Podcast Transcript

[00:00:24] Sean: G’day everybody and welcome to the ScaleUps Podcast where we help first-time Founders learn the secrets of scaling so they can fundamentally scale their businesses, fulfill the potential of their businesses, maximise the impact they can have in the world and make bigger decisions with greater confidence. I'm your host Sean Steele. And before I give you a bit of an introduction to our guest today, Sydney Finkelstein, just a quick shout out to bigw52, who left a review on Apple Podcasts the other day saying. “Just binge listened to the first two episodes of this. And you've now got 28 episodes to binge listen to.” Bigw52. I'm adding this to my regular podcast lessons, great interviews and topics. We're thrilled to have you in the community. Thanks so much. We appreciate you taking the time out. You know, folks, it only takes a few seconds of your time, but I can tell you for our team and certainly not just me, it feels like a big bear hug for us. And we love hearing your thoughts on what you like and also what you'd like to see in future episodes. But I'd like to welcome without further ado, Sydney Finkelstein, professor at Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, host of The Sydcast Podcast, author of numerous books, Sydney, including Superbosses, probably 2016, I think that was published. How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent. Welcome to the ScaleUps Podcast. Sydney, how are you today?

[00:01:33] Sydney: Thank you so much for having me, Sean, it's great to be talking to you and all of your listeners. It's such a great topic that you've got on scaling up. I can't imagine too many things much more important, so let's go for it. 

[00:01:43] Sean: Beautiful. Sounds great. Well, I'm really excited about our conversation because I do a lot of work on advisory boards and mentoring with Founders who are trying to scale their businesses up, either one-to-one or one-to-two with co-Founders and talent, it comes up in every conversation at the moment, particularly in the last sort of six months, we've never been in a tighter labour market and skills market than we have right now. And so, the conversations are; How do we attract them? How do we nurture them? How do we empower them? How do we retain them? How do we inspire them? But rarely is the question asked, you know, what do I need to do differently to become the kind of leader, the kind of boss that people would fall over to get access to? Because it's probably a pretty confronting question. Right? You know, many of us, I think, have worked for maybe, I don’t know what your, I mean, look forward to hearing your experience. I've had two what I would consider Super bosses in my time who were exceptionally influential in my development. And you just never forget those people. Did you have some yourself on the way up?

[00:02:39] Sydney: You said it exactly right. You never forget. You absolutely never forget those people. I've had probably three in my life, which is a lot, and each one different stage. One very early, one kind of as I was learning my trade, so to speak. And then one, when I was doing my own scaling up and this was just a really wise senior colleague who took me under his wing and taught me a lot of what he knows, and also opened doors for me as well. But, you know, the first one happened when I was, I think, 20, maybe 23, really early on. And I was actually teaching in Canada, Montreal, I'm a Canadian by birth. And I was teaching, I didn't have a PhD. I wasn't doing research. I was just having a good time. I enjoyed it. And he basically fired me and he told me, you're doing great, but if you want to be serious about this career, this is what you need to do. And basically said, I'm not going to exploit you. Because I was a young guy. I was a lot cheaper than some of the old timers that they could have brought in. And I was doing a great job, but it wasn't going to help me in the long-term, even though I didn't really know that at the time. That changed a lot. 

[00:03:57] Sean: Wow. Yeah, it reminds me of my first sort of reality check. I'd sort of found myself in sales after university and I just found it was something that I was actually really good at. And I made a couple of, you know, probably three or $400,000 in my first 18 months as a 20-year-old in sales. But I had ambition, so I sought out this general manager who was a pretty young general manager, but he was quite senior in that business. It was a big business. And I said, “How do I get to a general manager one day?” And he said, “Well, it's great. You know, Kicking an ass in sales and that's all great. And you're making a lot of money at the moment, but I've got a job for you. You're going to need to learn operations and customer service and quality and all these other things. So, I've got a terrible job for you. You'd have to move cities. You're currently probably making, you know, a few hundred thousand a year. I'm going to pay you 45,000 a year. It's a terrible team. No one has any idea, all this work's going into them and no work's coming out of them. So, it's basically a big bottleneck. It's going to be really hard to fix. But if you really want to cut your teeth, that's what you're going to have to do.”

[00:04:52] And it was like a pivotal moment in my career that changed my whole mentality. And that was the first of those couple. Could you maybe kick us off Sydney by giving the audience a bit of a sneak peek into what inspired you to do the research that underpinned the development of the, I guess of the concept around Superbosses and the characteristics of them as that we can then sort of get stuck into what those are and then how do people, what do we have to do differently?

[00:05:18] Sydney: You know, there was an overt reason and maybe an implicit one I didn't realise at the time, and the overt one was I had written a book called “Why Smart Executives Fail”. And it is a good title, isn't it? And it really took off, it was a global bestseller. And when you do that, you know, you're invited all over the place. And I gave a lot of talks, a lot workshops with C-suite people, and it was all about, you know, the different reasons why companies collapse and a lot of it had to do with people, but it was also strategic thinking organisational issues. And I was starting to get a question after a period of time that I thought I had answered, but because I kept getting the question I had to realise, you know, I hadn't answered at least well enough. And the question was okay, we understand what can go wrong and how to avoid falling into these traps, but what should we do so that we're never even in this type of conversation and we're just flying high and we're growing and we're generating and regenerating all the way through. And it's not just the opposite of avoiding failure. And that got me started in thinking about what that is, and it didn't take long and maybe this is the implicit part. It didn't take long for me to come up with a hypothesis, which was that, if you really want to survive and thrive into the long-term, you need to be able to develop talent. Not just once, twice, five times. I mean, continuously because people will come and go and we'll talk about that. You can't change the fact that some people will go. Probably many of your listeners have left something to start something, so they, they they'll understand. And so, I have this notion that, you know, people that have this ability to generate and regenerate talent on a continual basis, these were the ones that maybe give me the clue, the key to understanding how you really can survive, thrive, and succeed in the long-term, and that's that eventually became Superbosses. Those people that it's almost definitional to what ended up happening. Super boss, I have a lot of definitions, but the simplest is the ability to generate-regenerate talent on a continual basis. 

