#08: How have you dealt with your own failures in the industry?
Just to prove that you don’t have to always act or be perfect to succeed in this industry, let me just dive right in with some examples of where I have wholeheartedly failed!
In one of my first jobs as a “rescue” producer (hired to fix a broken show), I inherited a existing staff. And that staff was happily working at a slow pace, in an inefficient way, with a lot of last-minute cleaning up to do. So I quickly examined the production process and threw the whole model out. With my new model, we were completing way more work in far less time, meeting the deadlines, going home at better hours, delivering the right things to the network the first time out…and my staff was miserable. They didn’t care about efficiency and deadlines! They just liked to come to work with each other. And I hadn’t respected or valued the importance of friendship and loving where you work. I wasn’t respecting the environment I worked in. I had to change. So there were more staff lunches and happy hours and funny cards and gifts, etc. Not everyone came around because I’d upset them so much with the changes. Others followed me to other jobs and started incorporating my system into their own shows.
At another job, several years later, I again inherited a staff. They were miserably working at a manic pace, in a stress-filled environment, and they hated coming to work each day. I tried introducing more fun things to the work experience. They still hated it. I met with them to hear what wasn’t working and custom-designed solutions to fix the problems they struggled it. They hated the show more, and now they hated me, too. I made it through the first season and never made one dent in the staff’s experience or attitude. It was just misery for all of us. But for my part, I wasn’t respecting the fear they were feeling. The show was too big, the new systems were too foreign, the deadlines were too brutal. I simply could not fix their fear. And this time, I couldn’t change myself to make things better. So instead, I changed my deals. I no longer accepted a show unless I got to hire my own staff. I wanted to surround myself with people who weren’t afraid of making TV in a different way. On other shows, sometimes that worked, and sometimes, it failed, too.
Even though some of my hardest efforts have been failures in the small picture, with problems I couldn’t fix or even made worse, they all were huge advances for me personally and professionally. I talked in depth with my network exec on one show about what I could do to make the staff’s life less awful, and he became a confidante and advisor to me after that show. He trusted my compassion for my staff. I learned how to deal with people on their own terms…and when to stop investing in people who didn’t want to be helped. I learned to change as quickly and as adeptly as I needed to so my shows and my staffs could thrive. I grew so much in every victory and letdown because I was, and still am, dying to learn things I didn’t already know.
Can I also add why I think some people succeed? Success happens when you learn before you leap, work yourself dizzy because you love what you’re doing, contribute more than you reap and recognize even the small moments as gigantic blessings. Again, “attitude determines altitude.” Don’t think you’ll be the person who can bypass that formula. Consider adopting it just to prove me wrong by failing. You won’t.