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folks good morning my name is Peter Capelli I'm professor of management here
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at the Wharton School and director of our Center for human resources my colleague Mike Useem was also a
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professor here and director of our leadership Center the faculty Center at Wharton and I are hosting this series of
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interviews this is our virtual version free annual Leadership Conference and it's also a joint program with our
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knowledge awarding partners or beening this around the world and it will be available later for you on podcast
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version with us today to talk about leadership every year we try to bring in some people who are not just leaders but
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people who study leaders and observe them and it's a great pleasure to have sidney finkelstein with us in sydney as
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a professor at the Tuck School at Dartmouth Tuck School of Business even wrong professor up there he also heads
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their executive education program he's a longtime observer and expert in the
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field of leadership but we're going to talk to him a little bit about his book
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super bosses and the more recent addition to this the super boss playbook that he's developed has come out
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recently Sydney is joining us form Dartmouth up in New Hampshire sandy welcome thank you very much Peter great
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to be talking to you and now the folks are beaming in saying you want to talk just a little bit about your book could
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you spend a fair amount of time not just in this book but in your classes and generally talking to leaders and let's
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start with the book if you could just tell people a little bit about why you wrote this book superbosses is a great
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title and I think it does suggest to people what you're after here but you went around interviewing these folks in
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spending some time with him and watching him tell me a little about why you were
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trying to do this book as opposed to something else about corporate leaders right now it's a great it's a great
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question I had written earlier a book called why smart executives fail which is about failure and what goes wrong and
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one of the things that came out of that research as I went to work with a lot of
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companies and gave speeches around the world is you know this is we understand what can go wrong but what
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what do you really need to survive and thrive into the long term as an organization and it got me on a path to
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think about you know what really is the most important thing and I and I came up
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with a hypothesis and hypothesis was to survive and thrive to be successful into
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the long term you need to be able to generate and regenerate talent on a continuous basis and I set out to find
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people who have that track record and then do deep dives into them and all of their protégées and colleagues to try to
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see what is it that they did that's different than typical leaders even successful leaders and what can we learn
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that maybe we didn't know before you know it's a really interesting hypothesis and I think in the past
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generation one that probably didn't get a lot of attention when you talk to people about leading and being
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successful in business you get a whole lot of discussion about strategy you get a whole lot of discussion about managing
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financial markets and you don't really hear that much about developing talent
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from within what kind of reaction did you get from your publisher or other people when you first started to do this
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you get a sense of people say yeah that's really important they say what that have you talked about yeah it's
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really interesting it was almost like they were they were waiting for this deep dive because any CEO you talk to
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fact when I talk to them as you had 20 years ago and ten years ago and you asked what keeps you up at night what
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are you worried about it's always the same thing right how do I find the world's best talent on our way how do I
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develop them at or how do I retain them and they keep having the same problem year after year decade after decade now
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why is that because we haven't come up with solutions that really move the needle very much and that that's the
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reaction I got people said okay some of this some of these ideas around super bosses are not kind of standard but
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maybe that's what we need and so the reaction was wow this is a way to think
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about things mm-hmm you know I just wanted to pause on that one for a second because when you look at these surveys
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of CEOs they say exactly what you said right now that the top concerns are about talent but that perception never
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gets passed never seems to get out there my guess is if we polled our listeners right
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you know what they thought was keeping executives up at night that would probably not be top of the list but as
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you say in practice it is and it is in all the surveys the conference board survey why do you think that is why do
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you think this topic and your dive into this is something that is not more broadly appreciate it is it just not as
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much fun to talk about this as I just talked about strategy or something what do you think no I think the idea that
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people count that people are our most important asset amia we've heard that forever in people's eyes glass over and
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I think that and because it hasn't really happened because work is just not easy and it's been more and more
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pressure put on rank-and-file to managers to senior managers I think I think many people will say yeah they're
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that they might say that but they don't really believe that what they really
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believe is is hitting the numbers and pushing us harder and making us work work harder and give up more and there's
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a lot of cynicism and I think that that could be us behind this yeah yeah that's
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interesting so let's talk a little bit about about your book and maybe you could tell us a little bit maybe first
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about the people that you interviewed and how you picked them because there's
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a huge list that one could draw from you're trying to find some best s players here so tell us a little about
