How the show goes on
I read an interesting article this week written by the theatre writer and critic Lyn Gardner. It was inspired by the news that superstar director Ivo van Hove has parted ways with the organisation where he made his name and created much of his work, the International Theatre Amsterdam - or more specifically, they have parted ways with him after a report found that former staff members had experienced a “culture of fear” within the organisation under his leadership. Gardner links this to what certainly used to be and possibly still is a prevailing attitude in the theatre sector: that the priority is making a great show, regardless of the physical, mental and emotional cost to the people who are making it.
We can expand this beyond the theatre sector to any project or endeavour where the people involved are passionate about what they are doing and want it to be good - running an event, designing a product, launching a startup. As leaders, we often care so deeply about the thing that we’re making or leading that a slippery slope can start to be slid down where our responsibilities for our team gets subsumed by a myopic focus on making our work the best that it can be.
Perhaps part of this tendency is that, for leaders, our identity and, sometimes, self-worth, can be very closely bound up with our jobs. We care a lot and are deeply invested in our careers, our projects and our organisations - it really matters to us that they are the best that they can be. This, in a lot of ways, is what will make us good at our jobs, and I think it’s what makes a leader exciting to work with and for. Having a boss that’s shooting high is a lot more inspiring than someone who is aiming consistently for good enough. But, like all things, there’s a balance involved - and my personal view is that to achieve something amazing overall, sometimes, some of the parts within it need only be good enough, to give you and your team the energy and focus to really perfect the bits that matter.
There’s a difference between running a marathon and running a sprint - they require different muscles and mentalities and have different kinds of impacts on the people performing them. Leaders sometimes need to ask their teams to sprint - maybe a project deadline is coming up, or a significant setback has reared its head and everyone needs to double down in order to get things back on track. But if you’re always asking people to sprint, with no recovery in between, then either your team will suffer in silence, or they’ll get mentally or physically ill, or they’ll leave - potentially all three, in succession. This is, ultimately, counterproductive for having high standards - a consistent team of people who want to work with you is much more likely to achieve great things than a frazzled workforce with high levels of churn.
As an alternative case study to van Hove, let’s look at Sarah Polley who directed the Oscar winning 2023 film Women Talking. It has only one man in the cast, and, as the title implies, the majority of the film is, literally, women talking - women in a remote community working out how to make a better future for themselves after the abusive actions of the men they live with come to light. Sarah Polley is a former child star and has written in her memoir Run Towards the Danger (an extract of which you can read here) about how terrified and unsafe she felt (and was) when she was shooting a film aged eight. So when she made Women Talking, she did things differently (as outlined in this excellent article about the film). Shooting days were 10 hours long rather than the standard 16, meaning that members of the cast and crew were often able to get home in time to put their kids to bed. There are a number of child actors in the film - Polley told them the rule was that if at any time they were unhappy or even just bored, they could leave - she only wanted them to be there when they wanted to be. She kept a therapist on set, asked crew members for input and emailed the cast every night telling them what they’d be doing the next day.
Ultimately, what Sarah Polley did when she made Women Talking was de-centre herself. She might have been leading the movie, but she didn’t see it as a part of herself that everyone else was there to serve. It was a collective endeavour and all participants in its creation deserved to be safe and well and treated considerately. Her own scarring experiences of being on film sets early in her life led her to create a different set of priorities on her own project, particularly for the child actors, whose happiness she put above her artistic endeavour.
And what’s so exciting when you read about how this film was made is the fact that it’s also so good. The performances are deep and complex and layered, the visual language is stunning, the directorial choices are bold. The women playing these parts were being asked to speak and think about some of the very worst things that men are capable of doing to women. It’s arguable that if Polley hadn’t created such a safe environment in which to do this, the performances would not have sung in the way that they did - or, some of those actors might have chosen not to do the film at all.
One can never prove a counterfactual, but the question I always ask, when I hear stories of leaders who create great work whilst presiding over a toxic culture, is how much greater that work could have been if they’d shown a little more respect and regard for the individuals within their team. What ideas were never spoken? How many people made the choice to avoid working for that leader and, as a consequence, what talent and thinking did the organisation miss out on? We’ll never know - but given that great work can clearly be made either kindly or cruelly, we’re left with a choice about what kind of leader we want to be. The answer, I’d suggest, is pretty obvious.