by the Greeks—not agape (god-human), not storge (parent-child), definitely not eros (lover-lover), but it's also not philia (friend-friend).
Even though almost everybody today has a boss at some point, the nature of this connection has gotten short shrift not just in philosophy, but also in literature, movies, and all the other ways we explore the relationships that govern our lives. It's important to fix that, because at the very heart of being a good boss, at the heart of our ability to create a culture that will scale and even outlive us, is a good relationship with each direct report today.
Put hierarchy in its place, but don't pretend it's not there. This relationship must be characterized by humanity, not hierarchy, although there's no sense pretending hierarchy doesn't come into play. This is why the relationship between boss and employee is so complicated.