Okay, let's dig into what superboss leaders actually do and let's start at the top, which is talent, right? How do they find talent? How do they think about talent, how they recruit talent. And the first thing I'm going to say is that, superboss leaders are talent spotters. It's like wherever they go, they're on the lookout for talent. You go to your local coffee shop and the barista is engaging with you and just seems to have a great personality. You notice that it's not unusual in fact to maybe say something to that person and start to build a potential professional relationship that may lead to an opportunity down the line. Even a restaurant server wherever you go, you go to meetings, you're talking to people, you're going to clients, you're dealing with suppliers, wherever you go. They've got this antenna up, it's like people that are very entrepreneurial by nature, it's like innate in them, wherever they go, whatever they do, they can't help but think, how could this be done differently? How could this be done better? Is there a business opportunity here? Well, superbosses are like that except when it comes to talent, not so much creating a business as much as finding talent. And that right away is a big difference because it means that every single person no matter what your job is in an organization, from very senior executives all the way through. Middle manager, supervisor, individual contributor, first line worker, you could be this talent spotter, you could have your eyes and ears open to look for potential talent. That's a standard thing that we saw time and time again, by the way, what are they looking for in the first place, right. You could imagine that with all the different industries that I looked at and all the different sectors that are out there, there's going to be a lot of variability. But if I were to narrow down the commonalities that I observed about the types of people that superboss leaders seemed to be more attracted to, they would be this. First, intelligence, whether it's IQ or EQ, emotional intelligence. Either one or the other or both were always very important. They'd like to find people, in fact went out of their way to find people that maybe did stuff they couldn't do. That we're better in some way to themselves in some important capacity. They weren't insecure about that. In addition to intelligence, they like competitiveness. They like people that were naturally competitive. They'd like to try to figure out a way to kind of be better than others, to win. And I don't know, that's quite as unusual. There are a lot of leaders that like competitiveness among talent, among people they're hiring, but certainly superboss leaders were like that. They're looking for flexibility. They like the idea of moving people around, of giving people new opportunities. And so people that are not just so narrow in one segment that only could do one thing might be a little bit less attractive for a superboss leader. Someone has got deep expertise in something, that's fine, but that also has the interest, the ability, the open mindedness maybe to do a couple of other things along the way. Superboss leaders like that because, one of the things they often do is they move people around so that you have someone who's a little bit more non expert or naïve. Working in an area where he or she starts to ask all kinds of questions that maybe people have been doing it for a while and don't ask those questions. And so, we see that, and the last characteristic that I often see in what superbosses are looking for is creativity, which usually we don't think about that one, right? I mean, unless it's for a creative job, but this is for any type of job, any type of managerial job really, whether it's first level or further up, they like people that think a little bit differently. They value creativity and you will hear me talk about creativity in a variety of different places throughout this course, because that's kind of a central element of how superbosses think. So those are some of the things they're looking for, their personally involved in hiring as I described with this kind of talent spotting. I mean let me give you an example, Ralph Lauren, is that a restaurant in New York city? And he's there with his family and he's having dinner and three women walk into the restaurant and are seated at a table adjacent to him. And one of those women is dressed in a particularly kind of cool way, whatever she was wearing a sweater and the hat and I don't know that I would have noticed it, but Ralph Lauren among fashion is his life. It's in his DNA. He notices her and he thinks, this is someone that has some creativity, has an interesting way of kind of designing how she's coming across with respect to her clothes. He strikes up a conversation with her over the course of dinner, and this is not a weird thing that he's there with his family, it's not like he's talking to her all night. It's occasionally which when you go to a restaurant, it's not that unusual to lean over and maybe say something to a table adjacent to you. That happens a lot. So anyways that's going on, on and off for the course of the evening. And Ralph Lauren, his family get up to leave, dinner's over? But before he leaves, he goes over to this woman one last time and he takes his business card out and he gives it to her. Now, she had never recognized who he was and he had never said on Ralph Lauren. And so she looks at the card and looks up at him and looks at the card, looks up at him and realizes who she's been talking to for the last hour or two. Then Ralph Lauren says to her, if you have a chance, could you come in the office tomorrow? I'd like to offer you a job. How many HR rules are we breaking here, right? Have you ever done anything like this? Have you ever been hired like this? Have you ever heard of anyone doing anything like this? You know what, I've shared that story now with thousands of managers and I almost always hear an example of something analogous to that, as weird as that story might sound to you, if you haven't seen it before. It turns out that it happens, doesn't happen a lot, but it happens occasionally and sometimes it happens to you and you get this opportunity. I mean, think about it this way, we partner with our HR team to go through recruiting and hiring and, it's a lot of independent people as well and recruiting. And their professional if they're good and hopefully they are, they're going to do a great job. But can you think of any other asset, any other important element of your organization that you outsource 100% to business partners, that you have nothing to do with it, and you would not come up with another example. And if it's the things we say about people is anything close to real. We