[00:07:19] Sean: Generate and regenerate talent. And I actually, just to go back on something you said early on, which I think is really important, you said that: What you're doing to become a super boss and the characteristics of those is not necessarily the opposite of the things that make people fail, because it's almost like in my head, I had this image of, it's almost like it's in thirds, you know, there's the stuff that makes things go really wrong. There's the stuff that's just a whole bunch of average and it's not really a good or bad, but it's just sort of a mediocre, it's okay. It's not bad, but it's not great. And then you've got the stuff that actually really is the transformational sort of next level up when you're generating and regenerating talent with that. Is that a kind of fair assumption? Is that something that you've discovered?

[00:07:58] Sydney: So certainly, there are things that can lead to failure that if you avoid them, it'll give you some success. But to really get the home runs, I think it's a different, it's kind of a different ball of wax. And one thing that I discovered during the time I was doing the research on Superbosses, which was almost a 10 year project, I began to see some similarities between some of the Why Smart Executives Fail, senior executives and CEOs, and some of the super boss CEOs. And that caused me some sleepless nights, because how could they be, how could there be some similarities because they have completely opposite trajectories and results. And happily I figured it out. And what I figured out is that, it's all about how they treat and think about people and how they think and manage teams and the why smart executives fail, executives or CEOs really, they needed people only because that would help them succeed in their own life, their own career. That's the only reason they cared about anyone else. And you know, most of us could see through people like that, the super boss leaders were driven to succeed, but they understood that the only way they could do it. And this is true even for the toughest of these people, the only way they're going to do it is by building some of the world’s greatest teams and keep helping them get better and better. And in a sense, it's kind of like, of course, how could that not be true? But I've gotten plenty of pushback from people and saying, well, no one did that for me. Which is a ridiculous argument, but that's what people say sometimes. Right? 

[00:09:28] Sean: So, did you say similar behaviours or just similar concept and that they knew they needed to build team, they just had completely different motivations and purposeful that building?

[00:09:37] Sydney: That's Right. I mean, there was some similarities, not that they were all similar. The similarities related to their tremendous self-confidence. 

[00:09:46] Sean: Right. 

[00:09:47] Sydney: Their ability to build something. The ‘why smart executives fail’ leaders, they built it and then they destroyed it, and that did not happen with the ‘super boss’ leaders, you know, famous book as good to great. So, in a sense, I was looking at great to not very good at all. So there was a similarity in some of the personality types. Not entirely, but somewhat, but really when you look at the behaviours, the actions, which is what I spent almost all the time in Superbosses, you know, I'm focused on what people do or could do. Because I can't change somebody's DNA. I can't change somebody's personality, but I can teach you all kinds of techniques to become more effective as a leader. And so, that was the focus and that's where there was a gigantic difference.

[00:10:33] Sean: Right. So, could you unpack for us then, or what are those characteristics and what are those behaviours that you're seeing in Superbosses that you found at the end of that research were the things that sort of held it together?

[00:10:44] Sydney: There's a lot. So, I'll give you a couple of highlights and we can go deeper. Actually, let's say there's three main bundles of behaviour, one is around call it Inspiration. We talked about inspirational leaders and everyone understands the word inspiration, but I always challenge management teams and managers. Are they really inspirational? How do they know if their inspirational? What does inspiration actually mean? And what it meant for Super bosses is they were true. They would talk to their team and they would share with their team how they believe that what they were doing together was really changing the world in some way. I mean, even in Ralph Lauren fashion industry, are you changing the world compared to some other people. Well, and in that sector, how people thought about clothes and how they came across it. Yeah. Ralph Lauren, for example, used to say “We won't follow anyone. We're going to set the standards. They might try to copy us, but we're never going to do that.” And he was authentic. He believed it. And that starts to rub off on people. And, you know, there's also this thing, how do you perceive the bumps in the road? You know, it's almost like a coach in a sports and a team or a captain of a team. How are they reacting when it gets really rough? Are they going the mazurka? Are they losing it or is there some calmness that then exudes itself to other people? And I've found that to be a big thing. And so, when there's a lot of change going on, which there's endless change now, but when there's a lot change going on in a company in a business, is it being perceived as a threat or is it being perceived as an opportunity? And of course, it could be a little bit of both, but to the extent of which you can redefine something that looks a little scary and say; “Okay, we can't deny it, we got to do something about it. Can we think about how to create sense?” And isn't that exactly what entrepreneurs are all about? The entrepreneurial world is pivot for what I just said, which everyone talks about. So, inspiration and vision building is the first of those three.

