Start Being a More Effective Boss
Armed with Tony’s strengths and aware of his weaknesses, you can implement the lessons learned from him in just about any leadership position in any company. I hope you’re chomping at the bit to take some feedback in the face or to turn on the charisma. I trust you’re puffing on a Tony-like stogie (figuratively speaking, of course) and are ready to confront someone you’ve been avoiding without fear or second thoughts.
To help you get started the moment you put down this article, I’ve included a checklist of Tony-inspired actions that are now open to you. These might not be the exact steps you want to take, but I trust that they’ll encourage you to take the knowledge you’ve gained and be a Soprano-style leader.
- Level with a customer about why you’ve missed three deadlines rather than making lame excuses; explain that you discovered a guy in shipping was drinking on the job and is now doing time in the unemployment line; promise you won’t miss another deadline; figure that if your customer doesn’t appreciate your honesty, forget about it, he wasn’t worth having as a customer.
- Settle the ongoing "personality conflict" between your two direct reports; knock their heads together (again, figuratively) and let them know you and everyone else are tired of their petty bickering and you won’t tolerate it; explain that they either learn to work together or they learn to work somewhere else.
- Hold your next meeting at a great restaurant instead of in the grim conference room; use it to build relationships instead of to insert a line of copy into a contract; get to know your people and let them get to know you, recognizing that this is the best employee-retention strategy you could ever come up with short of giving them a million-dollar bonus.
- Arrange sit-downs with alliance partners, vendors, and customers to keep things on track and resolve conflicts; stop having bloodless telephone conversations and e-mail exchanges and start using more face-to-face interactions to resolve problems and pursue opportunities.
- Set a one-new-business-idea-a-week quota for yourself and your people; make everything fair game for new ideas, from ways to improve the food in the employee cafeteria to great new products and services that the world needs now; don’t punish anyone for bad ideas but reward everyone for good ones.
- Start acting like yourself rather than playing the part of a leader; allow your idiosyncrasies, dominant personality traits, and greatest strengths as a person to emerge; stop holding inside who you really are and let it out so that when you walk into a room, you, like Tony, will be noticed.
Tony’s style inspires people to take these actions. When you meet Tony, your first impression is likely to be that he leads by intimidation. After a little while, though, you realize that there’s much more to his leadership style than flexing his muscles. Watching Tony in action and reflecting on how he deals with various problems and opportunities, you realize that he’s a much more complex boss than he first appears to be. If you can separate what Tony does for a living from the larger issues he faces, you can see something of your own challenges as a leader. Tony’s creativity, courage, and charisma in dealing with these challenges is motivational. Once you move past Tony’s flaws, you can take advantage of his strengths.
As a leadership development professional, I’ve found that people who become superlative bosses often take the road less traveled. Their leadership models aren’t always confined to well-known and respected CEOs, but include their martial arts instructor, their high school science teacher, their commanding officer when they were in the service, and their beloved Aunt Agnes. To that list, we can now add Tony Soprano. He may be the last person your board of directors would include in their list of CEO succession candidates, but that’s because they’d only concentrate on his flaws. If they looked at this strengths—charisma, vision, the ability to generate huge profits, relationship management skills, and the ability to execute—they would find that his strengths probably match the list of specs better than any other candidate for the job.
TONY’S MORE EFFECTIVE BOSS AHA!
The best leaders are genuine human beings first and smart businesspeople second.