By C. Jewel Garcia
One co-director I have personally worked with, that I will refer to as Eric, had a leading style that was extremely ineffective. Eric was a student at the undergraduate school I went to. We were both taking a class called TV Production and Directing. He was often put in charge of directing our production team. He was never officially given that task. Instead, he was officially supposed to be an actor, however I believe the producer who was elected by the class had a crush on him and gave him that role unofficially despite the fact we had an elected director. We had one semester to complete all the required pre-production, production, and post-production. Eric failed at directing because he failed at being a leader in three key areas I will discuss. For more general information on how to keep a stable team I suggest reading the article Why Teams Don’t Work.
The first problem Eric had was with affect, which is the team morale, because he was rude to everyone on set including the Professor. He would tell people their ideas were “stupid” if he did not like them and would role his eyes at people when he did not want to listen. Yet what made his rudeness particularly challenging to a hand full of people was that it seemed to be directed more towards BIPOC people and often had racist undertones. For example, the professor of the class was Black and a doctor. The professor wanted to be referred to as doctor last name. However, Eric referred to him by his first name and as “Man,” even though he always referred to his White professors as doctor or professor. The actual director was also Black and he often argued with her and spoke condescendingly to her. It got so bad she often did not show up to shooting days if she knew he would be on set. This really effected team morale.
People just wanted to get done with the class rather than make a good piece of art. Team affect is important because it helps lead to synergy, or when a team works better than would expect when looking at individual performance. However, without it the team can at best only be as good as the sum of its parts also known as Potential Productivity. More information on this topic can be found in the book Group Process And Productivity.
Eric’s bad behavior also created a team norm and spread. In this way Eric failed as a behavioral leader, or a leader of the actions people actually took. More information can be found about behavioral norms in the article Organizational Behavior Reading: Leading Teams. Soon enough many people were being rude to each other and everyone else. Eric also insisted that he had the best ideas and shut out other people’s advice. This made some takes horrible. In one take Eric shot everything from above for no reason at all because he would not take others advice. A fair amount of time was wasted on set with the crew arguing with him over his bad decisions and as a result no progress was made during these times. This behavioral interaction further decreased synergy and increased progress loss, or when a team loses productivity and actually performs worse than what is expected of the individual members put together. As a whole Eric was just one person with a bad attitude and bad leading skills, he alone probably could have made a bad movie. The rest of the crew and cast probably could had made a good movie. However, together we never completed the movie because we lost so much time to behavioral squabbles.
In addition, Eric led to another sort of process loss he helped increase slacking in our team. He never showed up on time and only cared about the actual production phase. As a result, the editing team completely slacked off. They did none of their work until the Professor started checking in on them and found no work had been done at all. In the last week of the semester the editors got help and scrambled to put everything together, but it was still not possible. This situation is another example of process loss. Individually the editors would have gotten work done. However, because of the behavioral norms set and the lack of affect or morale they did not bother. This meant as a team we were less efficient then as individuals added together or our Potential Productivity.
Finally, Eric’s form of leading did not leave a psychologically safe environment. A psychologically safe environment is an environment where people feel safe to speak their mind even when it is a dissenting opinion. More on this can be found in Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams by Amy Edmondson. This made it very difficult for team cognition to take place. Team cognition is the shared understanding of tasks by a team. Team members initially have to communicate to build boundaries and form this team cognition. This did not happen. People on set were never quite sure what each other were doing. For example, I was the sound person and the actors never new why I had to keep checking their microphones making them not like me very much. I know if I felt more comfortable explaining the problems we were having to them it would have made a difference, but in that environment, it seemed too risky. This lack of team cognition also led to the editing team not being checked on and not knowing they were supposed to start doing their work before we finished production. If there was better team cognition, then the TV show would have had a better chance of being completed.
As a whole Eric failed at every crucial step in being a leader. This led to a situation where the TV show we were working on was never completed. If Eric had come to set with a less rude and aggressive attitude, then the TV show probably would have been finished. When I am directing, I will remember that it is important to foster affect or morale, good behavioral norms, and strong psychological safety for better team understanding or team cognition. To do this I will start by having a non-hostile attitude towards my teammates, creating an inclusive environment, and listening to any advice they give me. I understand how important these are to making a strong team that has strong actual productivity, or the actual amount of accomplishments the team achieves and how important it is to making a good film or TV show.
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DeChurch, L.A. (2021). Leading Teams [video file]. Retrieved from https://canvas.northwestern.edu/courses/149695/pages/watch-leading-teams-video?module_item_id=2046035
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