[00:12:54] Sean: And Sydney, I really liked that concept. And I've noticed that one thing that I see is a characteristic of leaders that I know who really have the attention of their team and the engagement with their team. I don’t know where I heard this metaphor a long time ago, but the concept of sort of putting the scorpion on the table. It's like, if everybody's sitting in the meeting room and there's a scorpion and running around on the floor, There are some leaders who will be so in the moment, they're so sort of blinded, they just won't even talk about the scorpion and people are really worried about the scorpion, but it's just running around rampant. The lady who's really going to guide your team, picks the scorpion, sticks in the middle of the table and goes, “Hey, there is a scorpion in the middle of the table, what are we going to do about that?” And everyone's like, oh yeah… It's brought into the lights, it’s brought into the arena. And then all of a sudden people aren't pretending that our leader is omnipotent and knows everything and has some crystal ball. And I can imagine that some of the leaders that ended up in failure are the ones who just… don't worry about that, we're just going this way, like kind of put your blinkers on, just keep moving. And the ones who get engagement are actually the ones who bring it to the surface, deal with it, talk about it. And yeah, don't have to pretend.

[00:13:55] Sydney: They do deny it more than anything else, the failing leaders, it doesn't exist. It's just not there. It's like COVID doesn't exist. There are people that said such a thing and boom, and yeah, that's what happened. And, you know, you gain more credibility with people around you when you say the obvious and pretend that something that everyone could see is not there. You actually lose credibility, but somehow the equation, which is kind of simple, gets turned on its head sometimes. I've had leaders tell me that they're afraid to acknowledge what that scorpion is, if you will, what the mistake is, what the problem is, because it's going to reflect badly on them. But it's quite the opposite. 

[00:14:34] Sean: Yeah, it is and takes courage though. It takes courage to get there and to have that level of humility, but it absolutely is what builds trust. And so, I think it's also quite different to say, well, let's bring it out at the table, let's expose it. And then let's kind of just swim around and not really do anything. That's not very helpful either. People still want you to lead and still want you to help kind of create a path, but with their input, with everybody on board with that.

[00:14:59] Sydney: Yeah, That's exactly right. It's not enough to just call it out. You got to do something about it.

[00:15:03] Sean: Yeah, sorry I interrupted you. You carry forward.

[00:15:07] Sydney: So, inspiration and even vision, which is kind of the most overused word around, people get tired of it because everyone talks about it, but actually it's important. And to me, the question that you want to answer when it comes to vision. It's a very simple question. Why do we exist as a team or as a company or as a start-up or as a anything? I mean, it's a hard question, right? Why do we exist? Nobody grants anyone the right to, I mean, there's some exceptions, but to have the right to exist, it requires some legitimacy. You have to be doing something important. And part of it is, somebody's got to be willing to pay you for whatever it is you're doing, but the other part is you got to be doing good for the world in some tiny way, because maybe that wasn't true a hundred years ago or maybe in 50-years-ago, you know, people did whatever they did and there's plenty, I'm sure examples today where that's still going on, but legitimacy in the eyes of not just regulators and government, but employees, we're talking about talent. I teach MBA students most of the time and their average age is about 28, let's say. And I've seen a sea change in how they show up over the course of my 30-year career doing this. And they really do care about ESG, about environmental, social, and governance issues. They really do care about diversity, equity, inclusion, all these words that are thrown around and we have these acronyms for them. They're going to select companies they’re going to work for or they're going to consult for or they're going to really invest the a hundred percent of themselves in, in part, not only, but in part on the basis of whether these leaders in these companies are kind of walking the talk and that's the vision question. Why do you exist? What's your purpose here? 

[00:17:02] Sean: I think that it's a great question. And I know a number of Founders who find that really difficult because they didn't start their business with have sort of purpose in mind. They started it because they thought it was something they could do. It made money. They liked the model. And so, they lock it and it sort of, and it's nice, but it wasn't purpose-driven to start with. And so, the conversation I ended up having with. Well, why don't you talk to your customers about actually what this means to them? What was happening before they engaged it? What was the trigger event that made them call you in the first place? What is it they want to do after they've worked with you? What's coming after this? How are they going to be using your product or your service? Because in there, you'll probably find there's actually something far more emotional or helpful that you didn't understand, which may ignite your understanding. What the purpose of the business could be if you didn't start with one, because that is quite a, I think it's tough for people to wrestle with as many businesses, of course, that have started with a really massive and transformative sort of purpose, but the ones I think find it more difficult are sort of stuck in that, it's just a business. But to your point, you don't attract the best teams. You're never going to attract top players without some level of them understanding how they can contribute because they want something that's big in them. They want to know that they can contribute something. They want to know that they're going to develop in that organisation, but then it's going to be meaningful to them. And I agree with you, in the last 10 sort of 15 years, it feels like it's just been a huge, huge shift where people used to be grateful for the job. And now they're like, well, you know, I know I've got capability, I know I've got lots of options. So, show me what I'm doing here. Like what are you actually trying to achieve.

[00:18:34] Sydney: Yeah, what you just said is really right. Especially this idea of going to your customers and finding out, doing your own market research, not about traditional things we do, but you're your fundamental purpose. I think it's a very smart idea. And yet people want more. And it's been going on for a while. I think COVID has accelerated, has kind of more than accelerates kind of exploded when people are seeing what's going on around the world, never mind around the world with their own friends and family. Everyone knows someone who actually a lot of people at this point who have gotten sick and some people, unfortunately, that didn't make it or dealing with a lot. And so, you question it and you say, what, what am I doing? Why am I working so hard? Why should I do that? What is my purpose as an individual? And that's why they're leaving because they don't feel like it's being fulfilled. And if that's not a wake-up call for employers and for companies, I don’t know what it is. And you know what, it is a wake-up call because they're not getting the people they need and they can't grow and they can't accomplish what they want to. It's just important to think about why is this going on? And the solution is not an extra $10,000, although no, one's going to throw out $10,000. The solution is, lead with meaning, create meaning for what you're doing and engage people that care about that. 

