But if you take this route—if you go around your boss and start making a fuss all over the company—make sure the issues you’re raising are not about yourself.

I remember we had a huge all-hands meeting at Apple once—these meetings would only happen two, maybe three times a year. And a guy stands up during the Q&A and starts asking Steve Jobs why he didn’t get a raise or a good review. Steve looks at him in stunned disbelief and says, “I can tell you why. Because you’re asking this question in front of ten thousand people.”

He was fired shortly thereafter.

So don’t be that guy.

6.2. The Board

“Good CEOs walk in with a presentation of where the company was, where it is now, and where it’s headed this quarter and in the years to come. They tell the board what’s working but they’re also transparent about what isn’t and how they’re addressing it. They present a fully formed plan that the board can question, object to, or try to modify. Things might get a little heated, a little bumpy, but in the end everyone walks out of the meeting understanding and accepting the CEO’s vision and the company’s path forward.

Then there are the great CEOs. With great CEOs the meeting is smooth as butter.

Plenty of people warned me that the worst thing I could do was let Steve into the company, that he would bully me and everyone else. I always said the same thing: “How can Steve Jobs coming into our company not be a good thing? Even if it comes at my expense? Who wouldn’t want Steve Jobs to have influence over how a company is run?” I wasn’t worried about how he would act, and I was confident that if he did do something that was out of line, I could call him out on it. He was quick to judge people, and when he criticized, it was often quite harsh. That said, he came to all the board meetings and actively participated, giving the kind of objective criticism you’d expect from any board member. He rarely created trouble for me. Not never but rarely.

I’m comforted by something I’ve come to believe more and more in recent years—that it’s not always good for one person to have too much power for too long. Even when a CEO is working productively and effectively, it’s important for a company to have change at the top. I don’t know if other CEOs agree with this, but I’ve noticed that you can accumulate so much power in a job that it becomes harder to keep a check on how you wield it. Little things can start to shift. Your confidence can easily tip over into overconfidence and become a liability. You can start to feel that you’ve heard every idea, and so you become impatient and dismissive of others’ opinions. It’s not intentional, it just comes with the territory. You have to make a conscious effort to listen, to pay attention to the multitude of opinions. I’ve raised the issue with the executives I work most closely with as a kind of safeguard. “If you notice me being too dismissive or impatient, you need to tell me.” They’ve had to on occasion, but I hope not too often.

Leadership can be a tough and lonely position, even in the best of times, but it’s especially isolated when you want to make changes. You can’t and shouldn’t try to do it all yourself.

You need someone trustworthy with whom you can brainstorm, discuss sensitive personnel decisions, test the waters, and gather opinions in situations when people might not be completely honest and forthcoming with the CEO. You need someone discreet whom you can turn to during the “what do I do now?” moments that hit everyone at some point. Call it partner or confidant, the position can be second in importance only to you.