This Is Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University with Talking Management for The Globe and Mail. Today I am delighted to be in Vancouver sitting down with Sydney Finkelstein, a Canadian who is at the Tuck School at Dartmouth College.
Sydney, you have an interesting book coming out, I love the title, Superbosses. What are some of the key messages of the book Superbosses?
FINKELSTEIN - So Superbosses is first of all about these incredible leaders in different industries, that have helped develop the absolute best talent in their industry. So if you look at today, the CEO's and senior executives in, pick an industry, and you ask where do they work in their career's? What do they do? It turns out that there are one maybe two people that have this incredible influence.
So what do they do, it's kind of a magical thing. What they do is they have changed rules on how you do a lot of the basics about how you develop talent from: how you find them, how you think about that, how you motivate them, inspiration, vision, they treat people in a master apprentice model which nobody talks about that anymore. They build great teams and then they leverage the networks that they create. So in almost every aspect of what we think about in terms of talent development and leadership, they change the rules.
MOORE - What was the most counter-intuitive finding you found in your research?
FINKELSTEIN - So, who doesn't care about talent retention? Everyone [cares]. Guess what I found? Talent retention can hurt you as much as it can help you. And you are puzzled - it doesn't make sense, but in fact all you need to think about is a couple of things.
Number one, the millennial generation, are they going to be working at a company for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years? Are they thinking about talent retention? No, they are not. Why fight a generational change?
Number two, wouldn't you be better off trying to get some of the worlds best talent, keep them for a year, 5 or 10, whatever it happens to be and then help them move on somewhere else, and thereby becoming part of your network. What you do is you are able to capitalize on those relationships over the longterm, and you become known as this kind of talent expert or magnet. As a result, some of the best people start to call you up and they want to work with you. It is a beautiful combination.