An Excerpt from You're the Boss
Executive coach Sabina Nawaz offers a guide on gracefully managing the pressures of power, helping readers become the leaders they aspire to be and whom others are excited to work with.
Stepping into a management role is often the rewarding culmination of years of hard work and commitment. However, executive coach Sabina Nawaz points out that while many managers fulfill their responsibilities adequately, they still possess a considerable amount of untapped potential. Unlocking this potential can foster an inspiring environment for their teams to thrive.
In her new book, You're the Boss, Nawaz pulls from data and stories shared by executives at major companies and organizations like Google, Nordstrom, and the United Nations to explore what enables leaders to reach their full potential. In the following excerpt, Nawaz highlights how prioritizing the success of one's team over personal ambition helps everyone succeed together.
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Redefining Success
How do you define success?
For most ambitious individuals on their way up, success means generating excellent work and garnering the attention and rewards for it. While we ideally strove to collaborate and be someone our peers ultimately wanted to work for (a proven marker of a successful boss), our focus was naturally and rightly on our work, our path, our ascension. Success meant us personally kicking ass on our individual career path. That drive to stand out is not selfish, but understandable as we compete to be the winner who will get promoted.
Yet success as a boss is a very different animal.
As I tell many of my clients, it’s no longer all about you, sunshine. When you become the manager of a team, your success now derives from their success. The goal is not to burnish your brilliance but to empower them to feel brilliant. Showcasing your output may be what got you where you are, but now you need to rewire who gets showcased and what “output” means. Recalibrating to focus on driving your team’s success is the critical distinction between being a standout employee and a standout boss.
Before, your mission was to generate the work. Now, however, your mission is to create and hold the container for others to generate their best work. By “container,” I mean the larger goal, the desired outcome, the nonnegotiables as well as sufficient psychological safety. As the powerful force operating behind the scenes, you accelerate and activate the work of others. For instance, before becoming the boss, you may have had to create the slide deck for a client presentation. Now your job is to give your team clear guidance on the objective and parameters for that slide deck so they can do the hands-on work to meet that goal. That’s what strategic thinking means. It means being able to step back, see the bigger picture, and drive the entire mission and team toward the greater desired outcome. Rather than manage every detail and issue as you once did, you empower them to manage those details and issues. Your job is no longer to work solo with laser-focused determination to ascend but to set the North Star to empower your team to rise along with you.
Sharing the limelight benefits you as well as your team. An extensive study done by Yuan Zou and Ethan Rouen at Harvard Business School showed that managers who elevate others experience greater rates of employee retention and are twice as likely to rise to the ranks of CEO. Having said that, shifting from being the star player to the coach can be challenging, as we are hardwired to protect our relevance and avoid our own corporate mortality. Many of us think it’s a zero-sum game: if they shine, I’ll be dulled by comparison. There’s an inherent scarcity built into the ascension mindset, as there can be only one best.
Take Armond, for instance. As the managing director of a design team at a toy manufacturer, he was asked to give a report to the CEO summarizing what each of his direct reports had accomplished or issues they’d dealt with that past week. His 360 revealed a habit of positioning innovations from his team as his own, both subtly and overtly. When I presented that information to Armond, he offered up a common justification: “If I’m just the person who passes along the information and approves paperwork, what’s my contribution here?”
Armond poses a good question. If we allow our team to shine, how do we stand out? If we delegate, what’s our value? How do we stay relevant at the top while empowering those who work for us?
The answer is to shift from a scarcity mindset to one of abundance.
To understand and cultivate an abundance mindset, we first need to get our heads around what scarcity looks and feels like. Scarcity isn’t always about money. Scarcity in our professional lives is a fear of not enough to go around: not enough opportunities, recognition, connections, or rewards. Scarcity is grabbing all the goodies and guarding our treasures—from our contacts to our knowledge and ideas—to keep our singular edge.
Scarcity is competing. Abundance, on the other hand, is collaborating. An abundance mindset means soliciting ideas and input from your team, freely offering up positive feedback, coaching your team to be their best, and sharing your ideas, your contacts, your expertise, and yes, the limelight. A scarcity mentality clings to an “it’s me or them” dynamic, whereas an abundance one makes room for others to ascend along with you. The truth is that there is far more space at the top than you think.
Excerpted from You’re the Boss: Become the Manager You Want to Be (and Others Need) by Sabina Nawaz. Copyright 2025 © by Sabina Nawaz. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, LLC.