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who and how you got to him so I was I started off kind of small looking at one or two industries that I that I care
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about that I'm interested in so the high-end foodie industry you know chefs and restaurants and I looked at the
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National Football League there's another thing I'm interested in so it was kind
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of like just playing around at the beginning to tell you the truth and what I what I did is as for example Nana
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Fells a really good example I was interested in head coaches and the development of head coaches and who is
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really good at it and the NFL is a great example because there's really good data
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and what I did is I looked at the Super Bowl winners and losers the winning team
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and a losing team each year for the two best teams I looked at their head coaches and I did kind of a a
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genealogical study of them not of course their parents but who they work for and
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I created these kind of trees of talent and when you do that you discover that there's one or two names at the very
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very top over over decades and actually the name of the very top is Bill Walsh the legendary and longtime coach of the
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San Francisco 49ers now now passed away and so I was able to actually quantify it in that it's you really really well
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in other industries I have to do a lot of grunt work a lot of hunting a lot of qualitative research but it turned out
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in every literally every industry I looked at I was able to find the one sometimes two people that have this
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outsized influence development of talent so for example in hedge funds Julian Robertson from Tiger management tiger
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cubs mentioned you know high-end foodie restaurants Alice Waters from chef Penny's the creator of the California
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cuisine and many of the friends and food that we see today from farm-to-table the
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organic the local sourcing endowments and universities and other nonprofits David Swensen from Yale University who's
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kind of legendary has many of his protege involved in in running funds and running endowments now in an in fashion
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in the fashion industry American fashion history Ralph Lauren in the comedy industry Lauren Michaels from Saturday
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Night Live I mean goes on and on and and you go and look at these people and you say wow
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they have they have a track record of generating and regenerating talent really on a continuous basis and and the
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other thing you discover about them is not only that they create these opportunities for people and help people
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be more successful in their own lives and their own careers they actually perform much higher than everybody else
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and and this is actually really interesting Peter because sometimes people ask me you know they say you know
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Sid we don't have time to spend all we don't have all this time to try to
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develop our people they got to figure it out I went through the school of hard knocks
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they gotta figure it out and and I and I said can you imagine a situation when your team is getting better and better
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and better where you yourself won't benefit is there such a situation where you will be punished for helping the
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people around you get better and as a result making you better it doesn't make
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a lot of sense but that's kind of what what happens so not only developing talent but being among the highest
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performers in their industry I must say I'm really envious of the idea of picking high-end restaurants as a
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subject to study that's a smart one I'll try to remember too a lot of fun a lot of fun research I
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have to say let's go back to that I think one of the points you made which is which is really important for people
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listening around the world is that your legacy matters a lot and presumably you got to these and identify these people
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because their descendants people who would work for them we're willing to say
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you know this is the person who really helped me right which is a really important thing to at the end of our
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careers I'm going to a lot of retirement parties you know older executives and
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they always talk about that you know who who I thought I helped and how important
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that was but let's move back to the book here a little bit and so get to the
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heart of this so what did these folks do to develop talent I imagine it's not
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just sending them to the Tuck School or to the word in school and that sort of stuff what is what do they do there was
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fundamental adieu yeah well there's a lot but let me highlight maybe two or three things real real quick number one
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is how they source town how they find talent they're very they're very open
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minded these super boss leaders they're looking for a talent all the time I almost I called them almost
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entrepreneurial in how they think about talent anywhere they go everywhere they go their antennas are up to look for
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potential for potential talent and as a result they they often find people have been bypassed by by others which i think
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is really interesting because it creates opportunities for for people so that there's a lot more I could say about
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that but they cast a wide net and they're very open minded there they're
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also creative they value creativity I say they unleash creativity the people around them and this is particularly
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important from Millennials but I think it's important for everyone know what do
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we want we want a seat at the table we want to have a chance to have an impact the best people think that way pie
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aspiration people think that way you don't have to be again an MBA graduate from a top school to think that way and
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and so super bonds leaders will give you that seat and and they'll give you that
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seat and therefore expect a lot from you and that goes hand in hand it's not a
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you know get tenure in that seat you have to produce and and you're expected
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to keep coming up with new ways of thinking along with doing whatever you day job happens to be it's it's kind of
