Why we wrote this book

Think about the best boss you ever had. There’s a good chance you’re already smiling.

No one has a greater effect on your working life than your boss, and over a career that adds up to something enormous. Between us, we have spent more than fifty years coaching executives and sitting in the boss’s chair ourselves, and one kind of leader always stood apart. Not the most charismatic or the most credentialed. We came to call that person the Best Boss.

So we asked nearly a thousand people about theirs. What unites them is not who they are but how they lead. And nothing we found suggests they arrive fully formed: they are made through choices you can start making today.

That idea is the heart of this book. We focus on the positive effect of the one leader you remember most fondly. We tell their stories, and we make it concrete. Most importantly, we make it learnable.

Somewhere there is someone who will one day name you. The work of becoming that person begins now.