[00:19:57] Sean: Yeah. I also think about the context of leadership, I always think that leadership is partly about creating meaning for action. So, if you're not able to translate why we would be sort of, you know, tackling a particular strategy or, and you can't link that thing together, how are they supposed to understand, how are they supposed to find the motivation in that? So, you're kind of assuming that, you know, you're kind of playing in this middle ground where you can, and you know what, you can actually build a business that's relatively successful in that middle segment where it's okay. And maybe it's not that purpose-driven, and maybe you've probably got a whole bunch of B grade players in the business and actually it can be pretty stable and it can be profitable and so on. But if you actually really want to get to the next level, you know, that you need people who are at the top of their field, you know, you're going to have to hire some super talent. And at some point, if you haven't done these things, that's not going to happen. What are the other I guess, success characteristics? 

[00:20:51] Sydney: Yeah. So, the first was around inspiration and vision. The second is I call it ‘Unleashing the creativity of the people around you’. So, we spent so much time trying to find good people, and then we tell them everything that they should do and report back and do what I tell you to do. And I mean, that's just plain dumb, isn't it? If you're going to have great people, then give them a chance to be great. And terminology I use is unleashing the creativity of people around you. And you know, this is also not a nice to have. This is a requirement because if you look at millennials and gen Z, they kind of showing up expecting a seat at the table. And a lot of people criticise that, you know, what have they done, they don’t have experience, but super boss style leadership, if you will. They'll give them the seat. They won't get tenure in the seats, they're going to have to produce, and that seat will be taken away. But the burden of proof shifts and they're being given that opportunity. And so unleashing creativity, it means, and I used the word creativity because a lot of people don't think that's a business type word, it is for the arts, but in fact it's a personal word, creativity. The other word we use is Innovation obviously, and people are more comfortable with innovation because it's a business-like word, but I kind of liked to push the envelope a little bit because it's about each individual and that's your own creativity. So, being innovative, being creative as a leader is important. Hiring people that care about this. Super boss leaders when they interview talent, they are probing some examples that they could latch onto of people that have some creative skill or creative aptitude, or at least some interest and creativity is not necessarily drawing something. That's a beautiful drawing. It's like asking a good question. That's a pretty good thing, right? I've always thought that the ability to ask great questions is as valuable as almost anything else. Because if you asked the wrong question, you could have the greatest execution in the world, but you're going to be in trouble. If you asked the right question and even without perfect execution, you're probably going to be okay.

[00:22:58] Sean: And sorry, Sydney, did you find in that… because you brought into my mind my second Superboss straight away when you said that, because I thought, it was my first executive role, so it was a big step up for me. I had a much bigger team than I was used to. There was a lot of pressure. It was quite a public sort of role, a very large organisation. And my boss was very much like, “Show me the strategy you tell me the strategy and I'm going to back you.” But what I noticed was that there was an underlying sense of you've got to deliver. But you're also going to be safe if you screw it up a little bit along the way.
And as he grew in confidence, as I was able to deliver, he gave me more and more like, I don't think I actually made any request for capital allocation, you know, money to fund anything. I don't think I ever got to know because I was willing to take risks and I backed myself, but I also knew that if I screwed it up along the way, there'd be a sense of safety where I wasn't going to be concentrated publicly or shamed in front of everybody. There was going to be private conversations where I was actually going to be helped to address it and to do it better, which was actually a really… did you notice that's because one thing is kind of hoping they unleash the creativity, but that means hopefully people can take risks. Right? So, then the question in someone's mind is, well, what if I take a risk and I screw this up, what's going to be the outcome of that? And then am I still willing to take that risk based on what I expect to happen?

[00:24:18] Sydney: So, here we see the comparison between the Why smart executives fail Leaders and the super boss Leaders, because that was standard practice. If you screwed up the why smart executives fail leaders would come down hard and it wouldn't be a happy situation. And that was standard. And of course, people are not stupid, they figure that out and then you keep your head down. And the people that refuse to keep their head down, they leave. And those are the people that change things. And so, you're left with, as you said earlier, B players or C players, but taking a risk and failing for the right reason is important.
You know, you could take risks and do kind of things that you shouldn't have done. So, one example that came up in my research is in the advertising industry, Jay Chiat, who is the Founder of Chiat Day, very famous advertising agency in the day. They had created a very famous ad for the Apple Macintosh when it came out that I think in advertising history has been seen as one of the greatest ads ever because IBM was a dominant player in those days. And here was the Mac and the IBM were kind of walking off a cliff by not changing. It was really a classic Steve Jobs moment and they put it together. In that event, Jay Chiat, I interviewed some of the people that worked for Jay Chiat and one person told me a story about how they, it was advertising. So, they're making a pitch for a client for a program for a whole package of things they want to do and they didn't get the deal. They went with someone else and the reason they didn't get the deals because they were almost too creative or too far out there for the client. The client want to just kind of a standard type of thing. So, no one is happy you lost the deal, but Jay Chiat actually gave each person on that team a bonus afterwards. And of course, word spreads like wildfire and accompany about that, and he said, the reason why you’re getting a bonus, it's not that I like failure, but you fail for the right reason. You failed because you went for it. And that's what we're all about. That's what our culture is. That's how we differentiate. That's our mission. That's our purpose. And if we're going to make a mistake, let's always make the mistake because we are being so creative, and let's never make the mistake that we're timid and think about … 

[00:26:42] Sean: Yeah. You can fail just as easily. Too conservative, actually. You can just totally miss the mark. But yeah, with no upside, it's like an asynchronous downside. Like at best, it's going to be average. At worst. It's going to be catastrophic. Whereas at least if you go for it, you got an asynchronous upside opportunity.

