Sydney Finkelstein, a professor of management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, encourages leaders to approach their direct reports like teachers. As Finkelstein explains, being a teacher-leader means continually meeting face to face with employees to communicate lessons about professionalism, points of craft, and life. He says it’s easy to try and that teaching is one of the best ways to motivate people and improve their performance. Finkelstein is the author of “The Best Leaders Are Great Teachers” in the January–February 2018 issue of Harvard Business Review.
Key episode topics include: leadership, mentoring, motivating people, developing employees, coaching, careers, managing people, performance management
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HANNAH BATES: Welcome to HBR On Leadership, case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts—hand-selected to help you unlock the best in those around you.
The best leaders are great teachers. That’s the title of an HBR article by Sydney Finkelstein—a management professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. He says that leaders who coach, give clear feedback, and invest in their direct reports’ growth have better relationships and stronger performing teams.
In this 2018 episode of HBR IdeaCast, Finkelstein talks with host Sarah Green Carmichael about how managers at all levels can adopt a “teaching mindset,” even when they’re short on time or not subject-matter experts.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So, how did these kinds of teacher-leaders approach managing really differently from other managers?
SYDNEY FINKELSTEIN: Well, I think that they understand that to win, to be successful, you absolutely have to have great talent around you, and they’re willing to invest in that. And that means specifically spending the time working hand in hand, sometimes very personally, and I don’t mean every day. Because if you have five or 10 or 15 direct reports, you can’t possibly be spending all your time with everyone else. But periodically, and they value it, and they recognize it, and at the same time what they’re doing is, they’re pushing people, they’re forcing people, to kind of raise their own game. And so, it’s one of the best ways to not only motivate people but also get them to perhaps a different place and a higher level than they have might otherwise been.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So, what are the types of lessons that great leaders should be teaching to their direct reports, like, particular—are you talking more about like life lessons or elements of the work itself? Basic professionalism? What are you talking about here?
SYDNEY FINKELSTEIN: Some leaders would teach about general professionalism, about ethics and about what was right and what was wrong and about credibility. Other leaders would focus on what I call points of crafts, so very specific lessons on how to run your business.
Look in the fashion industry: Ralph Lauren and the way he would specifically teach people around him on what it takes to be a great merchandiser. Actually, Mickey Drexler more recently is another good example of that. Larry Ellison, known as a particularly tough boss but one that would constantly be talking about software architecture and the nature of technology. But there’s also life lessons, and by that, I mean maybe some discussion about how to how to manage your time, how to think about your goals.
Bill Frist, longtime CEO of Hospital Corporation America, would tell many of his protégés—and they shared those stories with me when I interviewed them—about how he would have, he’d always have a list of his short-term goals, intermediate goals, and long-term goals, and he’d be updating them on a regular basis, which is, you know, a discipline that maybe we all know that’s not a bad idea. But how many of us actually do that? But when you have someone that you respect, your leader, your boss—in this case, a CEO—explaining how this made such a difference and makes such a difference for him, it’s going to have a little bit more weight I think in how the rest of us might want to manage our time and our careers.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: What are some of the benefits that the teacher leader gets out of leading this way?
SYDNEY FINKELSTEIN: Benefits are many. No. 1, your team gets better. They’re learning what works and what doesn’t. No. 2, if you’re a leader, presumably you have more experience in doing whatever you’re doing than the people that are under you. And we saw something akin to a master-apprentice type of relationship in some of these situations, where the leader was the master, if you will, who had spent the years to understand the ideas and the challenges in the business, and the people that were on the team were learning and wanted to learn. That’s another benefit. And I think the third thing is—and I’ve seen this as a teacher or professor myself—when you really dedicate yourself to teaching other people, they really appreciate it; and you create a bond, a connection, that is quite meaningful. People inevitably value others that try to help them. That’s what teaching is. And so, you’re not only improving the kind of the content, skillset, of people that are around you. But at the same time, you’re tightening the bonds between them and you and creating a real team.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I’m just wondering if there was an example or a story of people that you studied for this project where you really saw those sort of bonds of loyalty in a dramatic way.
SYDNEY FINKELSTEIN: There were several. But here’s one from a smaller coffee chain whose CEO told me this story about how there was a young team member that actually had a prior criminal record. And then there was a story in the town where one of the coffee shops was in about how someone had stolen something from a local liquor store, and people started to point fingers.
He hadn’t done it, but once you’re guilty, people continue to think that you’re guilty. She spent a lot of time talking to him and then talking to a lot of the other employees, to use it almost as a teaching moment about how we make certain assumptions about other people that could be wrong, that could be, in this case, as you can see, extremely damaging to someone’s life, someone’s livelihood, someone’s self-confidence.
And when she was telling me this story, she talked about how—in this particular coffee shop, probably a rotating group of six or seven people—and she said they were never tighter because people felt like she didn’t jump to conclusions; she didn’t let anyone else jump to conclusions; she had that debate, that discussion; and people respected that.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So, it sounds like it’s not just something for knowledge workers, or it’s not just something for, you know, a certain kind of company. It sounds like you’ve seen this in all industries.
SYDNEY FINKELSTEIN: Well, I’ve looked at dozens of industries and companies, in different countries as well, and there must be something universal about teaching. That shouldn’t be a shock to anyone, because how much time do we spend in our lives in every country in the world learning and teaching. And in most countries, we spend the first, you know, from age 3 or 4 or 5 to age 18 or 22 or 26 or what-have-you in a form of teaching. Then you go to work, and all of a sudden, it’s all gone? It’s over? You’re assumed to know everything? You can begin to feel—you know, it’s like an impostor syndrome. You know, you’ve been part of a team. You’ve been learning for years and years, and all of a sudden, you’re expected to know everything. And we all know that’s not possible. So, it’s fundamental, I think, to people.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: The people you studied for this are at the top of their career and really experts in their field. But there’s also a lot of us in organizations who are managing people who actually know more about the craft than we do. You know, for example, some young MBAs who are out in the world managing people who are subject-matter experts. How do you lead someone through teaching if you’re managing someone whose job you don’t necessarily fully understand?
SYDNEY FINKELSTEIN: There’s something to be said to reverse-engineering a little bit of this. I have found almost again without exception that these leaders that are great teachers are also great learners. What the means is if you’re the younger person or the MBA or what-have-you that’s supervising someone that has deep specialization, you need to spend the time and provide the respect to learn from that person, because it’s a two-way street.
And it turns out that when you’re open to learning, other people are very often open to learning from you as well.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: One of the things that I think managers do struggle with is finding ways to work this into their workday. How does a good manager sort of find those pivotal moments and intervene in a way that will have an impact down the line?
SYDNEY FINKELSTEIN: Yeah, I have a couple of specific suggestions. No. 1, take a good look at your calendar. The amount of time that all of us spend in unproductive time is actually rather remarkable. Top of that list is meetings and how many meetings we go to. And then the meetings we go to, how effectively run are they. How much time are we spending—do we need to be there? Do we need to go through all those PowerPoint slides? Can’t we just look ahead of time at some of the data, some of the ideas, and then