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it's kind of standard and how they and how they think about how they think about things and then you go ahead what
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you gonna say they get accountability right so they get some ability and accountability they really they really
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do and you know in kind of related to that is when you talk about motivating people so a lot of ways to talk about
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talking about motivation but there's two major things we found among super boss
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leaders number one is they push you hard they raise the bar it's not an easy
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place to work with respected the demands and the expectations not for it's not
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for everyone but if you're a high aspiration person that wants that opportunity are you gonna jump at it and
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then the second thing they do is they inspire you it's kind of you know kind
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of a weird we hear all the time right but they really do they inspire you to believe that you're the person you're
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the that you're the team that can accomplish this that you're that that with you we can do these great things
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and sounds maybe sounds a little soft but you combine both of those together and at the hard core you know we're
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gonna be tough we're gonna have these high demands and at the same time you know we I'm inspiring you to feel like
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and really believe that you that we together can do anything that combination turns out to be pretty
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powerful but maybe we should just tell people a little bit about the kinds of people that you were talking about can
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you tell us who these folks were yeah so when I mentioned a couple Bill Wallisch
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the the head coach from the San Francisco 49ers and you know Ralph Lauren who you know people know the name
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Ralph Lauren but the number of people that work for Ralph that went on to tremendous success in their own careers
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really unbelievable perawang Tory virgin Abood and John Barr bozos and I mean goes it goes on and on the CEO of
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Michael Kors John Idol that's another that's another great example in the in
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the food business high-end food is I mentioned Alice Waters it turns out that there are over 250 people that worked in
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her restaurant at some point that have become significant players in that ecosystem and I don't mean just you know
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a sous chef becoming a chef but someone who may have been baking too that creates a big bakery companies to even
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this people that were involved in running the running her restaurant are now some of
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the people involved in private equity and venture investing in some businesses really it's really kind of kind of
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amazing though it's lots and lots of industry industries ami frist and healthcare is another is another good
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example Larry Ellison at at Oracle which a lot of people give me grief over because there's no tougher executive
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that we know of CEO former CEO that we know of than him but if you could survive working for for
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Ellison the upside was unbelievable many of his top people ended up running gigantica you know I wanted to ask you
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about my favorite category out of your category of four personality types of these folks and that's the glorious
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bastards as and as Ellis in one of those just tell it tell us what sir please my
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postive like that else is my this is the thing keep in mind the word glorious is
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in front of bastard right there's plenty of bosses there that qualify for a team
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of the ladder the ladder adjective but what makes some glory and what makes these people glorious like a Larry
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Ellison is they understand that to be successful they need to have the world's
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best talent around them and they need those people to keep getting better and better so while they might not care a
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lot about you into personally if you can handle that pressure they're just gonna
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accelerate your career it's almost like somebody I think said this to me in one
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of my interviews working for Larry's like we counted in dog years one year of
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working for Larry's like seven years working for somebody else yeah and I could certainly see that let's see if we
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can switch topic a little bit because we're mindful of your time and the audience here and and you've been
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watching this world for a long time and in the last year particularly with respect to the pandemic it looks like
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the context of business is changing quite a bit can you tell us a little bit about what you think businesses business
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leaders will be like after well I mean from now on the we're in the middle of
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this pandemic now what's a demand from these folks different isn't it you know this is this
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is obviously a watershed moment and we can we can also talk about the the racial crisis that has come that has
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come in front of the country and cannot be denied anymore and leaders are and CEOs in particular
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but leaders more generally are really expecting to are expected to step up and do do things maybe a little bit
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differently than they have and and that starts with transparency being completely transparent about what it is
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you're saying as opposed to kind of manage as opposed to you know we're in
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an era of fake news but the stand-up leader has never been more important that's why you know so many people
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resonate with Governor Cuomo from New York it's become such a star and we've been far from perfect but he's
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up there day after day with a message that conveys action and seriousness of intent and and maturity and and what's
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the result it generates trust and it boosts the confidence of the people of the people around you and so I think
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that that attribute of what it takes to be an effective leader to gain the trust
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of others is going to be even when it's always an important but it's gonna be
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even more and then then the other thing I'd say and there's a lot more to say
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but the other thing I'd say is how is business changing and going to change because of this I'm I'm talking to you
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and everyone from my dining room right now people are home people are working from home and and that's not gonna