[00:27:01] Sydney: You know what that's like actually, the way you just said that, in my view, it's like best practice, which gets a lot of people crazy. I'm not a fan of best practice because best practice means catching up to yesterday's ideas from your competitors. And they're not staying still, they're onto the next thing. And so it's kind of like, you're like a donkey kind of following the lead horse far ahead of you and you're never going to catch up and you're never going to try to do something on your own. So, yeah, that's a slight overstatement. There's certain things where best practice has some value, but you can't let it dominate your thinking. 

[00:27:35] Sean: I think, One of my guests, I can’t remember who said this, but they called it next practice. They're like, yeah, we don't do best practice. We don't look it out. We don't spend time thinking about our competitors. We think about what's coming next because we've got to find different ways of solving problems for our customers that no one's even thinking about. If we spend all our time looking at the competitors, to your point. We're just going to end up replicating stuff that I do. And the problem with that is the more that you try to compete on the more things you end up just squeezing margins, you can't do everything. You have to de-select things and compete on stuff that actually nobody else is doing otherwise you can never build a competitive advantage because you want to get so far down the track of something that really matters to your customer that no one else has kind of willing to do, perhaps that the competitors, when they realise what you're doing, you're already three years ahead and they go; actually, I don't even think we can catch up with that. So, now that don't even try, 

[00:28:23] Sydney: Yeah. And you know, there's a famous case study, business school case study that's been used for decades about a company called I think Liberty Electric, maybe. I might be wrong in that, but I think that's what it's called. And they were always known as the most innovative company in the world. Go back to World War II in the war effort. And they were very active in it and they opened their doors and invited all of their competitors to see everything they were doing, because it was part of the war effort. And then even after the war, they invited tours of competitors to come. There's a manufacturing company and it didn't matter. They were always ahead of everyone else, because all they were seeing is what was going on in the past, or present, to be accurate. And they were always going meet with us next practice or what you want to call it. They were always going for the next thing. It's also relevant for Superbosses because you're going to lose some great talent along the way. Well, is that person that leaves, are they going to walk away with kind of your game plan and then you're going to be out of business? Well, if that's the case, shame on you, because it means you're static. You're not continually adapting, adjusting, changing. And so, you're not only unleashing creativity that people around you, you're not allowing yourself, not building a culture of innovation.

[00:29:35] Sean: I always think if you're not moving forward, there is no still, like there's no static. If you're not actually moving forward, you're already moving backwards because lot of people are moving forward. So, you need to be moving forward at twice the speed of everybody else, because there is no staying still, doesn't really exist.

[00:29:51] Sydney: There's some theory in physics, I think that says that. Maybe Einstein talked about it in some way. I don't know. Anyways, the third thing I was going to tell you about Superbosses that what they do is, historically the way that people learn their trade, learned how to do whatever it is they're doing is in a master apprentice relationship. You worked at the foot of a master, you learn. I mean, Leonardo da Vinci, who I read about in the book as an example, Leonardo da Vinci learnt so much about, about art and tapestry and other types of arts from being in the workshop of Rocchio in Renaissance, Italy. And Leonardo DaVinci was born pretty smart and pretty capable, but that's how he started. And the question is where is that today? Where are those master apprentice relationship? Now of course, we have that for the trades, you know, for carpenters or plumbers, I mean, a bunch of places, but management, leadership, business building, we generally don't have it with the exception of super bosses that have done it. And the way they've done it is, there's a bunch of things they've done, but just to highlight a couple of them, one is that they're teachers. I wrote an article in Harvard business review a couple of years ago that the best leaders are the best teachers. And they're really doing, one-on-one teaching, not doing it all the time. You've got a lot of other things you're doing, but every time you interact with someone, you look at it as a teaching opportunity, and what are you teaching? You could be teaching about the business, some technical aspect, perhaps, you could be teaching from your own experience. You could be teaching about life even. I mean, I've even found that to be the case. So, they're teachers, they think about themselves as teachers, which I think is really cool. Then the second thing they do, or the same. They all highlight there are other things because they customise how they work with each person in their team, which I think is a really smart idea. And so, we know everyone's different. Why do we treat everyone the same? Why do we think that equity requires every single person on the team to be treated in identical way? That is such an illogical idea. We live in a world of mass customisation for everything, you know, go put something in the Google, a search term, and it tells you what you're doing before you're done. It's a little spooky, but we don't do that nearly as much when it comes to managing talent, managing people, and you can do it very practically by just spending the time working with each person one-on-one having conversations with them, where what you want to understand is what you want to learn is; well, what makes them tick? How did they get motivated? I mean, what motivates them? Not everyone gets motivated the same way. How do they like to work now in this where we are today and, you know, what's the balance with respect to hybrids you like, you prefer to work at home, you like to be in the office, you want to mix, what are your career aspirations? Are you happy to do this?

[00:32:42] Sean: It even flows into sort of reward and recognition, doesn't it? Because we typically have these sort of reward and recognition schemes that are vanilla, applying exactly the same for everyone. But you know, if the big thing in the company is, I don't know that I've got some big town hall and I try to put people up on a pedestal, there's a lot of people that absolutely hate that and can't imagine anything worse, but they actually might really care about the fact that they might be a, I don't know, an equestrian horse rider or something, so you buy them tickets to an equestrian event or something that takes them on a awakened trip somewhere. They'll think that's so much more meaningful than whatever it was that was the standard kind of company approach. It reminds me actually probably my first, maybe not quite a super boss with very close who in the way in sales, where he knew that I had a very strong motivation to buy a property. And so with me, and he didn't do it with anybody else, but he knew it was motivating for me after every single sale, he would get his commission calculator out and he would tell me exactly how much commission I've made towards my house. And he built like a little picture of this house. And so, we we'd kind of talk about it once a week in our meetings. He knew that was my motivator and so he specifically tailored that conversation for me, but it wasn't something standard for everyone. So yeah, I really agree with you there.

