SuperbossesHow Exceptional Leaders Master The Flow Of Talent

By Sydney Finkelstein

What common theme binds such disparate figures as fashion icon Ralph Lauren, football coach Bill Walsh, tech entrepreneur Larry Ellison and Star Wars director George Lucas?

They’re all what Sydney Finkelstein refers to as “talent magnets” - people who attract a disproportionately high number of brilliant employee protégés.

They and more than a dozen other figures, including TV personalities John Stewart and Oprah Winfrey, newspaper editor Gene Roberts, chef and restaurateur Alice Waters, and hedge fund titan Julian Robertson, have endowed their respective industries with an abundance of talent.

This handful of characters are Finkelstein’s “superbosses.” They stand out among thousands of other successful business people for their supreme ability to find and coach the best employees, while creating an environment in

www.thebusinesssource.com All Rights Reserved ©

which it’s pure delight to work.

Why is this important?

Because surveys show that most employees are disengaged and unhappy at work. So it’s fair to conclude that more firms will survive and prosper if superboss practices become more widespread.

And although at first sight superboss talents seem to be some sort of charismatic gift, they can actually be learned, so you too can become a superboss.

Sydney Finkelstein is a professor and director of the Center for Leadership at

Tuck Business School and is also the author of several best-selling business books, including Why Smart Executives Fail and Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions.

Common Characteristics Of Superbosses

For this book, Finkelstein interviewed scores of people who knew and worked with the superbosses whom he puts under the microscope, along with protégés who subsequently became movers and shakers in their respective industries.

He found that although every superboss is distinctively different from the others - some fierce, some gentle, some belligerent, some self-deprecating - they all shared certain common characteristics.

They were all extremely confident, even fearless, in promoting their ideas; they were all competitive by nature; and they were all creative and innovative visionaries.

They also exhibited great integrity in terms of their vision and their view of their role in achieving it - they were true to themselves, their beliefs and

their core values.

And they demonstrated authenticity - in Finkelstein’s words, “they let their personalities hang out.”

“Despite all the differences visible among superbosses, what truly united them more than anything were their actions,” he writes.

“Superbosses achieved seemingly impossible results because they didn’t hire, motivate, inspire, coach, develop, or fire their employees the way other bosses do.

“They had their own unique and often counterintuitive behaviors - a clear, powerful ‘playbook’ that allowed them to help others thrive. The great secret of superbosses ultimately wasn’t who they were. It was what they did.”

Hiring DifferentlyThe superboss approach to hiring often breaks

with the conventional HR practices of CV analysis and interviews.

A superboss may hire someone merely on a hunch, perhaps after a chance meeting, and may create a job for someone they admire even when there don’t happen to be any appropriate vacancies.

Ralph Lauren did this after admiring the attitude and clothing style - a man’s jacket and old corduroy pants - of Virginia Witbeck, a woman he met in a burger restaurant.

She became his muse, working in Lauren’s design department for four years without ever having a job title.

Lauren has also hired designers without even looking at their portfolios.

What he and other superbosses instinctively search for are individuals of unusual intelligence and originality, people driven to succeed and make

a difference, people with whom they can share a vision.

In other words, says Finkelstein, superbosses are looking for people who “get” what they’re trying to do. Lauren, for example, wanted all employees at every level to have a fashion sense and be able to say interesting things about clothes.

Superbosses suss out “their fit” through observation during work trials or through their non-conventional interview techniques.

At interviews, they might ask unexpected questions that candidates couldn’t possibly have prepared for - if there’s even a formal interview at all.

They might ask questions, as Oracle founder Larry Ellison used to instruct his recruiters to ask, like, “Are you the smartest person you know?”

If they said “yes,” they’d get a second interview. If they said “no,” they’d be asked, “Who is?”

Sometimes, Oracle would approach the individual whose name was given, and invite them for an interview!

Superbosses are also self-confident enough not to feel threatened. They want people who can be stars in their own right and they’re happy if someone has the potential to outshine them.

Real estate mogul Bill Sanders liked to talk about “how many people I have hired that were four times smarter than I was.”

Hiring Like A SuperbossWhat can you do to emulate the idiosyncratic, even eccentric, superboss hiring techniques?

First, don’t try to change everything your company does - certainly not at the outset - but rather dip your toe in the water of unorthodoxy.

So:

• Don’t eliminate prospective hires just because

of an unimpressive CV or lacking credentials.

