Rookie Mistakes: Forgetting You're on the Production Team
Production staff please remember: you’re on the Production team, not the team you coordinate/manage.
The second rookie mistake I want to talk about in this series is forgetting that you are on the Production team! Especially if you are a Production Coordinator, it is easy to start to think that you are, say, a Lighter on the Lighting/Comp team, if you are coordinating the lighting team. You are not, you are a Production Coordinator on the Production team, full stop.
Being on the Production team means keeping an unbiased perspective as much as possible. Remember, more often than not, Production has to be the bad guy. You can still deliver bad news, performance feedback, etc in a way that is constructive, informative, and professional.
In order to do so effectively, you need to maintain some professional boundaries, and part of that is fulfilling your role as a Production team member. Andrew Hill and John Wooden say in Be Quick But Don’t Hurry:
One other pitfall you must avoid is to become too enmeshed in the personal lives of your underlings. You should recognize the individuality of your people and treat them accordingly, but your values and expectations are the ones that matter, and they should be clear to everyone in your organization.- from Be Quick - But Don’t Hurry!: Finding Success in the Teachings of a Lifetime by Andrew Hill with John Wooden
I want to suggest a couple things with this distinction of being on the Production team vs. the team you coordinate or manage. First, it is critical that we Production stay in our lane. We should never be making creative or technical calls unless that is explicitly part of your role at a given studio.
To offer creative feedback or propose a technical solution is often wildly overstepping, and frankly, annoying and unprofessional to creative and technical representatives. We need to let our Directors and Supervisors do their jobs and make those calls.
The second thing I want to emphasize with being on the Production team is that, in my opinion, you serve the show.
You aren’t really working for your client, your Line Producer, your studio, even your Head of Production. You work for The Show, and at the end of the day, it's important that you conduct yourself and work in a way that benefits the show as a whole - you are part of a team, and the success of a show benefits all of us.