[00:33:52] Sydney: Yeah. And that just takes, I mean, it takes a little bit of work, but it's not impossible to do. And very importantly, the super boss leaders will talk about people's careers and what they want, and they do something really unusual I think in the sense that they want to understand them. What are your aspirations? Do you want my job? You want my boss's job? You want to create your own company? You want to do a spin-out? And you're allowed to change your life. You could change anything you want. And then the question is: Okay, well, if this is what you want to do, let's think together a little bit about what skills and capabilities you're going to need to make that happen. And let's see where you are today. And let's see if by doing your job with, on this team, let's see if we can help you build some of those skills as part of your job now. And imagine the reaction of people that get treated that way. All of a sudden you have flipped the switch and they're working for themselves, even though they're working for you as part of the team, and the loyalty that you get is tremendous. And that's what they do.

[00:34:59] Sean: I think that's a fascinating point. We had a guest and I've used her metaphor so many times because I found it so impactful. We talk about this, this issue with often Founders who are really focused on retention and because they think retention is the holy grail. And retention is good, but it's kind of a by-product I think of all the things that you're talking about, the way that people are treated on the way through, like if they stay because they're loyal because they're getting all the other things, then retention is a sort of natural outcome. It's an output, not an input. But why do people focus on retention? Because often they're scared and they have this mindset that hasn't quite shifted yet to think. Well, I just need to hang on to this person for as long as possible, as opposed to what you've just talked about, which is to say. Well, if business is a sort of series of bus stops, you know, some people are going to need to be on from bus stop A to B, and some will get off at B and new people will get on and those people will be on from B to C. And some people will stay all the way up to E and F but the assumption is, my job as your leader is to help you maximize your contribution and you'll grow between each of these stops and whichever one you get off on, that's totally fine. That's kind of what I expect and I don't know when that's going to be, that's your decision to make, but my job is actually to help you for the company to help get the most out of you, and for you to get the most out of that journey so that the focus becomes contribution, rather than how do we get them to contribute and help them contribute the most as opposed to retain them, like a sort of, ‘I'm scared of losing you’ kind of mentality.

[00:36:31] Sydney: It's quite controversial, this point of view. I've had more than one CEO tell me I was completely nuts when I was doing the research, actually close to writing the book and I would go back to some CEO friends and tell them here's what I'm finding. And one of the implications is that, you're going to end up losing some of your best people. This is going to happen. And one CEO told me, “Are you out of your mind?” And had a few other words in their adjectives. Why would I want to do that? Why would I want to let my best people go? And the entire story is in the verb in that sentence. “Let” Is it the case that any executive, any one of us can force people to work, to work for us? It doesn't work that way. Everyone is a free agent. Anyone could do what they want to do. And so right away, you're framing it in a way that first of all, it’s not consistent with the world as It ever was and certainly as it is today with so much mobility and movement and it's actually hurting, you don't gain anything with that mindset, because it means that if somebody leaves, you're upset with them, you know, don't let the door hit you on the way out. And what you've ended up doing, and I've said this to a lot of people, what you ended up doing when you have that mindset when somebody leaves and you're just upset about it is you have now ended your total return on investment from that person, all the work you did, all the development and whatever you did, whatever opportunities you created for him or for her, it's over because you've now created this barrier. Wouldn't it be smarter to think about how to continue that return on investment, which is what happened. This is what some of these super boss leaders, very, very clever. My example is a bit more for senior leaders, but you have, there's one company hospital company had a senior executive that was being recruited by head hunters to become CEO of other companies. And he was obviously a star and his boss, the CEO of this hospital care company said, “Why don't we do the spin off and create a whole series of mental health clinics? You'll be the CEO that. We'll fund you and you'll get equity in that. You won't just be a hired hand for someone else. You get equity in it. And we also will invest with it.” In other words, you know, we'll support you. We're going to give you an opportunity you couldn't easily get on your own, but we're going to make some money at the same time. And it's just a smart way to think about things.

[00:38:51] Sean: It was super smart. Actually, the boss, when I was making my transition out of executive leadership roles into my first CEO role, I was petrified of having that conversation, had this amazing leader and built an incredible relationship and he'd really, really backed me and supported me. And I was like, I really want to be the CEO. I kind of want end-to-end accountability. I want to test myself and see how I go. And we looked extensively about opportunities to do that within the group in the same way that you said, is there a way that we can do this in the kind of acquisitions that we're making, where I can sort of take on that?
And we couldn't find the right opportunity. So, I got full support in actually going and being a referee and helping me in the process, and we remained close to this day and we're still speaking to every three months or so. And I would then continue, if there was ever an opportunity where he was working on something. And this is to your point about the total return on investment, I would recommend anybody in a heartbeat work with that guy if they want to learn. And so that return on investment will continue for him every time I find a super talented person, I'd be like; Hey, you should work with this guy, see what he's doing. Get amongst it.

[00:39:50] Sydney: That's exactly what happens when you adopt this kind of different mindset. It's a little bit uncomfortable if you grew up in a certain way, where as you said earlier, talent retention is everything and that's the metric that you look at. And yeah, you just end up hurting yourself.

[00:40:10] Sean: I mean, I know that there's obviously a lot in your book. Were there any kind of other key ones that you really wants to talk about in terms the sort of key characteristics or behaviours that we haven't covered that you think make us a super boss?

