Sydney Finkelstein, management professor at the Tuck School of Business, has a longstanding interest in what makes exceptional leaders. His new book released this month, Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent” (2016), looks at the different traits of “superbosses,” people who have had great success in managing talent and transformed entire industries. The Dartmouth conducted an interview with Finkelstein discussing his research and his book.
Your book is about “superbosses?” What sparked your interest in the subject?
SF: I’m a foodie and I’ve always followed the restaurant business. And at a restaurant in Berkeley called Chez Panisse that’s very famous, the restaurateur there is Alice Waters. And I happened to notice just by being alert to that industry that there were so many people that had come out of that restaurant who had opened restaurants themselves or foodie establishments and it seemed like she had a gigantic impact in that industry. I thought, “Well that’s kind of a cool thing, lets see if that’s true anywhere else.” I looked at one industry after another. So it was more seeing something that was interesting to me and wanting to see how common that pattern is and understand what’s behind it.
So what was your research method for looking at these different industries?
SF: Some of these industries have a lot of data. The NFL is a good example, there’s data on coaches and assistant coaches and who worked for whom and all the rest, so I was able to get that quite easily. Other industries require all kinds of other resources, the primary one was interviews. I ended up interviewing literally hundreds of people to try to understand who were the superbosses and what they did that was different than any other boss. And along the way, and it was a very long process, I had many research assistants, including many Dartmouth and Tuck students.
How long did that take in total?
SF: From when I first got the idea to now that the book is out, it’s actually 10 years.
Those hundreds of people you interviewed, were they just the leaders themselves or people who worked with them?
SF: I would say some of them were protégées, some were superbosses,but most were former employees or current employees, and they were the people I wanted to talk with about what the superboss did and how the superboss acted.
What did you find distinguishes these superbosses?
SF: I would highlight a couple of things. First, they are people who do things in different, unusual ways. They are always on the lookout for talent. If they see somebody that they think is really a great talent, they will often create a job for that person. It’s extremely unusual in the world of HR where you usually go through the dull recruiting process. They look for diamonds in the rough when it comes to talent. They look to other sources of talent than what most people look at. So George Lucas, early on, was hiring Ph.D.’s in physics and all kinds of other areas to help make some of the original technology that he wanted to create to make the original Star Wars. Bill Walsh, the former head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, a big superboss in the NFL, was the first one to tap the talent pool of African-American assistant coaches. And he actually created an internship, if you will, for promising African-American athletes and young coaches to help develop them further. And I think he’s one of the major reasons why there are today African-American head coaches in the NFL. So looking for talent in what are not your typical places historically.
They resurrected the apprenticeship model, which is pretty much how everyone was trained for centuries. Somewhere along the line, apprenticeships stopped and I think a big reason is because of higher education. I think people thought when you come out of universities, you are trained to do what you need to do. The reality is very, very few people are. And that’s why more and more companies are recognizing this. This is true in law, this is true in consulting, this is true in finance. Superbosses help to train you, to teach you, to develop you, so that you become much more valuable to them and of course to yourselves as well.
Were there any findings that particularly surprised you?
SF: Definitely. For example, superbosses do a lot of counter-intuitive things. When it comes to say, delegation, many people think about bosses as big delegators or micromanagers. What superbosses realize is that delegation and micromanaging is not one continuum. You can be a big delegator and a little delegator, you can be a big micromanager and you can be a marginal micromanager. And if you recognize that, its now possible for a manager to adopt a style that says, “I’m going to be a big delegator. I’m going to give big opportunities and responsibilities to people. At the same time, I’m not just going to forget about them, I’m also going to be occasionally, if not a micromanager, certainly someone who rolls up their sleeves and works together with my team members, with my protégées.”
What’s particularly relevant for your audience of students at Dartmouth, is that early on in your career, its really difficult to learn and to have big opportunities. This approach that the superbosses take does exactly that. If they see someone with that potential talent, they’ll give them that big opportunity of a challenging job but they are also going to teach you and they’re going show up unannounced at your door or your cubicle and spend an hour or two with you digging into every fine-tooth part of the project you’re working on. Not only to see how you’re doing, but more to challenge you, to push you a little further, and to teach you at the same time. That’s the way to really accelerate your learning and training once you get a job. For that reason, for so many younger people, when they hear about superbosses or when I started teaching about them at Tuck, the first question they ask is, “How do I find them? I want to work for a superboss.” And it gives you an indication that people are recognizing “here is the type of boss that can actually help me get better and create the kind of opportunities that will turbocharge my career.”
Are the characteristics of the superbosses innate, or can they be learned?
SF: It turns out that every single part of what a superboss does is completely learnable and teachable. It’s just taking on a mindset that wherever you’re going, you’re always looking to meet people and think about people as potential partners or employees or team members.
That’s really important and very encouraging because managers want to be more superboss-like, if you will, and people want to work for superbosses.
Is there any further research you’re thinking of doing relating to superbosses?
SF: Obviously, in this long research project I’ve done a lot of things on this topic but I think I’m going to continue to work on this because it’s really important for any organization to do well but also really important for people thinking about how to manage their own careers. So I’m interested in the career aspect even more, and I’m definitely interested in the global side of this. I’d like to do more research on global superbosses and how they differ from most of the American examples I use. I did identify several in Europe but I didn’t spend much time looking at China, India or Brazil.
Are there ways in which Dartmouth or the Tuck School of Business has helped to facilitate your research?
SF: Certainly, by having great students that are interested in this project. As I said before, there have been a lot of research assistants that have worked for me going back four, five, six, seven, even eight years. Of course, financial support for research is a big deal, you can’t just do all this by yourself. And Dartmouth and Tuck have been very generous in support of research. I think having the type of intellectual climate that both faculty and students together create is a big thing that we should never underestimate. There are a lot of curious people around and there are a lot of people interested in ideas, whether, in my case, its people and organization, or in other cases its physical sciences or the arts. We live in this little place up in New Hampshire where there are lots of people who have this curiosity and that’s a great environment to be doing work like this.
This article has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.