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In an exclusive interview, Executive Central asked Sydney

Finkelstein about the Superboss phenomenon, and its

potential for transforming talent management and employee

engagement.

What do couturier Ralph Lauren, Oracle founder Larry Ellison

and filmmaker George Lucas have in common? According

to Dartmouths Professor Sydney Finkelstein, they are all

superbosses: leaders who know how to identify, motivate and

nurture talent, drive outstanding performance and help others

accelerate their careers. As his 2016 book Superbossesbecomes a global best seller, we spoke to Finkelstein to see if

we can all become superbosses.

How do you dene a superboss, and what sortof evidence tells you that a leader belongs in thatcategory?

I did a genealogical study very much looking at the senior

executives in industry over a period of time looking at who

they had worked for and their careers, and mapping it all out,

and it turns out that you can often trace the genesis of their

career back to one or two people who have had a tremendous

influence in developing talent. People like Ralph Lauren, AliceWaters or Bonnie Fuller, have created whole diasporas of high

achievers. That genealogy is really definitional in relation to

this whole analysis.

Finkelstein characterizes superbosses as being passionate,

fearless, envisioning and innovative. Superbosses recruit

in unconventional ways: Ralph Lauren once famously hired

a woman he met in a burger restaurant because he was

captivated by the creative and unique way in which she was

dressed.

They give personalized attention to key talent, building teams

that are both collegiate and competitive, facilitating a flow of

talent. They develop a master-apprentice relationship, with a

coaching and mentoring approach that is both high touch and

high delegation. When its someones time to move on, the

superboss maintains the connection as valuable alliance and

network building.

While superbosses have share common traits, they are di-

verse in personality and style. I identified three types: peo-

ple-focused nurturers, who have a mentoring mindset; icono-

clasts, who have a single-minded passion for their business;

and inglorious bastards, who just want to win.

Are superbosses just doing what normal leaders

do and doing it better - or is it a completely differentparadigm?

Its both. It depends on the type of superboss. Nurturers are

probably most like regular leaders, doing more of what really

good bosses do. Being a superboss is partly a matter of em-

phasis, going deeper into coaching and mentoring. But then

theyre also doing things are quite differently from standard

leaders, whether its customizing how they manage people,

conveying and building an uncompromising, powerful vision,

or unleashing creativity.

To what extent is this a culturally bounded

phenomenon? Does the superboss phenomenon,arise out of American culture?

The cultural aspect was part of the research project, and is

accelerating right now. Using the same methods I used for

some of the big US companies I set out to look for superboss-

es in China and India. What I came across was a dominance

of family business: this is much more prevalent in these

countries than it is in the US. Its a different scenario: people

accelerating careers arent going anywhere, because theyre

going to be taking over the family company. Nevertheless a lot

of the superboss playbook can help groom that next gener-

ation of family talent much more effectively. Thats some of

the work were doing right now, not just in China and India butalso in many parts of the world.

My feeling is that in every culture there will be some contex-

HOW TO BE A SUPERBOSS:Sydney Finkelstein on Nurturers, Iconoclasts

and Inglorious Bastards

For more information on Executive Central Programscontact:Glenn Ball|E:[email protected]|M:61 (0) 412 100 727 or

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tualizing of these ideas. Although were still working with the

data, a philosophical perspective would be that around theworld we see much more similarity than we do difference in

terms of human thinking and behaviour. If you think about how

old modern man is and how our brains have evolved through

millennia, we are much more similar than we are different.

One of the characteristics youve talked aboutis a master-apprentice relationship. Do someindustries and companies lend themselves to thisconcept more than others? Ralph Lauren and thefashion business would be an obvious site for thiskind of relationship, but what about a monolithicorganization such as IBM?

Superbosses strive to be very aggressive in trying to flatten

hierarchies and not let bureaucracy get in the way. They

want to get close to people and dont like formalities to get

in the way. Theres an entire generation of companies who

are very good at this: leading edge high-tech companies

such as Google and Facebook are very good at maintain-

ing flatter and perhaps more plastic structures.

Superbosses can certainly exist up and down the hierar-

chy of big organizations. I was not interested in looking

for them in the middle of a big company because it would

be extremely difficult for me to find them. That would be a

different research process. Thats why I relied on some very

well known people, because theres a paper trail out there

its relatively easy to find out who the big influencers are.

But the master-apprentice approach works at any level a

middle manager could do it.

When Im doing book signings, so many of the people

ask me to sign over the book to their superboss manager.

This person is most often a middle manager in a relatively

unknown company, so being a superboss is certainly not

restricted to celebrity leaders. A middle manager could

easily use these techniques with their direct reports and

maybe another level down.

Superbosses use some unconventional practices for

recruitment and management of talent. Should wejust throw out the conventional rulebook on talentmanagement?