• Don’t immediately abandon the interview process either. Instead, try to loosen it up, making it more informal.

• Unorthodox picks are a gamble so don’t use the tactic for every hire. Initially, just test your instincts on one or two.

• Let your team in on your new approach. Otherwise they might inadvertently sabotage your strange hiring choices.

Motivating To Do The ImpossibleFor superbosses, “good” is never good enough. They expect “outstanding” both of themselves and others. So they lead by example, while driving their people exceptionally hard.

As one protégé of Oracle founder Larry Ellison remarked, he knew how to “make exceptional people do the impossible.”

Says Finkelstein: “Superbosses want to see how far people can go. They treat staff like Olympic athletes, pushing them to the limit and beyond.”

It’s not unusual for superbosses to expect their disciples, like them, to work long hours and abandon the traditional notion of a work-life balance.

They want their protégés to believe that they can achieve what they’ve set out to do, inspiring them with their own self-confidence and their vision for the future.

One protégé of Bill Sanders explained: “(He) would lay out his vision and he would say, ‘I would like you to be a part of it.’ You were so honored to be asked to be part of this great vision that you just wanted to jump in and say, ‘Sign me up!’”

Motivating Like A Superboss“If you’re a boss focused on getting superior performance from your team and you’re struggling,

maybe it’s time to stop doing what doesn’t work and start doing something new,” Finkelstein suggests.

Begin by ensuring you’ve crafted a vision that will inspire and energize your team. Then, devote lots of time to communicating it. In the process, quiz employees about their opinions.

Make time to listen to their responses but also focus on improving their confidence by confirming they have the skills and abilities the tasks ahead require. Tell your protégés that they’re members of your “A” team.

Struggling with formulating your vision? Ask yourself these questions:

• Why does my organization exist?

• Why does my team exist?

• Can I communicate it succinctly and in a way that really hits home?

• Can I connect it to specific items on my agenda for this year, this quarter and this month?

Your goal shouldn’t be to inspire your people just because it might help your bottom line. Instead, it should be because you feel passionately about them and about your mission.

“In everything superbosses say and do around their protégés, they are authentic. They’re not reading from a script or playacting,” says Finkelstein.

Driving InnovationAlthough somewhat of a paradox, superbosses have on the one hand, an unshakeable, inspiring vision - the reason “why” the organization exists. This is not up for debate. But, on the other hand, they want employees to challenge and rethink everything else - the “how” of everything they do to fulfill that vision.

To inspire innovation, they encourage risk-taking and rule breaking plus they remove sanctions for failure, to mitigate the fear of failure. And they forbid anyone from resting on their laurels just because they succeeded at a particular task. They must constantly attack the next challenge.

“If superbosses fear anything,” the author writes, “it isn’t that they’ll go off the deep end with their innovations, but that they’ll stop innovating and get old and complacent.”

As a result, employees of superbosses get swept up in the tide of enthusiasm for innovation. The superboss’s mood is contagious. In fact, employees’ internalization of this drive can lead them to ultimately leave to follow their own ideas - an issue dealt with later in the book.

Fostering Creativity Like A SuperbossThe superboss ideal is to create an organization that never stops changing and innovating.

To do this in your own organization, start by encouraging your team to challenge the way projects are undertaken. Have them put forward their own ideas for improving processes.

One way to get the ball rolling is to have each member of your team write down the major assumptions behind, say, a particular project you’re currently working on.

What will happen is that they’ll each come up with different underlying ideas about the rationale behind the project and the variables on which it depends.

They’ll then realize there are a number of ways of thinking about the same problem. No single approach for how something is done is sacred - “anything can be changed if something better comes along.”

Fostering a mindset of change by encouraging challenges to the status quo can energize the

workforce. And this type of culture can attract even more creative people to the organization.

So many organizations are bound by the rules that no one dares challenge - the “undiscussables,” as Finkelstein calls them - but people will open up if you begin encouraging and rewarding them for raising tough issues.

You could also perform an audit of your own communications and attitudes, he suggests. Do you secretly regard some practices as sacred and unchangeable? Which ones?

“You can’t expect your reports to suggest ideas for reforming or improving established practices if you’re sending messages that discourage such efforts,” he warns.

A New Era Of ApprenticeshipThe concept of mentoring is well-known and widely practiced in many organizations. But Finkelstein broadens and deepens it to a level

more akin to the notion of apprenticeship.

