On her list of America’s best bosses, Mary Corbitt Clark did not include herself.

Instead Clark, the executive director of Evanston-based Winning Workplaces, commits herself to recognizing great bosses in other small businesses across the country.

The “Best Bosses” list, which appears in today’s issue of Fortune Small Business magazine, highlights managers who have created innovative and productive workplaces, Clark said. She chose a group of six bosses with different managerial styles in order to show a variety of paths to success.

“There’s a saying that good families aren’t very interesting, but bad ones are very unique,” Clark said. “That’s not true with businesses. Organizations are all unique — good, bad or indifferent.”

Clark said she also wanted to represent the wide range of people that lead today’s successful small businesses.

“We were really trying to identify different companies in different industries led by people who look different,” she said. “You’ll notice that half of them are women.”

Although the “Best Bosses” have diverse backgrounds, Clark said all of them have created workplaces that promote employee satisfaction and independence. This is consistent with the mission of Winning Workplaces, a nonprofit organization that helps small and midsize businesses create “people-friendly” workplaces.

Clark said she believes respecting and empowering employees are keys to running a successful business.

“We strongly support open-book management so that employees know what the issues are,” she said. “In a successful business, the employee comes to work every day wanting to do a good job.”

Ellyn Spragins, an editor-at-large for Fortune who collaborated with Winning Workplaces on the “Best Bosses” project, said today’s small business owners are more savvy than those in the past.

“Unlike years past when small businesses were owned by mom-and-pop or family operations, (small-business owners) are extremely educated and many have experience in the corporate world,” Spragins said.

Spragins said she chose to work with Winning Workplaces because of the Evanston company’s sophisticated view of business.

“We needed a partner that would be very sophisticated in understanding what works on a theoretical level, as well as a group that has hands-on experience in business,” Spragins said.

That experience comes from chairman Kenneth Lehman and the Lehman family, which provided start-up funding for Winning Workplaces. The Lehman family was a co-owner of Fel-Pro Inc., an auto-parts manufacturer based in Skokie, which was ranked fourth on Fortune Magazine’s 1998 list of the 100 best places to work.

Winning Workplaces is a great company in its own right, said Barbara Wicker, director of communications for the Greater Chicago Food Depository, whose executive director, Michael P. Mulqueen, was honored on the “Best Bosses” list.

“We think (Winning Workplaces is) a really remarkable organization because of the standards they set and the examples they provide of a wide range of companies with successful business practices,” Wicker said.

Janet Chang, Medill ’03, worked on the “Best Bosses” story as an intern for Winning Workplaces this summer. She said learning about employee-friendly companies gave her hope for her future.

“It’s great to see companies actually care about making their employees happy, especially in this economy,” she said.