SQL Pattern to get "root/ start" of uneven hierarchy dataset

I feel this is a common problem and I've seen it in some SQL challenges even but for the life of me, cannot think clearly about a solution. Say you have an uneven hierarchy. Elements that belong to other elements but you don't know the top. Let's say it's a Company Org Chart to keep it simple (really it's task dependencies but eh). So there's a table. Employee Name and Boss Name. Employee name: Bob .... Boss Name: Dora Employee name Dora .... Boss Name: Kim And on and on. In my case there is an added piece of information. One person only reports to one person ever. One-to-one relationship. There are N elements at the top of the chain that have Name: Whoever Boss: Null. So I was doing something as follows: select employee_name, boss_name from boss_table b1 left join boss_table b2 on b1.boss_name = b2.employee_name left join boss_table b3 on b2.boss_name = b3.employee_name And on and on to attempt to find the 'Root Boss' or 'Top Boss' of each employee. However some of these nested elements are VERY deep -- I don't want to do 20 joins ... or at least type them out -- I feel a recursive function is the obvious answer, but can't figure it out -- thoughts?