Tina Fey's Top 5 Rules for Business

Writer, producer, director, stand-up comedian, actor and every woman's dream bossy-pants BFF Tina Fey, gave it all up to the New Yorker back in 2011, in yet another hilarious piece of hard-butt foolery, Lessons from Late Night. Now that the New Yorker has breached its own pay-wall, you can read it too.

Apply Fey's list of life lessons from SNL producer Lorne Michaels directly to whatever wound is festering in your workplace as follows:

1. Leadership is about discouraging creativity.

"Mostly", Fey writes, "your job is to police enthusiasm."

Your people have a job to do and they want to do it in their own unique, record-breaking way. Congratulations! You have an "engaged" workforce. Now you have to turn them into a disciplined team where the work, rather than the individual, shines. Leaders create teams of workers among workers, not victors on the singles tennis tour.

Create rewards for teamwork and apply them generously.

2. Figure out if there is something you're asking someone else to do that's making him or her uncomfortable.

I once told a senior executive with sexual harassment problems in his machismo-laden workplace that he had two choices. He could create an environment in which he was most comfortable or one in which all of his employees were comfortable. Up to him. As a consultant, I wasn't there to tell him how to run his business. I was there to help him manage risk. If his comfort came at the expense of his female general counsel and female Chief Human Resources Officer, he might want to set aside a fund for sexual harassment and gender discrimination lawsuits. If not, not. But he could start by asking the women who hired me to train his people whether there was something at work that was making them uncomfortable.

3. The show doesn't go on because it's ready; it goes on because it's eleven-thirty.

Perfectionism is its own punishment. Don't let the best be the enemy of the good. If there's only one way to do something right and a million ways to do it wrong, rest assured your staff will not get it right every day. It's more important to get it done. Let your people make mistakes and learn from them. In this, leadership is just like raising a child. If you don't let them fail, they'll never learn to do anything on their own.

4. When hiring, mix Harvard nerds with Chicago improvisers and stir.

If you ever watched a single episode of 30 Rock (if not,do so now) you should know what this imperative means to your business. Diversify! Remember why every world religion frowns on incest. If you recreate yourself over and over again, you don't get Superman. You get mouth breathers with hemophilia. Look in the mirror. Sure, you look great from your vantage point. But ask yourself if you any longer look like your market. No. You don't. You might want your America back, but your America left with the hot Latin girl a long time ago. It's time to adjust. Keep some of the people who look, act, walk, talk and think like you do. Then add the demographic your country has become to the unmix. Avoid group think by avoiding in-group hiring. Stir. Get over yourself. Have a little fun.

5. Never cut to a closed door.

This is the balance to rule number one. Encourage teamwork but never rule out an idea before you've taken the time to run it around the block inside your own head at least once. Ask someone else for their opinion. If you avoid new ideas because you're risk averse, the CEO down the street will eat your old product or service alive. As F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

Want more leadership lessons? Come on over to our shop at She Negotiates Consulting and Training where we've been asking "what box?" rather than thinking outside it for the past five years.

For those wondering about the photo gracing this post, it's an homage to an infamous 1965 Esquire Magazine cover here.