Be like The Boss: Leadership lessons from Bruce Springsteen

Open this photo in gallery:

Interested in more careers-related content? Check out our new weekly Work Life newsletter. Sent every Monday afternoon.

At the end of each concert’s final encore, Bruce Springsteen rushes to the stage exit so he can be in position to greet his E Street Band members as they also leave that night’s music behind. It’s not that he is more tired, or above them. But he is The Boss. And this boss wants to be able to thank them – night after night after night – for their work. Some band members are newish while others have been with him as long as five decades. But he does not take them for granted. Each gets some words, a handshake or a hug.

“The Boss knows how important it is to show appreciation to his team,” strategic consultant Andy Freed writes in his book Lead like The Boss.

“One of the E Street Band members described that moment of Bruce’s thanks this way: ‘He just makes you feel like you’re the greatest.’ As leaders, isn’t that how we want everyone in our realm to feel? The simple act of saying thank you seems so basic. But the impact of something so basic can be extraordinary.”

Mr. Freed also thinks you can learn from the starting point of each concert, when the legendary rocker sits down not with a guitar and harmonica – the tools of his trade – but with a pen and paper to write out the set list. How will he open? What emotions does he want the audience to feel during the show? Where should they be invited to participate? What emotions does he want them to leave with?

You may not sing and strut before thousands of people, but if you’re a leader you should accept that you perform as well. People continually are watching you. There are times of special attention, such as talks to the team and presentations to more senior executives or outside groups. Mr. Freed urges you to follow Mr. Springsteen by developing a script, which should revolve around three key questions:

• What do you want your audience to think?: What message should people leave with? Put yourself in the audience’s shoes to get this right.
• What do you want the audience to feel?: This gets ignored, he stresses, because it’s not as straightforward as the thinking element. Most leaders also feel they aren’t responsible for how their audience feels. “They couldn’t be more wrong,” he insists. “This is where communication goes off the rail.” They dump a slew of fact-laden PowerPoint slides on the audience when the topic invariably has an emotional element that could prove decisive.
• What do you want the audience to do?: What should be different in future?

“The ‘think, feel, do’ technique works for any size audience. The framework applies whether you’re talking to an audience of one or a crowd of a thousand,” he writes. He points, as an example of its power, to a performance review and how leaders can use that trifecta to prepare.

Mr. Springsteen can also teach us the importance of being willing to repeat a message. He has played Born to Run close to 2,000 times in concerts. And he nails it each time, Mr. Freed notes, for two different types of listeners: People hearing it for the first time and wondering what the fuss is all about and those who have heard it many times and are carefully comparing tonight to other versions.

You learned your alphabet or arithmetic times table from repetition. There is a marketing rule that someone must hear something seven times to remember it. Yet most leaders, Mr. Freed points out, are bored with their messages after repeating it the third time. Be like The Boss.

Open this photo in gallery:

And like the Grateful Dead, another iconic band whose communications approach offers us lessons. They only had a few hit records but built a devoted following over 30 years as many fans followed them from concert to concert.

“The Grateful Dead is one huge case study in contrarian marketing,” Brian Halligan, co-founder of HubSpot, and marketing strategist David Meerman Scott, write in Marketing Lessons from The Grateful Dead.

The group pioneered many things that are common today, from mailing lists informing fans about events to the freemium strategy of giving some of your offerings away for free while charging for extra.

Above all, they rethought industry assumptions – notably touring constantly instead of relying on recordings as a primary revenue source – and put customers first. Indeed, they turned customers into evangelists. While most bands prevent recordings of concerts they encouraged it, allowing people to share tapes, creating greater enthusiasm for the band’s work. Instead of relying on ticket agencies, they put the word out for how fans could get better seating, without any scalpers, directly from them. They put fans in the front row, argue Messrs. Halligan and Scott, which you should as well, rather than offering deals to new prospects and making existing customers pay more.

Leaders draw ideas and inspiration from many places and would do well to ponder the lessons from these inspirational rock ’n’ rollers.

Cannonballs

• The more you are needed, the less effective your leadership, argues executive coach Dan Rockwell.
• Research on employee sentiment keeps growing as technology makes it easier and timelier but engagement and trust scores aren’t getting any better, notes consultant Ghassan Karian. He believes that’s because it is viewed as a reporting activity or leadership mirror rather than a design tool for action. He suggests instead of asking questions such as “Do you feel empowered?” asking “Where do decisions get stuck?” or replacing “Do you trust leadership?” with “What behaviour made you stop trusting them?”
• Sometimes we have to say “no” to good things in order to say “yes” to the most important things, observes broadcaster Jim Burns.

Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.