I want to introduce you to a brilliant friend of mine, Rebecca Radziejeski, who has a unique and insightful perspective on leadership, especially in stage management. Her experiences and reflections provide a refreshing take on what it truly means to lead a team. Far from the traditional image of a leader as a stern, commanding figure, but as an act of service, where the role is to support, facilitate, and empower others. She shares some key strategies and philosophies, and I believe her words will resonate with anyone interested in effective, compassionate leadership. Enjoy!
Leadership, at least in the modern Western imagination, is often portrayed as forceful, even militant, stern, and decisive. The “leader of the free world” is the commander of its largest army. We are taught to idolize generals and CEOs, and to see leaders as strong in the sense of dominance, not resilience. It is easy for adolescents and adults alike to confuse a position of leadership for a position of power, when it is, in fact, an act of service. A leader is in service to the organization they represent – in the case of the stage manager, service to the production as a whole, and to each individual they are tasked with facilitating.
I have summarized my work as a stage manager as simply being an affable clock; I just tell them what time it is, and they know what to do. This is, of course, an oversimplification – on a typical show day mid-run, my work may only be to call times and cues, but this simplicity is only possible due to the groundwork laid in the preceding weeks.
This groundwork of facilitating a production (or any project) is essentially three tasks:
Remove obstacles
Determine (by inquiring, not dictating or assuming) what each of your department heads needs to successfully accomplish their work, and take the necessary communication and logistics steps to clear that path for them. This requires the use of disparate communication and listening styles, as managers of creative and technical departments are necessarily diverse in their education, vocabulary, and emotional investment in the production. The Hersey-Blanchard Situational Leadership theory (1) is something I have called upon to provide a useful framework for understanding how to facilitate different people in different situations.
The work of obstacle removal is ideally able to be shared and delegated among a team of stage managers, each with different areas of patience, interest, and strength. I have, for example, worked with ASMs with particular fluency in Wardrobe and Hair, or a background in dance, making them comfortably situated to assess and empathize with those areas of the production. This work is ongoing, as challenges arise based on cast, venue, or schedule changes, or as attitudes within the company shift due to external circumstances.
Trust your team. Ideally, as with my last crew (shoutout Wimpole Street Moving Company), you can trust them to be competent, self-starting, hilarious professionals. If you find you can’t trust them to execute their job functions, learn what you can trust them to do and account for it (and document, document, document.)
Mitigate harm
Anticipate events, situations, and miscommunications that will be detrimental to the production and overall work atmosphere. I tend to use regular and casual check-ins with company members as a way to gauge where there may be an impending imbalance, though this can also be achieved with formal standing meetings or anonymous comment cards. It is important to maintain a degree of accessibility, so company members feel comfortable approaching you with their thoughts and concerns.
Where anticipation proves impossible, respond to unforeseen challenges promptly, transparently, and honestly. For example, I have worked on shows (haven’t we all) with consistent automation issues; the harm of stress, fear, and uncertainty on the part of the cast is mitigated by holding a cast meeting before the show and updating them on the steps that have been taken to ensure their safety, even if the troubleshooting is ongoing.
To mediate conflict, remain impartial and analytical with an objective focus on the overall good of the production, the greater-than-parts sum of a collaborative exercise you have all agreed to support. Adam Grant has outlined useful terms for distinguishing between task conflict and relationship conflict (2), which I have successfully invoked to help crew members navigate forming productive work relationships with colleagues they don’t particularly like or respect.
Help people cope with immutable realities
This is the “serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” or the parenting part of the job. I was once onboard an airplane seated next to a young family with a baby, maybe 2 years old. “Apple,” the baby requested, and they ordered an apple juice from the flight attendant’s cart. A while after she had finished the juice, she demanded again, “apple.” “That’s right,” her mother brilliantly replied, “you had apple juice but now it’s gone,” and redirected the girl’s attention. That’s it, I recall thinking to myself. That’s the task of parenting: not to procure juice at every request, but to help provide the tools, words, and means to cope with the reality of the juice being gone.
Sometimes the venue is too small, or the local crew is too inexperienced, or the schedule is too tight, and there is nothing to be done about it but cope – ideally with humor, grace, and perspective. I have certainly been heard saying “It’s either survivable, or it isn’t, and either way, we’ll be fine.” Acknowledge among your team the difficulty of surviving challenges and stressors, and validate their reasonable responses to these pressures. But (”yes, and”) remind yourself and others that strife is worsened by a lack of camaraderie, a lack of shared purpose, a lack of motivation, and belief in the work that is causing you strife – all of which is alleviated by the nature of communal, collaborative, creative work such as crafting a theatrical production.
These steps are my recommended path to affable clockdom. Once you have cleared the path of obstacles and mitigated potential hazards, your involvement should be to maintain momentum. This is when, if the stars align in your favor, you can start crosstraining positions to create depth in staffing. Strive to render yourself inessential. Another of my aphorisms is, if I get hit by a bus on my way to work, the show should run itself.
This piece of wisdom from Matt Groening, via his Futurama characterization of one deity advising another, rings perpetually true in my stage management work: “When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.”