How to be better than 99% of bosses

Tell your team their superpowers

👋 Hi, it’s Greg and Taylor. Welcome to our newsletter on how to make high-stakes professional and personal decisions in your 30s.

In my first review with Greg, he did something a manager had never done for me. He told me what my superpower was.

He said I was world-class at very quickly getting enough (but not too much) data and information to build a plan and get a V1 stood up.

When he described it, I wasn’t surprised – I knew I was generally good at this. But I’d never had someone else articulate the skill so clearly, and highlight it as a personal differentiator and something I could use throughout my career.

Highlighting that superpower helped me in three ways:

1. It gave me the words and confidence to articulate it to others

2. It gave me context for why Greg was asking me to take on certain roles or projects

3. It helped me see how this superpower sometimes limits me (e.g., I can sometimes build the V1 plan and not come back to V2)

You can’t do this for everyone – not everyone has a superpower. But if you can articulate your high performers’ superpowers to them, you’ll be better than 99% of other managers, and give yourself a framework to assign them projects and give them feedback. And you’ll give them an unlock they can use again and again in their career.

– Taylor 

A superpower is a skill that most people don’t share

A superpower is a highly extensible skill that can be applied to many different situations or tasks and produces very high-quality outcomes.

Being a good writer is a strength. Being someone who can listen to someone else’s ideas for 15 minutes and then turn around those ideas into a very strong first draft in a few hours is a superpower.

Superpowers are differentiators – they’re a capability your direct report has that most other people don’t have. They’re usually the “why” behind the quality of work that high performers produce. Here are a few superpowers we’ve identified in individuals on our team:

• Productization: Someone who can quickly create structure and productize a vague idea into a template by putting a framework and constraints around it

• Seeing around corners: Someone who understands what will be needed for an initiative to succeed long before it comes up

• Organizational prowess: Someone who can look at a set of roles and a set of people — then match the right people into the right roles to get the outcome needed (very valuable in a startup)

• Resilience: Someone who can naturally hold the larger opportunity in mind and absorb the body blows of a startup – and model this behavior to others

• Finding leverage: Someone who can look at a workflow, and see places where a lot of short-term work will have massive gains in the long term (or won’t)

Every superpower, when leaned on too much, can become a blind spot. Seeing around corners can lead to constant second-guessing without an ability to commit. Great product thinkers sometimes over-templatize, or struggle to move outside the template when necessary. As a manager, you should highlight your direct report’s superpower and corresponding blind spot.

Why you should tell your team their superpowers

You put people in a better position to succeed when you tell them their superpower. They might be applying it to smaller projects now, but their superpower almost certainly has bigger implications for their career. 

Articulating their superpower lets your direct reports see beyond the immediate work and understand what will make them valuable long-term. This is essential for high performers – they have a higher ceiling for potential, and you need to help them meet that potential to retain them. 

It also gets you and your report on the same page. When you’re handing out assignments, you both know which ones will be easy for them and which will be a struggle. And you can provide context when giving negative feedback – “this is the flip side of your superpower, so it will be more difficult for you.” 

How to identify someone’s superpower

There are two steps to identifying your direct report’s superpower. 

First, you need to see that they’re consistently producing high-quality outcomes across a range of tasks. Sometimes this is obvious – someone on your team has become your go-to person. Other times, it’s a more junior employee showing signs of promise on the first 1-2 bigger projects you give them. Either way, you need to have worked with the employee for at least 3 months – it’s even easier if you’ve worked together for 6-12 months. 

Second, you need to identify the underlying behavior or way of working that’s producing these outcomes across different scenarios. So you need to actively work with this person. Don’t just ask them for deliverables. Instead, do a few working sessions with them, where you build the deliverable together. This can be over Zoom, on the phone, or in front of a white board. 

For example, after Greg and Taylor had worked together for a few months, he started bringing her problems that were less fleshed out and working through them on a whiteboard. This helped him see how Taylor thought and worked, including quickly pulling data and information from disparate sources, live as they worked. 

Once you’ve identified that superpower, tell your report. If their review is coming up, do it then, but if not, don’t wait for that. Once you’ve told them, consistently refer back to the superpower in 1:1s and future reviews.

Highlight where it’s helped them, and where their corresponding blind spot has hindered them. Look for projects that leverage this superpower, and tell your fellow leaders so they can do the same.

Our advice

People remember (and want to work for again and again) managers who see and articulate what’s special about them. Most managers don’t do this, so it’s an easy way to stand out and add outsized value to someone’s career.

This is hard – you can’t do it for your whole team. It also takes practice, and becomes easier after you’ve identified a few people’s superpowers. 

So choose one person on your team who’s producing great work, and start collaborating with them directly (rather than asking for completed work). After a few months, try to articulate their superpower. Bounce it off a few colleagues, and then tell it to them.  

To the next 10 years,
Greg & Taylor