Leadership Lessons From Game of Thrones’ Night King
Whatever your feelings were about The Long Night episode, I’m sure your mind turned to the Night King’s management style and what can be gleaned for your organisation, right?
Vague spoilers below:
Stay On Brand (To Stay On Bran)
The Night King ran a successful business campaign for around eight thousand years… “Winter is Coming”
Like all good brands (“Just Do It”, “I’m Loving’ It”) the Night King stayed 100% on message. He didn’t randomly start a Twitter account that shared recycled memes, pretending to be your funny friend. No, he wanted to be the most feared creature in the world, bringing death to everyone… and stuck to his unique selling point.
Don’t Talk, Listen!
As a leader you don’t need to dominate meetings with your self-important mouth noise. Effectively managing employees starts with listening, and the Night King was a great listener. He was attentive and made a lot of eye contact. Not once did he interrupt someone mid-sentence.
Good managers can communicate effectively, even if it’s with icy stares and smirking at other’s weakness. (He may have seemed cold, but real leaders aren’t trying to win popularity contests.)
Hire Brains, Not Looks
His focus on hunting down Bran shows he wanted the biggest brain in the room — he wasn’t after the skilled and fearless fighters. He’d didn’t want some loudmouth jock named Ryan who dominated office sports days, but whose tuna lunches and protein shakes stank up the office fridge.
No, he wanted an employee like Bran sitting in the corner, looking half asleep, but writing quality code for a new search engine or killer app.
Don’t Lead From The Front
This saves energy. Even if you’re immune to dragon fire, send your staff in to do the heavy lifting. Speaking of which…
Understand The Role Of Your Employees
Your army of the dead (low-level employees) are expendable. Once they’ve literally been worked to death, send in your middle management White Walkers to take the glory.
Don’t Count On Senior Management To Help You In A Crisis
They’d rather stand around looking cool while you get knifed to death by a girl… metaphorically speaking.*
Dream Big
Like Steve Jobs, he wanted to make a dent in the universe… an emotionless, permanently dark universe.
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He didn’t want to win a few battles or enslave humans. He wanted to erase the memory of humankind from all existence and create an endless winter. Think big! is the takeout.
Personal Problems Are Not Organisation Problems
Even if he resented the Children of the Forest for using magic to turn him into the first White Walker, forcing him to freeze for aeons, he still had a lot of staff looking to him for guidance and direction… towards Winterfell.
Create a Positive Work Environment
We never saw the White Walker army squabbling like their human counterparts. His staff obviously received decent salary packages, time off, and resolved office grievances like mature adults.
Team Building Is Key
Many members of his team would never have gotten a second chance at other companies, probably facing mandatory retirement due to old age, but he appreciated their skillsets and raised them from the dead (unemployment).
Use Corporate Assets
There may be backlash against unfair perks, but the Night King used his corporate jet (dragon) for actual work and as a legit tax write-off.
Unlike the CEOs of his competition (Daenerys & Snow) who flew around on their private planes pretending to formulate a macroscopic plan.
Patience Is Good, Agility Is Better
So yes, he stuck to his eight thousand year business strategy, but it’s this lack of agility that may have been his downfall. If he’d been able to pivot sooner (on one foot), he may have survived the attack.
Being born of magic provides an unfair advantage — like being a trust fund kid who uses his $100 million inheritance to run a successful $1 million business - but that’s not enough advantage when taking on agile, motivated competition (Arya).
Delegate
The Night King ensured that his entire company relied on him, the trait of a real narcissist boss. If you as a manager died, why should your whole company die along with you?
If the Night King shared some power and responsibility, Winterfell would have fallen faster than a one-legged giant.
‘Winter is Coming’ may allude to our inevitable march towards the next global recession, so let’s learn from Game of Thrones and the Night King before it arrives.
*This falls flat if the Night King is just faking his death, lying dormant in the snow, waiting to shape-shift his army back into soldiers. Delivering his only line of dialogue, the final words of the series… “Surprise mother***kers!”