He recalls the way that great historical, creative figures like Leonardo da Vinci learned their trade and developed their innovative thinking under the guidance of a “master” - Andrea del Verrocchio in the case of da Vinci.

This type of immersive, “on-the-job training” has largely disappeared today. But superbosses still provide it, exerting a powerful, almost parental influence on their protégés.

“By apprenticeship-style management, I’m talking about workplace relationships that are more sustained, all-encompassing, intense, and intimate than the best traditional corporate ‘mentorships’,” Finkelstein explains.

Superbosses even extend this interactive behavior to employees in all levels of their organization.

Take the case of food giant Kraft under the guidance of CEO Michael Miles during the 1980s.

One of his techniques was making himself unusually accessible to employees.

He would even pick someone at random every morning and invite them to his office for a chat. He would listen to their ideas and concerns and offer them advice.

His list of protégés reads like a who’s who of American consumer marketing, including the future CEOs of Mattel, Young & Rubicam, Gillette, Sears, Heinz, Hershey Foods, Quaker Oats, Marks & Spencer, 3M, CVS, and Campbell Soup.

In the normal corporate world, employees who want to speak to the boss, if that’s even feasible, have to book time. But superbosses are proactive, constantly mixing in with employees, getting to know them, letting them into their world and sometimes working alongside them.

Not surprisingly, then, many superbosses disdain hierarchies and bureaucracy, favoring a relatively

flat organization and unpretentious culture.

Like the great masters of the past, superbosses may convey ideas as “nuggets” of wisdom, but they also teach by simply being themselves and letting employees see them in action.

Teaching Like A Superboss“The apprenticeship model doesn’t need to be a substitute for what you’re already doing,” Finkelstein writes, “but rather it can be an enhancement, part of a rebalancing that might occur in how your workplace operates.”

Start by taking stock of what you currently do to guide employees and consider how you might improve that.

Perhaps experiment by having more direct contact with just one or two people in your organization, as well as making time to apply the well-known principle of “management by walking around” - being highly visible in the workplace.

By simply making more time to interact with employees and passing on the benefits of your knowledge and experience, you can make the workplace a happier, more productive place.

Guiding And Shaping CareersWe’ve already encountered one paradox in the management style of superbosses - their single-minded vision for the direction of an organization versus their willingness to encourage innovation and radical change to the way things are done.

In the same vein, superbosses also know when to be hands-on, almost to the level of micromanagement, and when to delegate tasks to others and stand back so they can get on with things.

In fact, they’ll take delegation to the extreme, often promoting people they admire into jobs that seem crazy and out of reach to others.

They hire people and then get out of the way,

demonstrating a deep, underlying trust that’s essential to effective delegation. At the same time, they hold protégés strictly accountable for their performance. It’s sink or swim.

“With so much responsibility on their shoulders and a clear sense of accountability, not to mention the trust of their superboss, protégés come away feeling a sense of their own power and worth,” the author notes.

And yet, the superboss knows when to step in and exert control. They stand back when all goes well, allowing employees to make and learn from mistakes (provided they acknowledge them), but if they don’t like what’s going on, they don’t hesitate to step in.

They see their role as coaching and passing on wisdom but ultimately they push protégés to take responsibility for their own development by focusing on learning and growth, asking questions

and actively trying to improve.

Shaping Career Growth Like A SuperbossYou can change the approach to typical career growth and development within your organization by stepping away from the traditional career-ladder model where people progress “safely” one rung at a time.

Some of the actions you might take include:

• Promoting a younger person, who isn’t “next in line” for a vacancy.

• Putting a talented person with an unusual background into an unexpected and challenging role.

• Identifying what help and support your direct reports need to progress into a higher role.

• Challenging yourself to delegate something you’d be inclined to do yourself.

• Ensuring you have succession plans in place for yourself and direct reports.

Give people the chance to succeed - but stand by in case things go awry.

Team BuildingYet another apparent paradox in the superboss playbook is their advocacy of teamwork, while also encouraging competition between individuals within a team.

The superboss has to achieve a balance between the two forces of collaboration and competition - knowing how and when to focus on one or the other.

In superboss organizations, colleagues compete with each other to perform at their best, yet they work closely together as a matter of routine when needed.

“(S)uperbosses understand that teams win more

than individuals do - that the potential of a group of immensely talented individuals is greater than the sum of its parts,” Finkelstein writes.

But they go further, encouraging teams to regard themselves as elite, almost cult-like – “chosen people” as Ralph Lauren would call them. Membership confers exclusivity, a feeling of having been selected by “the Great One.”