[00:40:21] Sydney: Well, you know, we should say something about how super boss leaders hire, how they think about hiring talent because that's kind of where we're at now. Right? What do they do that's different than other bosses, and I'd say that there's several things, but I'm going to say two things that stand out. One is that they become talent spotters or talent scouts or whatever word you want to use, wherever they go they're on the lookout for great people. And whether that's  someone in the industry or else. So, I've heard this story many times at a restaurant and the server is just really great. We've all had those experiences. They make you feel better. You enjoy the experience. Super boss leaders will strike up a conversation with that server and they're not leaving me for giving him or her their business card and saying, if you ever want to have a cup of coffee and talk about potential opportunities in my company or my team, I'd love to talk to you about it. And why is that? Because an excellent server in a restaurant has a certain skillset. We have words for that in business called Customer Relationships, Relationships Skills, Customer Service, Sales, all those critical skill sets are bundled up in things that maybe are not fully appreciated sometimes. And so being a talent scout means wherever you go, you're on the lookout. And I look at it and I say, this is maybe more for bigger companies because you know, some more entrepreneurial companies won't have big HR departments to be sure, but why would we want to outsource. But we always say is a single most important thing are our talent, our people, why would want to outsource that to our HR team or HR person, no matter how good they are, why wouldn't we want to be involved ourselves, we would never treat any other asset that way where would be hands-off and with we say it's the most important asset. So, the first suggestion or idea that comes from super bosses is to be a talent scout, a talent spotter. And that's not just you. You could teach other people to do it. You would talk about that, you would even reward people for that.

[00:42:22] Sean: I actually expected my leadership teams to allocate a minimum percentage of their week, every week to exactly that it's like, if you don't know the best people in industry, how are we going to ever attract them into because they're not sitting around waiting for jobs to turn up on the job boards. These are all going to come from relationships. So, it's almost like a minimum KPI that you need to be talent pooling all the time. You got to be out there searching and having coffees, having meetings, be unafraid of going and tapping those people in the shelter and having a chat.

[00:42:48] Sydney: It's actually what dealmakers do as well for companies, venture capitalists, private equity. You want to be in the deal flow, you need to know who's doing interesting stuff, so you've got to get out there and talk to people. It doesn't mean you're necessarily going to want to acquire any of these companies or invest in them, but you might. And the second idea is, what I call Untapped Talent Pools. So, we have such a shortage of talent everywhere. Where are you looking for people? Where are you looking for talent? I don’t know why this is, but so many organisations, so many people keep going back to the same source, the same place, whether they're hiring at a school or university, they have their two schools or whatever, or they always have to hire someone that has a certain engineering degree, and that's all they're going to do or whatever it happens to be. And what super bosses have done is they, maybe this is part of the creativity as well. They've opened that up. They've taken the blinders off and said; okay, what are some potential talent pools that we've never looked at before or we've hardly looked at before that could potentially be valuable for us. And so, actually there's a lot of Public school teachers that are getting hired by companies right now, because they have variety of, I think, important skills that haven't been considered before. But the most common groups would be, let's say women who left the workforce because they want it to be the stay-at-home mom for a period of time, and they had high power jobs. they're very capable, often they have advanced degrees and they just find a very. Why should they find it very difficult to get back in? This is like an incredible resource. Ex-military. This has made me more of a US thing because there's so many military everywhere, but they're retiring, they're coming back after a tour of duty or tour of service. They might not know what a spreadsheet looks like, but they sure know what leadership looks like because they've dealt with things that the typical employee has not dealt with and which is easier to teach them, you know, leadership in a battlefield or Excel spreadsheet. I think we know the answer. I talked about this in a workshop I once did. And there was a CEO from Ireland who had a small tech company, and his problem was hiring coders, which is, I think a problem for a lot of places. The price keeps going up and up and up and where are you going to find them. And he ended up tapping into really an untapped talent pool of people that were somewhat on the autism spectrum that had deepen math logic skills. They may not have been so good, you know, interpersonally that wasn't their strong suit, but it wasn't hard to teach them how to code and they became among the best coders in the entire company. And that breaks a lot of rules, if you think about that, So, it's just a matter of being open-minded and creative. I can give you literally another five different examples. 

[00:45:45] Sean: I can think of lots of those too. Yeah. I remember hearing a story about somebody was trying to build their sales team and they realised actually the kind of perfect profile for them in their kind of sales business was people who'd been chasing a professional sporting career who'd had an injury. And so therefore out of the professional sporting career, they kind of got through the university level studies and they had therefore the team orientation, they had ambition, they're great at goal setting, they're really disciplined, they had very engaging kind of characters. But they had an immediate curation. So, they kind of look for that trigger that somebody just dropped out of the sport and they'd go immediately and talk to them. Or, you know, when we think about cyber security. People going into cybersecurity when you think, okay, well, what's some of the skillsets that really translate nicely into cybersecurity. Accountants, accountants are excellent at spotting errors in patterns, pulling together reports, you know they're really interesting cohort for people looking for cybersecurity professionals, rather than looking for the people who are already trained in, you know, retrain accountants who are all of a sudden going to go from a 50 or $60,000 job to a 90 or $90,000 job in the blink of an eye, because I happened to be in a more in demand sector.

[00:46:52] Sydney: Yes, exactly. Those are great examples. And that's what I would say to people. Just start, kind of get out of your way, start thinking a bit openly. And in the space of 10-minute brainstorming with a friend, even let alone your team. You'd come up with several avenues, several possibilities, and then just dig into it to see which makes sense and then experiment a little bit. 