I think its true that the HR world, including talent development,

has become very conventional and standardized. Superboss-

es certainly do things differently.

I think if youre hiring 1000 people for a company you cant

adopt superboss practices for all 1000 - it would be too chaot-

ic. However there should be some room there for freelancing,

for example that some people could get pushed 2-3 levels up.

This would be unheard of in a conventional career ladder.

The superboss playbook provides a counterpoint to conven-

tional human resource management. If you look at enterpriseand organizational life around the world, and par ticularly in

advanced economies, the amount of innovation in so many

areas like supply chain management, marketing, customer ex-

perience, has been stunning, and driven by digital revolutions.

Whats the part of the organization with the least innovation?

HR. And whats the single most important aspect of the orga-

nization people!

There has been little or no change in HR practices. When you

talk to a CEO today and you ask, What are your pain points?

its still about finding and developing great people. HR prac-

tices havent helped. Maybe its about time to try something a

little bit different.

The majority of your examples of super bosses aremales. Why is that?

There are many more white men in my study. It wasnt by

design. I looked far and wide. There werent nearly as many

women as men at very senior levels. The thing is, you have to

have been in a position of senior responsibility for a decade

or two to develop this genealogical track record of spawning

talent, and not nearly as many women have been around long

enough to have developed it. Its the same story for diverse

ethnicities.



E X E C U T I V E

C E N T R A L

HOW TO BE A SUPERBOSS:

Sydney Finkelstein on Nurturers, Iconoclasts and Inglorious Bastards

Superbosses possess an energy about them. They are spicy, interesting, and exuberant all because they

make no pretenses. When youre around people like this you cant help but be energized.FINKELSTEIN


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This is not to say women and others arent superbosses

but just that in terms of my research design and data

collection, it was hard to establish the evidence. Sheryl

Sandberg, for example, may well be a superboss, but she

hasnt been around for all that long, so its harder to track a

diaspora of leaders generated from her leadership. In 10

years Ill get a better picture.

Do women behave differently? In terms of the data I have, I

didnt see any difference in terms of the superboss playbook.

But admittedly at this point there is a small sample size for

women. Id anticipate that there would be differences but I

dont know what they are at this point. Interestingly the people

I talk to at book signings and other events often mention a

woman as being their superboss manager.

If you were running a workshop on superbosses, whatwould be some actionable ideas youd want them totake away?

One idea is to become a talent-spotter. You can train people

on your team to do this. Thats an easy one. Part of this is

about consciously looking for people in untapped talent pools.

Everyone should be doing this.

Also you could do an audit of where you and your company

are looking for talent. Universities? Linkedin? Its too easy to

get into the habit of using the same one or two independent

recruiters. Ask yourself, how do we know we have that right?

Its important to add one or two sources and take one or two

out, regularly.

Do companies evaluate their sources of talent? Which are the

most fruitful? They probably dont! Personally Id like to know

which recruitment methods/providers are producing good

outcomes for me. Thats something any company can do.

Another thing you could do is think about how you manage

people: the way we manage people is far behind the way we

look after our customers.

Why dont we see more customization ofmanagement?

Its a good question to ask. When you think about looking after

customers, its an area that has exploded around methodol-

ogies and segmentation, tracking individual behavior online

and predicting what will interest you. Management of people

is so far behind customer engagement in terms of custom-

ization. If we believe that the most important people are our

customers and our people were doing a lot for the custom-

ers, why not our people? So many people score low in these

engagement surveys its a scandal in my opinion that so

few people have a sense of engagement at work when you

spent so much time there. We can put a lot more thought and

creativity into how we manage and lead people.

What do you think of the current Presidentialcandidates? Is there a superboss amongst them?

Trump is an anti-superboss in some ways. I dont think that

there is any one of these candidates that is a superboss. I

mention Hillary Clinton in the book because she - and Bill - are

exceptional at building and leveraging a network. Its ironic

because shes been criticized for that network. I dont think

there are many CEOs who would say that having a powerful

network that you can leverage is a bad idea. However when it

comes to politics, everything gets turned on its head.

Edward Kennedy would make it a practice to find young

talent; training them in his office for a while and then helping

them get a great job in the administration. Dozens or even

hundreds of people owed their career success to Ted Kenne-

dy. I dont think that the Clintons have done it quite that well,

but maybe they have.

I wonder I think around the world there is a tendency to

elect the person who is going to change their situation if

theyre not happy with it. Key to Trumps success is that a

lot of people have been left behind in Americas economic

development over the last couple of decades. Someone

who comes in with a big change agent persona, for example

Barack Obama, is very attractive. Does that make that person

a superboss? Id say not necessarily.



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HOW TO BE A SUPERBOSS:

Sydney Finkelstein on Nurturers, Iconoclasts and Inglorious Bastards

finkelstein-flyer_v1.pdf

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