really believe it, that people are important or central, that it's all about talent, which every CEO, every senior executive always says, and I think they believe it, they recognize that. Why would we outsource that two other business partners and not have our hands in it at all. It's not, we would never do it for anything else. Superboss leaders don't understand why we would just hand it off to other people in HR or externally. You would partner with them, use their expertise, but you'd have to be involved. And sometimes that leads to creating jobs for people. Even when there's no job description, I like to say, don't let your existing job descriptions limit your thinking. I've had people tell me, you might not have a job right now for somebody, but you start the relationship. You check in with them and your intent is up and you're looking for the first chance you have, where you can go back to that person and say, there is an opportunity here. And that's what superboss leaders do when it comes to recruiting talent, thinking about talent. There's one other really big thing I want to share with you. I call it untapped talent pools. Many times people will tell me, we can't find people, we can't find talent, we just can't find enough good people. And I asked them, where you're looking and they tell me where they're looking. And I said, well, have you started to look in different places, different industries, different backgrounds, different schools. And often they're not, they just keep doing the same thing over and over again. Untapped talent pool idea says, can we think of other areas where for whatever reason some people have been bypassed. I haven't been considered for a job historically for whatever the reason is, I'll give you an example. Jay Chiat, who was the CEO of advertising agency Chiat\Day, noticed this way back and this is going back several decades really. And by the way, if you saw Mad Men, the TV show, the series on AMC, you can get an inkling of what I'm about to tell you. Jay Chiat realized that there were hardly any women in senior executive positions in his firm or any other firm in the advertising industry. And the creative side of those companies as well, hardly any woman has senior positions. And he said that doesn't make any sense at all. That's nuts, and so he created a whole bunch of different activities to try to identify high potential talent that happen to be women. They'd get their foot in the door, they'd have an opportunity, doesn't mean you're guaranteed to get a job. It doesn't mean that you're going to be elevated right away. But at least the talent pool has now been expanded, and you know what do you think happened within five years? Chiat/Day had more women in senior executive positions, both on the creative side and the business side than any other advertising agency in the industry. There's another word to describe what I just said. It's called competitive advantage. If you can expand your talent pool and bring in world class talent that others, for whatever reason, haven't really looked at or having considered it seriously. That's a tremendous advantage. I'm going to give you an application exercise soon on untapped talent pools, where I'm going to ask you to think about what they might be in your own business, in your own sector, in your own company, in your own lives. And I think that's going to be a good exercise. But let me give you another example. I was doing a workshop for a group of executives and there was, one of the attendees was a CEO from a company in Ireland, let's call it a smaller company. But as a tech company. And his problem was when it came to talent is that, he could not find enough coders. And as you know, coding skills, pretty important skill and those prices are bit up and it's not like there's tons of people sitting around waiting for a job. And this was holding up his growth, and he's ended up meeting some people and talking to different people. And he came across this idea that there are some people that had never been given the chance to work in a company like his as a coder and kind of a, significant compensation position because they were somewhat on the autism scale. In other words, they weren't that good inter personally and so they didn't do so well in interviews and maybe they didn't even know exactly how to maneuver the whole corporate structure in any company. And maybe there was no discrimination against them. But he came up with this idea because he realized that for some people that are on the autism scale, they have deep logical ability, deep math skills. And with just a little bit of training, coding is something that's in their wheelhouse. And what happens, well, within a matter of a couple of years, he starts to expand the number of people from this community that are coders in his company and they become the highest performing coders in the whole company. And so he has identified what other people for whatever reason, we know some of those reasons, didn't consider legitimate or appropriate talent. That's when an untapped talent pool is. If you come and tell me, we've got some trouble finding people, I understand, but where are you looking and how creative are you? So regardless of whether you're hiring or not, the fact that superbosses are on the lookout for talent, wherever they go. It means that you yourself may well find that you're being interviewed without even knowing you're being interviewed. I mean, if you think about it, right, anyone who meets you at a meeting and a conversation on a Zoom call, when you're when you're presenting something in a social setting. Given this kind of superboss mentality of being a talent spotter, you never know when that opportunity might emerge. So for individual contributors or anyone else who is not the one hiring, but the one potentially being recruited, there are some important takeaways here. Every interaction is a potential opportunity within your present job and company. Maybe you should think a little bit about how you're showing up and how you're showcasing your skill set to others. Not just to your boss, your peers, but every single day, every place that you go, just like superbosses have their antennas up to identify talent. So too, can you have your antenna up to learn from people you meet, even network with others in informal settings, it becomes kind of a two way game, both of which could be beneficial. All it takes is for you to kind of flip the switch in your head that says, okay, this is how talent works, this is how recruiting really works. This is what the best boss is, the best leaders are all about, and I want to be in that, and I want to be part of that. Well, maybe we need to think about that for ourselves, regardless of what your job is.
