If Your Boss Is a Superboss, Don’t Be Afraid to Leave!

It can be difficult to talk to someone about the limited availability of permanent jobs. It is human nature for workers to seek stability and security. Yet, while employers and employees both struggle over the demise of lifetime employment, recent research has proclaimed a different view. It is that the best bosses encourage their employees to pursue alternative opportunities. These include working for another organization or setting up their own businesses as entrepreneurs – that is, being what McKinsey & Co call “independent workers.”¹

How can this be? For years, we have been hearing that organizations need to preserve their best talent. They are supposed to identify, recruit and nurture their talent pool, and encourage the best employees to stay.

However, talent management can’t work that way any more. The boundaries of a single organization have broadened to include a large network of stakeholders, partners, peers, and even competitors. To innovate, organizations can no longer rely on their internal people and processes. Instead, they need to leverage their organizational networks, and to learn to collaborate with others within and even across industries. Moreover, organizations are also learning that they can re-employ former employees to utilize the experience, knowledge and networks they have developed while working elsewhere.

This new, much broader organizational playground has also prompted the rise of a new concept of managerial leadership. It is reflected in what Dartmouth College professor Sydney Finkelstein calls superbosses, leaders who have learned how to “master the flow of talent.”² Finkelstein writes that superbosses are not only exceptional in finding and nurturing talent, but also in letting that talent go.

What happens when talented employees leave? Finkelstein’s research shows that they don’t really leave at all. Instead, they become permanent members of the superboss’s club – an “extended family” of former protégés as well as customers, suppliers, and other connections. This provides a host of remarkable resources available to help any club member to help craft a superior career, and become a key player in their industry.³ It also indicates the reciprocity of contemporary careers, that we are each contributing to one-another’s careers in dynamic and important ways.

Finkelstein notes that if we look at the top fifty people in advertising, consumer foods, real estate, hedge funds, comedy, and fashion industries, we could easily notice that fifteen or twenty once worked for or had been mentored by one or a few talent spawners. Industries can often be seen as genealogical “trees” of talent germinating from one or a few legendary leaders – or superbosses.

So if you are working for a superboss, should you worry that your job might be temporary? The answer is no, because being part of your boss’s network can provide you with new opportunities:

• Your boss is a primary source of new opportunities and information about business openings and possibilities.
• Your boss is your primary reference and often a gatekeeper in the industry. His or her reputation is a marker that you have the background and the ability to make a strong contribution.
• It is not only your boss you have worked for. Your connections with valuable information and resources extend through all the other people who have worked or still work for your superboss.
• In being a contributor to your industry, you can experience the gratification of helping create a better world. Here, though, we emphasize that you need to work on your own terms, rather than as slave of any company strategy.

Finkelstein invites us to imagine a company living “the superboss playbook” where employees have fun, are highly productive, progress rapidly and show loyalty years after they have left the fold. He speaks directly to career owners when he says:

“Everyone has the potential to be a superboss. And every organization has the potential to become stocked from top to bottom with these extraordinary, talent-generating, bosses.”

So what does all this mean for you and your career? Like Finkelstein, we believe that we all have the potential to be the superbosses of our own careers: building networks, encouraging colleagues to go their own way but staying in touch, supporting and being supported.⁴ Being a superboss doesn’t have to mean running your own company or even any company. It need not mean any direct managerial responsibility. However, it does mean you are the superboss of your own career. Keep in touch with other superbosses, and use them as a resource for your own career development. You are all in this together!