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disappear when we eventually get get back to get back to work as normal and what does that mean for managers how do
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you manage a team when they are much more likely to be virtual some or all of the time and and learning how to do that
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I think is going to be is going to be more is going to become more important than there's some kind of nuts and bolts
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think supply chain management we've discovered because of the the problems with PPE that these long complex the
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highly efficient supply chains didn't give us any flexibility to be able to kind of step in and and and produce what
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we needed in real time and that's our note to be a big that turned out to be a
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big big problem and then speed of work I'm going to say I think it's really
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is really important you know the the pace that decisions are being made we didn't have to talk about the the pace
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of you know aunt antibody treatments and other treatments and vaccines of course
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which you know hopefully will we'll get there but the pace that it's going on it
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says is tremendous and and and so we've kind of knocked away a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of oh we better
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study this and study this and study this well now the alternative is something really really bad so we're doing less
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studying and more action and many CEOs I've talked to over the years they some
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have said something like you know I don't have to be right all the time nobody's right all the time but if I'm
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if I'm right more than half the time that's pretty good as long as I know
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when I'm not right I step in and do something about that and try to fix it that's that's gonna be I think a central
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part of what makes for an effective leader moving we're gonna get to our questions in just a second here matter
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one more for you before we get there and that is if you think about the CEO today
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and a lot of challenging social questions of black lives matter issue is right on the table right now and what do
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you think about CEOs who are in a position where maybe their personal beliefs and what's going on in society
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are not particularly well balanced though for example we saw this earlier on gay rights for example LGBT community
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issues about all the CEOs were in favor of those but maybe their employees were what do they do there is they just
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better to keep their mouth shut or do they have to articulate positions that make sense for the organization even if
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it's not their personal positions what do you see happening so this is really a
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big big challenge because it goes against it puts in conflict to kind of core things that every leader is told by
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one is you got to be authentic you got to be true to yourself and and so there's one then the other which is even
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bigger is how business goes which is customer focus we're all about customer
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focus well you know we're not going to sell our customers what we think is the
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right thing to do the right the right product unless we believe customers and we have to convince them no Steve
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Jobs is kind of this people say what about Steve Jobs he created this stuff nobody knew we needed a knife and iPad
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or pod for that matter well there's one Steve Jobs and there's probably a hundred thousand others
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that'll fail trying to do the same type of the same type of thing we can't make
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you know leadership practice based on Uglies ultra exceptions so to follow your own beliefs I think when that's not
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what the your ecosystem is demanding is is gonna be a really is gonna be a real problem and it might it might fall on
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boards of directors to start to think about value systems at a very personal level when they start hiring and
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evaluating CEOs because there there is a fit and you know if employees are in revolt if the managers are not happy
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with the way the CEO is running business because of certain values that are out of touch that's that not just that's not
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gonna work yeah that's a really interesting point I think we are at the point in the show here where we turn to
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questions and answers and I hope I've got this at the right point so great pleasure to have with us the Eagle Yomi
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who is our knowledge of Wharton partner the executive director there and Steven been listening to what people in the
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audience have been asking and I'm gonna get all the way and turn it over to Steve thanks Peter hi Sidney
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we have time for a couple of good questions we got lots of questions here about talent development attracting
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talent so so let's I'll ask this one how can leaders develop talent effectively
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while people are working remotely does that pose more of a problem and the other question was should maybe talent
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development be sidelined for the time being during this crisis take the second question first the answer is absolutely
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not it's the sideline talent development is to send a signal of people around you
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that you know what your future is not is actually not that important now we got to do something else how do you motivate
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people you motivate people when they feel like they're part of something they
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are contributing something so I don't think I would I don't think I would do
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that and by the way that's not just about spending money which is some what motivates that type of mindset we
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got to cut back we don't have money in training budgets are often among the very first things that get that get that
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cut when when times are tough the best way to develop talent is for in an individual boss or an individual leader
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to work directly with the people that work for her one-on-one though that's the best way that's what super boss
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leaders do and it's not necessarily going offer training and and the first the first question was again see how do
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you develop what can we do to develop talent this situation and present barmen yeah given the fact that people are so
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dispersed and working on the other end does that post more of a challenge for talent development yeah well it does the
