Our Aspiration: More Best Bosses!
By this point in our book, we hope we have prompted you to deeply consider your own leadership style. We have offered up our Best Boss study insights, shared compelling stories, and provided opportunities to self-reflect on how your leadership behaviors align with our Best Boss model. In Chapter 9, we shared some specific ideas about how you can improve your people leadership skills. We considered ending our discussion there, satisfied with the prospect that we had the opportunity to influence many of you to become better individual bosses.
However, while there is nothing wrong with individual-by-individual incremental positive change, we have an additional, more ambitious goal. That is to encourage organizations of all kinds, shapes, sizes, and structures to transform their philosophy on how leaders lead others within their walls. To do this, we will first explore the ways in which an organization can better align and develop their leadership expectations and practices using our Best Boss framework. However, as you will see, there are limitations to how successful these strategies alone can be. Moving beyond the individual leader, we will investigate how economic and legal forces impact an organization’s decisions concerning leadership. Next, we will explore new thinking by business community leaders regarding the importance of considering the interests of multiple stakeholders versus shareholders alone in determining how companies invest. Finally, we will conclude with a provocation to CEOs and executive leadership on how to build the Best Boss brand within their organization.