This generates what the author calls the cohort effect, where individuals learn to play off each other’s strengths, while they enjoy the fruits of comradeship and mutual support by spurring each other on.

As Paul McCartney said of John Lennon, “If I did something good, he’d want to do something better. It’s just the way we worked.”

Team Building Like A Superboss“The cohort effect is one of the strongest levers we have for developing talent, and it enables

superbosses to become magnets for future talent,” Finkelstein writes.

“What supremely talented person wouldn’t want to go to an organization where he or she would have a chance to brush up against and learn from other supremely talented peers?”

Accordingly, superbosses such as award-winning Philadelphia Inquirer and New York Times editor Gene Roberts, who spawned 16 Pulitzer Prizewinners, like to group their “all stars” together into a single team.

Research suggests the clustering competitive approach and the cohort effect foster growth of enterprise and talent.

“Why not structure work so as to spur competition?” the author asks. Or create forums where managers and other employees mingle to share ideas - and then publicly recognize top performers.

Collaboration and competition - superbosses seem to intuitively know that success relies on reconciling and balancing apparent opposites.

Networking For SuccessOne of the major issues that affect all superboss organizations is the outflow of talent. The more successful they are at encouraging the development of their protégés, the more likely these individuals will spread their wings, sooner rather than later.

But this is not, and should not be, a negative, Finkelstein stresses, because superbosses know how to exploit these transitions. So they welcome them.

Indeed, superbosses may go further and actively promote individuals’ careers outside the organization. Some have even been known to set up businesses for their protégés to run.

A classic example of the helpful approach is

Oprah Winfrey, who would regularly introduce new personalities on her show. If they did well, she’d offer them the chance to produce their own shows under her umbrella - as she did with Dr Phil, Rachael Ray, Suze Orman, Martha Beck and Dr. Oz.

One major benefit of this approach is networking - a sort of superboss’s club, an extended family of former protégés who stay in touch with each other.

With these networks, superbosses maintain open channels of communication that could lead to new business opportunities and exchanges of ideas and information.

Networks also benefit superbosses by enhancing their reputation through word of mouth, increasing their prestige and influence - and therefore their talent magnetism. They are at the head of a thriving alumni network that creates a virtual cycle of talent spawning.

“As their behavior suggests, superbosses don’t conceive of the employer-employee relationship as ordinary bosses do,” the author contends.

“They don’t consider the relationship over the minute the employee walks out the door, and they’re not offended, hurt, or even all that surprised when this happens.”

Netflix CEO Reid Hastings was famous for telling employees, “Netflix doesn’t have to be for life, in which case, we should celebrate someone for leaving for a bigger job that we didn’t have available to offer them.”

Building Alumni Networks Like A Superboss

When key people leave your organization you can either watch impotently from the sidelines or implement a strategy to stay connected. After all, you never know how much departing employees may help you one day.

So, don’t forget them or, even worse, see them as traitors. Instead, think of them as having completed a “tour of duty” and be like a “concerned godparent,” staying in touch and keeping tabs on their progress.

Realize too that your star performers WILL leave. It’s inevitable. So have a strategy in place for maintaining and leveraging your relationships with them over the long haul.

ConclusionSydney Finkelstein’s key point is that while you can be a perfectly good, or even an outstanding boss in terms of organizational performance, that’s not the same as being a superboss.

The attributes of a superboss add an extra layer of success that’s more about strong relationships than it is about the bottom line - although ultimately one may feed the other.

And the reason is that superboss teams and

organizations are much more likely to have a culture in which employees feel valued. When they know they can make a difference and that their opinions will be heard, employees are happier and more engaged. Superboss organizations become regarded as great places to work.

In Finkelstein’s playbook, the difference between “ordinary” and “super” comes down to:

• Hiring differently

• Motivating people with a powerful vision

• Inspiring innovation and risk taking

• Adopting “master/apprentice” relationships

• Actively guiding and shaping others’ careers

• Balancing collaboration and competition in “all-star” teams

• Maintaining a network of former protégés

“Imagine what it would be like if your company, division, unit, or department were populated from

top to bottom by individual bosses who lived the superboss playbook,” says Finkelstein.

“Think of how innovative the organization would be, how resilient, even dominant. Think of how much fun individual employees would have, how much more productive they’d become, how much more loyalty they would show even years after they’d left the fold.”