Harvard business review Feb 2018
Sydney Finkelstein Phd Professor of Management Dartmouth College
What sets exceptional business leaders apart? One thing, says Sydney Finkelstein, is their ongoing commitment to giving direct reports one-on-one instruction. Finkelstein, a management professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, has studied world-class leaders for more than a decade. He’s found that they make a point of personally imparting memorable lessons that fall into three categories: pointers on professionalism, technical knowledge and skills, and broader life lessons.
Finkelstein notes that when and where top leaders teach is almost as important as what they teach. Instead of waiting for formal reviews, great managers stay accessible to their employees and share their wisdom as opportune moments arise, whether that’s in the office or outside it. They also create teaching moments—often by taking protégés off-site.
How do they make lessons stick? Their techniques include (1) customizing instruction to the needs, personality, and development path of each individual, (2) asking pertinent questions to deepen learning, and (3) modeling the behavior they want others to practice. Finkelstein discusses numerous superstar leaders who are revered as great teachers and suggests that if you follow their example, you can strengthen your staff and drive superior business performance.
But he didn’t work at a school or stand in front of a class. Instead, he delivered his lessons at the office—to the employees who served under him during his four decades as a senior executive at, and then CEO of, India’s ICICI Bank. Whether he was offering tips on stakeholder communication or explaining the importance of ambitious goals, Kamath treated each day as an opportunity to provide his direct reports with a customized master class in management. Over time, this approach transformed the company into a hothouse of leadership talent, accelerating its growth. ICICI became one of India’s largest, most innovative banks, and Kamath has been credited with molding a whole generation of the country’s banking executives.
I’ve spent more than 10 years studying world-class leaders like Kamath to determine what sets them apart from typical leaders. One big surprise was the extent to which these star managers emphasize ongoing, intensive one-on-one tutoring of their direct reports, either in person or virtually, in the course of daily work. Cognitive psychologists, teachers, and educational consultants have long recognized the value of such personalized instruction: It fosters not just competence or compliance but mastery of skills and independence of thought and action. However, it’s unusual to see this type of teaching employed in a business context. Indeed, I’ve found that most leaders fall back on more-traditional employee management and development practices, such as giving formal reviews, making professional introductions, advising on career plans, acting as sounding boards, and helping to navigate internal politics. Although some managers do occasionally find themselves imparting a lesson or two, few give it much thought or make it a core part of their job.
By contrast, the exceptional leaders I studied were teachers through and through. They routinely spent time in the trenches with employees, passing on technical skills, general tactics, business principles, and life lessons. Their teaching was informal and organic, flowing out of the tasks at hand. And it had an unmistakable impact: Their teams and organizations were some of the highest-performing in their sectors.
Fortunately, it doesn’t take special talent or training or even a lot of time to teach in the same way that star managers do. Simply follow the precedent they’ve set. Learn what to teach, when to teach, and how to make your lessons stick.
Great leaders teach on a range of topics, but their best lessons—so relevant and useful that direct reports are often still applying and sharing them years later—fall into three buckets:
A manager who worked for real estate CEO and investor Bill Sanders told me that Sanders often gave advice on conducting oneself professionally. He explained how to effectively prepare for meetings, how to communicate a vision when attempting to sell, and how to look at the industry not as it is but as it could become. Protégés of Kamath have said that he showed them how to mentor subordinates in an appropriate and constructive manner—guiding them while still respecting their independence. Other managers spoke of learning from their leaders the value of emphasizing integrity and high ethical standards. “He started with credibility,” former Burger King CEO Jeff Campbell said of the late Norman Brinker, a legend in fast casual dining and one of Campbell’s early bosses. “It’s clear that he really cared about how guests felt and what kind of people he had working for him.” An executive who reported to Tommy Frist Jr. when he was the CEO of Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) recounted that Frist sometimes lectured doctors about the need to put patients first. “Your duty,” he would tell them, “is to do just what you learned when you took the oath. If you ever have a business manager call you and encourage you to do something different from what you think is right, you call me, because the day we start doing that, we start shutting hospitals.”