Creator Note#3: Finding your team
Successful collaboration and recruitment
This week all thoughts, words and writing are guaranteed to be vacuumed into the annihilating twister of the Trump victory as it makes landfall. There is no routine that I can usefully add to that circus, so I thought it would be a good time to head up to the high ground and publish another Creator Note.
This one will be about the pitfalls associated with working with others, be that a collaborator on a creative project, or people that you hire to work for you.
I remember, right at the start of my career, a fraught afternoon tearing my hair out in a capacious post-production sound studio next to our building. It was one in a run of maddening afternoons spent in that studio. My co-producer and I were taking good-cop, bad-cop turns to encourage a decent sound mix from the persecuted sound mixer. There was a lot of turning and walking away with palms cupped over faces, of shaking heads, of hands reaching for switches and faders and being swatted away. The mixer’s one and only mode was glassy-eyed exasperation, an unspoken demand for us to finally specify what exactly we wanted.
My father had dropped in to meet me, the session having been slated to end some hours earlier, and he quietly watched the whole tortured production from the back of the studio. I slumped into a chair next to my father while my co-producer bent-over the sound mixer, his finger jabbing angrily towards the mixing desk. “He’ll never get it”, my father said, pursing his lips and shaking his head.
My co-producer, blowing out his cheeks, wandered over to the back of the studio to join us, having left the sound mixer to sweep energetically up and down the mixing desk on a wheelie chair, twisting EQ knobs and pushing faders in yet another hopeful attempt to avoid crashing the plane into the mountain.
“He’s just never going to get it”, my father said again, “it doesn’t matter how many times you do this, how many different ways you explain it. He can’t do it.” This was a moment of high revelation for me.
The sound studio had opened at around the same time that we had opened our production studios, and it was in the building next door. We’d seen this as an opportunity and cut a deal with the studio owner, a sound mixer with a decent pedigree in post-production film sound as well as music production, to share work at preferential rates, offer audio services to our clients and have discounted audio post available for all our productions. It was an arrangement that looked like good business.
The problem was, as my father noticed, the sound mixer couldn’t deliver, he wasn’t up to it. Until that day in the studio, I’d never really appreciated that most people (not in all cases, like most rules, there are exceptions) have a natural limit to their ability, which they are not able to surmount. I’d always unconsciously taken the view that people must be able to perform in their career, and I’d interpreted any failure for them to do so as somehow a failure on my part: I hadn’t explained well enough, given them enough time, sufficiently set expectations, I lacked the technical knowledge to speak in terms that they would understand, and so on.
No, the revelation from the sound studio is that some people just can’t do what you’re asking of them and they will never, under any circumstances, be able to. It doesn’t matter what business or collaborative arrangements you’ve made, doesn’t matter how much time you invest in trying to make it work, you have to recognise when it’s not a fit and pull the plug before it gets expensive and you lose your mind.
A friend of mine, hearing lamentations from me on this point, explained a concept that he’d collided with in the corporate world: people get promoted to their level of incompetence. This theory holds that when a person is given a role and they perform it competently, they are in turn promoted and given greater responsibility. The cycle of performance and promotion continues, until such a point at which the person hits the natural limit to their ability and is unable to perform in their role. They can’t do it; they have reached the point where they are no longer competent to do what is asked of them.
A problem then announces itself: in this scenario, they can’t reasonably be returned to a level where they operated just fine, because it would be a humiliating demotion and pay-cut. They can’t ever be promoted into a higher role, because it’s clear that they would not be competent, so they just bob around at their level of incompetence, unable to adequately to do their job. All their colleagues become frustrated, and the organisation suffers.
When you embark on any type of collaboration, or are hiring people to work with you, it is critical that you find people competent to do the tasks that you want them to perform and, if they are not, that you recognise it as early as possible and take steps to end the relationship, which will not be pleasant.
These are difficult and emotional judgements premised on human relationships. Human relationships and professional relationships do not always co-exist harmoniously, you make like the people that you work with and urgently want them to succeed, you may even become invested in their success, and give your time to supporting and encouraging them. But, ultimately, none of that matters if they just can’t do it.
Your creative life will be infinitely less painful if you avoid working with the wrong people at the outset, which will take some effort and divination. In Creator Notes#2 I mentioned the moment at my studio when, in order to arrest the months and years we’d burned down by hiring the wrong people, we designed a new recruitment process. This is how it went:
The old process:
1. Post a vacancy at our studio, outline the role, invite applications.
2. Email boxes deluged by incoming job applications, breathlessly try to drain them, emptying buckets against the rising tide while screaming at those trying to “show initiative” by phoning, in defiance of the rules, to back off.
3. Optimistically read through the applications, pleased and impressed by the achievements within; dismiss the internal Cassandra, who whispers that these are lies.
4. Watch through showreels and discuss.
5. On the basis of the full application and showreel package, shortlist candidates for interview and get excited.
6. Meet a gallery of smart, personable and funny people, have a great day and, reluctant to pick just one out of this much talent, eventually settle on the person who seems like best fit.
7. Six months of hungover struggle reaping the black harvest of that decision, lamenting that Apollo had cursed Cassandra never to be believed.
The New Process:
1. Email boxes deluged by incoming applications, breathlessly try to drain them, emptying buckets against the rising tide while screaming at those trying to “show initiative” by phoning, in defiance of the rules, to back off.
2. Pessimistically read through applications, believe Cassandra, in defiance of Apollo.
3. Watch through showreels and discuss.
4. On the basis of the full application and showreel package, sceptically shortlist candidates for interview.
5. Meet a gallery of smart, personable and funny people, have a great day and invite the 5 most promising candidates back for a second interview.
6. At that second interview, test the candidates on knowledge that they have professed to hold in their application. Review their answers with them.
7. Show the candidate into an edit suite, seat them in front of an open project that contains a small selection of interview clips, archive footage and music tracks. Hand them a set of research notes and explain that they have 2 hrs to put together a short film sequence on subject X.
8. Return to evaluate the results, ask about their experience of the task, and conclude the interview.
The new process had benefits for all parties. For us, it quickly identified those who had overstated their abilities, gilded their histories and would not be able do what we asked of them. For the applicant, it gave them a brief experience of the role, so that they could better judge whether they did really want to join our team. We had someone withdraw during the second interview, saying that they’d decided that it wasn’t for them.
The system was spectacularly successful. In a single day of second interviews we were able to dispel the fog and discover our guy standing resplendent before us, waiting for the invitation to assume his natural place in our team. He aced the written test and quiz questions, and when asked to complete the short film challenge, he did such a great job that he asked if he could carry on and finish it off the right way. We gave him a further hour and half to polish the piece that he’d made: isn’t it amazing that he was so conscientious that he wanted to stay longer to get it right?! Admirable, a good job is better than a fast job, after all.
We began a round of self-congratulatory backslapping at the success and infallibility of our scheme, and that we had a discovered a great new asset to our team. Over the course of the next decade he proved to be a pleasure to work with, a valued part of our studio. And he never, ever, handed in a single, finished piece of work on time. What we had read in his interview as conscientiousness and pride was in fact an inability to work to a deadline.
If you design a strong process to identify someone to collaborate with or employ, it should also reveal a clue as to the issues that you may have with that person down the track. You’ll be better able to know both their strengths and weakness, how those complement your own, and how best to stimulate the former and mitigate the latter. But, if someone just can’t do it, do not waste your life trying to wish it otherwise or make them someone they are not.