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fact that it the fact that that's the way we are doing work and we'll continue
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to do work even more it's it's just raises the degrees of difficulty I always say know that before all this
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happened when everyone's working from home or almost everyone is working I used to say well there will be time
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times when you're face to face and when you face the face that becomes gold and
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that's an asset that's really valuable you got to leverage that time so for
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example you don't want your powerpoint presentation so you don't want the
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updates from from teams when when you finally have a chance to be face to face that could all be done offline you just
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got to be smart about when you're face to face it's about it's about talking
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it's about learning it's about interacting it's about pushing and challenging and so I'd say using your
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time much more effectively and thinking about you know of all the things that we
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do what could we actually push offline and what do we absolutely need to be doing face to face so even though it's
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more difficult it doesn't mean that it's going to go away it just means it's got
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to get done and and this is another thing to keep in mind the managers that figure it out the leaders have figured
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how to do this more effectively are going to have a competitive manager that's a pretty good sense try to put
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your energy into that right right it also during this time do you have any advice for how managers can best lower
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employee anxiety while they work remotely because I think that it's a very anxious time not only because
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what's going on in the world but because things changed dramatically most people are
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kind of in a zone now but but how can a managers help to lower employee anxiety during this time yeah I think there are
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two things one one is communication and more general level the best leaders as managers know that they need to be
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communicating communicating often and effectively I think the bar has been raised on that too you don't want to use
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up everybody's time all the time people are working and their kids are running
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around the house and not everybody else childcare etc but communicating what you're doing and and what people are up
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to and where and where you're going and inspiring people a little bit I think is
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is important and that the second thing is more of an individual idea which is for each individual on your team
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carve out some time to have that one-on-one conversation not the big zoom thing or the Blue Gene thing or whatever
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it is and one of the best ways you can signal that you really care about somebody and this will alleviate or help
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alleviate their anxiety is if you if you if you if you try to understand what it
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is they need and they want in their own careers at this point in time and and that could be you know starting to think
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about well you know within that within a year hopefully we're we're on the other
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side and here's what I'd like to do and how we're going to continue or I have an
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aspiration to be you know a senior VP or a c-suite executives here to actually spend the time I hesitate to use the
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word coaching because coaching is a word to use all the time that's a little bit
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weak I prefer almost like partnering as a better as a better word where you're
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not only providing advice but you're actually helping them execute on on this
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so for example if somebody needs certain skills to get to the next stage you help
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them figure out how they can get those skills with them and if that means a new assignment a new opportunity you do that
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so that's just good kind of managing people activity but I think when you when you do that especially now you're
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demonstrating in a real way not just with words which I think are important but not just with words in a very real
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way that you know you care about each individual person and you want them to succeed and you want to
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understand what's going on in their in their lives now and work together to try
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to get them to the next stage whatever that happens to be right right and I I think that one one issue that does come
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into play in these scenarios is micromanaging or a tendency to micromanage look what is that if what is
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it in effect due to employees yeah so micro managers the definition is someone who does your work for you or does tells
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you so much detail that it's as if you're just filling in the connecting
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the dots and you know some jobs that that makes sense automation actually does that to some
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extent but for managerial jobs for leadership jobs for people that want to have a bigger impact want to have some
00:27:13
of their own personal capability it's the last thing you want to do and and I
00:27:18
found you know that super boss leaders they were hands on it's kind of one of
00:27:22
these paradoxes I'm hands on delegate errs there were very big delegate errs
00:27:26
which means they're not micro managers but they were also hands on they were
00:27:29
involved with people they they did some of that partnering that I just that I just described but if you're if if you
00:27:37
fall into this trap I mean it's a losing formula if you're gonna start doing
00:27:41
other people's jobs for them how are you ever gonna survive all right you know
00:27:46
when people tell me that you really well the number one thing when people tell me
00:27:50
you know I don't trust my team or I've run out of time or I I'm working day and
00:27:55
night it gets down to trust doesn't it that you don't trust your team you're
00:27:59
not delegating enough and usually not always but usually it's self-inflicted
00:28:03
right right so Trust is the main issue there well I think we're actually out of
00:28:07
time so I'll switch back over to Peter but thanks so much thanks Steve thank you but thank you Steve and I
00:28:16
think we are at our times and now we should probably first of all do a virtual thank you for Sydney for being
00:28:22
with us Denny Finkelstein is the Steven Roth professor and have the executive education program with the Tuck School
00:28:28
at Dartmouth and joining us today like everyone is by video thanks very much for being with a Sydney and we will have
00:28:35
this up shortly I hope on YouTube you'll see some of this in knowledge of Wharton
00:28:39
as well and we look forward to following up with you when we do this again and sending out those enough thank
00:28:46
you all very much for being with us and I hope to see you again soon you