[00:47:16] Sean: Sydney, I'm dying to ask you, what leadership behaviour, what's the worst or most common Leadership behaviour that perhaps is, has sort of unintentional, but damaging consequences? You know, sometimes I always think some stuff is relatively overt and other people can see it, but there's often a whole bunch of stuff in a leader's blind spot. You know, the stuff that they do they're doing, they don't realise they're doing, this kind of insidious behaviour that starts to erode your ability to build the kind of relationships that you want with your team. Are there things to three-year research that you've found other sort of watch fors? You know, like if you're noticing yourself doing this really need to start thinking pretty quickly. You may not be down in the; okay, you're going to be failing yet, but you might be slipping from that middle ground, or you might actually be on the way up to super boss, but you've got a couple of things that are actually going to be derailing your best efforts.

[00:48:07] Sydney: You know, this is a great question. There's probably a bunch of things, but the one that pops to mind is, maybe it sound a little bit strange, but it's overvaluing your own personal experience. And even your own successful experience. Experiences is great. If you and I met at some cocktail party, we started talking, what are we talking about? We're can talk about our resumes indirectly. We talk about our jobs, it'll come up at some point. So, our experience as professionals is very closely tied into our identity. The problem is that as new challenges come, we continue to rely on that same experience base. And if that new problem, that new challenge is one is different, and we continue to go back to kind of the same game plan we're going to end up in trouble and it's because of experience. And I've actually done some academic research on this, in the context of mergers and acquisitions and why they fail. And I've seen it in other venues as well when you … but it's a tricky one because we get hired for our experience. We get rewarded for our experience. So those are really good things, but sometimes experience gets a little stale. Sometimes we don't keep reinvesting in that experience. And sometimes that experience gets bypass by totally different way of thinking about it. But the worst thing that can happen is when we believe that that experience puts us in a good position to solve problems. The only time That's true. is when that problem you're facing is identical to when you solve before. And how often does that going to happen for anyone who's running a company? 

[00:49:36] Sean: That's so true. Yeah. That's so interesting. Isn't it? It's a really nice parallel with the concept that your business growth rates never going to outstrip your personal growth rate because if you're not continuing to learn, then you are the main, especially if you're the Founder, you're the main bottleneck. And if you're not continuing to re-invent your own skills and level up and think differently, to your point, you're just relying on essentially whatever got you to here, but that's not necessarily, what's going to get you to there. 

[00:50:04] Sydney: You used a good word on that when you said learning, I didn't mention that. But Super boss leaders love to learn. And that's why they're open to criticism, to feedback, to different things that they haven't thought of as long as you've got to be able to defend your point of view. They're not exactly going to say, oh yeah, that's great, I never thought of that and you're right. You know, you got to have some data, you got to be able to argue, you got to stand up shoulder to shoulder, but that's the way it should be. They love it. They love to learn. 

[00:50:29] Sean: That's beautiful and probably a great place for us to wrap up our conversation today. Sydney, thank you so much for the work that you've done, the work that you published. I mean, that's a huge amount of research, it takes a lot of personal effort and sacrifice to do level of research you've done to then produce the kinds of thoughts that you have, and then be able to share that with the world. So, we really appreciate you trying to condense that for us today for our audience. And I know that we've got a lot of gold from you there. How do people get in contact with you or follow along with what you're doing and find out more about the all concepts?

[00:51:00] Sydney: So, I always say I don't play hard to get when you Google my name, you see all sorts of stuff come up. But the two things that I'm doing most recently that I'm really excited about is the podcast – The Sydcast (www.thesydcast.com), where I interviewed kind of like you're doing, you're a great interviewer, so I'm enjoying it very much on the other side of the microphone. I talked to interesting people in different walks of life. They're not all leaders, some are an entertainment, some are in sports, some are academics doing interesting work, and that's been really enjoyable and lots of great lessons. And then the second thing is just launching now is a series of courses for Coursera, which is the world's biggest online education company. They have something like 180 million learners. And so, I'm going for 1%. I think 1 million is a good number. And actually, what I did is I created four courses for them, which they call a specialisation. You get a certificate of you actually do it all. And there are courses you cannot get any anywhere else because it's kind of, they’re based on my books, they’re based on my experiences and things I've worked on and that I've done and they're extremely applied. I created over 60 application exercises that enable you to take the ideas that I share and say; okay, what does that mean for me? How would I do it? How can that help me get better? So, I'm very excited about that.

[00:52:23] Sean: How soon will they come out, Sydney? 

[00:52:25] Sydney: They're out as we speak, they just came out. 

[00:52:28] Sean: Oh, awesome. Okay. Brilliant. Well, we're at April, 2022. So, if you haven't been on www.coursera.com before, get on going and get amongst it and check out Sydney's work.

[00:52:36] Sydney: It's called Strategic Leadership. So that's the way to find it or more with my name. 

[00:52:41] Sean: Yep. Beautiful. That's wonderful. Well, I very much encourage the audience to go and get amongst that. Thank you so much, Sydney. Folks, I hope you enjoy the show. A huge thanks to Sydney Finkelstein. A couple of things before you go. If you got value from today, of course, please share it with a friend, take a screenshot, post on Instagram, you know, leave a review, however you can help Sydney's message get out into the world the more people get the benefit from it. So, thank you very much. And just remember folks, the only thing that can prevent you from fully ever having the opportunity to scale is giving up. So, you have to remain unshakable in your faith that you're going to get there and then you continue to adapt and change and learn along the way as we've been talking about today. Thank you so much, Sydney. You've been listening to ScaleUps Podcast. I'm Sean Steele and look forward to speaking again next week.