If you’re a manager and you want to hit the right note, maybe you ought to be a Soprano.As in Tony Soprano, the fictional mob leader in the popular HBO television series — and the target of two recent books about how to manage employees: Deborrah Himsel’s “Leadership Sopranos Style” and Anthony Schneider’s “Tony Soprano on Management.”Although they cover much of the same ground and point out what Soprano does well, the book...

Back when Johnny Carson was hosting “The Tonight Show,” NBC used a handful of guest hosts to handle the load on Carson’s frequent days off. Some of those hosts knew they had leverage, so they started asking NBC for $25,000 per appearance, raising their pay considerably.But Jay Leno didn’t. As he explained in an interview on Bravo TV’s “Inside the Actors Studio,” he continued doing the job for just $512 per show — the basic...

Workers in the Los Angeles metropolitan area are the happiest and least stressed in the country, according to a new survey. Boston workers also fare particularly well, while those in San Francisco have lots of stress to go along with their happiness.Nationwide, 62.9 percent of workers say they are “thrilled” or “happy” with their jobs, according to the random online survey of more than 5,000 full-time workers, done by Digit...

You ought to hire people based on far more than just the job interview, but sometimes there’s just no time to do it right. So if the interview is all you have, here’s how to make the best of it:Call applicants first. Before setting any interview, telephone candidates first and talk for a few minutes. If the chemistry simply isn't there, don't bother setting up the full-blown interview.If they get passing marks in chemistry,...

In a recent Dear Abby column, a guy expressed concern that his wife was drinking two glasses of wine a day. Some health experts say that a glass or two of wine is good for you, but the guy wondered what their definition of “a glass” was.His wife’s glass was huge — about the size of half a bottle of wine. The federal government defines a glass of wine as 5 ounces; the wife’s “glass” was more than twice that size. Her habit w...

Lois P. Frankel knows there is a glass ceiling, but she also believes that if a woman wants to know who is undermining her chances for promotion, sometimes she needs to look in the mirror.In her new book, “Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office: 101 Unconscious Mistakes Women Make That Sabotage Their Careers,” the Pasadena career coach explains how certain behaviors that are traditionally taught to girls can make them too t...

In many workplaces, “Be a team player” is simply code for, “Shut up and do the grunt work.” But if you want to understand real teamwork, see the movie “Miracle,” the mostly true story about the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team that won the gold medal, defeating the heavily favored Soviets in the process.Coach Herb Brooks came on far stronger than most managers would ever think of, but it fit the situation. Brooks was coaching...

Getting laid off can scare you and scar you, but the emotional baggage that comes with being one of the displaced masses is minor league when you compare it with another workplace occurrence.What if you got fired? You weren’t caught in a big numbers game. You got dumped simply because you were the boss’ No. 1 pain. How do you get past that? How do you bring your career back from potential oblivion?The first and most importa...

If you promise to be good, I won’t tell you another Janet Jackson joke. Or one about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Or about a Dan Quayle spelling bee.Anyone with a decent sense of humor probably got a good laugh from one of those topics — and maybe even all of them. But their shelf life has expired. As each week goes by, even the greatest topic for humor starts to fade away.The same thing is true in other workplace situ...

High-tech, banking, health care, you name it. Just about every major industry has mergers, major or minor. So how do you survive without suffering a major injury?Consider these steps:Think about escaping. Third-graders go through fire drills, even though there’s only a minuscule chance that they’ll ever get burned. But lots of people get burned in mergers, so at least think about what you would do if you got fired or simply...