A-List Leadership: How A Hit-Making Mentality Helps With Hiring
Some of the same strategies that make a hit TV show can inform smart team-building no matter what business you’re in. Two veteran media execs connect the dots.
By Marissa Ronca and Chris Linn
Every movie, reality show and scripted series begins with a pitch meeting — creators share an idea with studio heads, network honchos, or agents and hope that their vehicle gets a greenlight to move into development. The end goal? Emerge from development with a project that will create buzz, connect with audiences and gain momentum across all platforms. In short, you want to create a hit.
As media executives, we’ve attended thousands of pitch meetings and developed our share of hits (Jersey Shore, anyone?) and misses — Turbulence, a game show shot aboard a plane flown by a stunt pilot, never took off because air sickness grounded the cast and crew. Along the way, we had a “Eureka!” moment — we realized that the framework we use to create breakout shows could help any organization, in showbiz and beyond, develop high-performing teams and employees. This insight is particularly timely: You may have heard that we’re in the midst of “The Great Resignation,” with 40–90% of the workforce either contemplating or actively planning for a job change within the next 12 months. Think of this new landscape as a blank slate, a fresh opportunity for leaders across all professions to develop their teams thoughtfully and strategically from the ground up and to bring a hit-making mentality to hiring.
Here are four core principles for leaders to keep in mind:
See the Big Picture: A savvy development executive can spot the potential in a creative idea at its very earliest stages. We assess what’s original about a concept and examine all creative elements to see how a project might fit into the larger business strategy and competitive landscape. Initial pitches are rarely perfect, so it’s critical to see beyond that first meeting and envision the path ahead. In our experience, “outlier” ideas — pitches that might at first seem too radical or provocative — have often morphed into projects with much greater impact than ideas that began as safe, “sure-things.” Impractical Jokers, the show where four friends compete to embarrass each other, is now a ratings juggernaut that has run for more than 200 episodes, spawned a sold-out world tour and a feature film. But, in 2010, when we heard the initial pitch — titled Mission: Uncomfortable — it seemed like an odd fit for truTV, a network that had until very recently been known as Court TV. Still, the premise offered qualities we look for in all our shows — relatability, humor, chemistry and light conflict with authority — and packaged them in a fresh, new way.
For leaders, this same insight can apply to hiring. A candidate may not check every single box in a job description. But if you pinpoint some unique skill or added value they would bring to the team, something that would likely raise everyone’s game and help the organization thrive, the benefit of making that hire could outweigh the risk.
Ask More (and Smarter!) Questions: A key step in developing a concept is asking questions and identifying strengths — Is the premise original? Which format or genre does it fit into? Who is the audience? — and also acknowledging the weaknesses. The most successful development executives regard weaknesses as opportunities to strengthen an idea. If you can see a path to reinforce the concept, then it justifies the effort and expense. If you can’t, then it’s probably not worth pursuing. The same is true in recruiting. When you meet a candidate who seems promising on paper, ask plenty of questions to better understand them, their strengths and their opportunities for growth. Do your homework in advance so that you have a few relatable topics to discuss, and come prepared with thoughtful questions. This will likely lead to a more meaningful conversation and show your investment in the interview process, which is especially important given the rise of virtual interviews. Video-conference platforms can have huge benefits (no getting stuck in traffic!) but can also make it difficult for both candidates and hiring managers to gain a full, 360-degree sense of one another. Finally, don’t limit your curiosity to hiring: Canvassing current employees has a serious upside. In one Gallup study, more than half (51%) of exiting employees reported that in the three months leading up to their departure, their manager never asked them about job satisfaction or their future. Effective leaders will spend time connecting with employees, asking questions and listening proactively.
Mind the Gaps: The right show on the wrong platform doesn’t work for anyone. The first thing you assess in a pitch is whether it fits your brand, is right for your audience and fills a gap in your lineup. If the answer to all three is “yes,” you give the pitch a greenlight and invest money and time in developing it. Managers can use this same approach by hiring to fill gaps in the team and putting resources toward employee development. This means proactively addressing DE&I imbalances and also investing in training for existing employees to grow and fill the skills gap — a disparity in the needs of an organization and the knowledge of its workforce. According to a 2021 Retention Report by Work Institute, lack of career development was cited as the number one reason to leave a job and has been for the past 11 years. Developing projects and people is costly, but not nearly as costly as turnover. Future-fit leaders and companies must choose candidates thoughtfully, identify clear targets, communicate those goals and then fully commit to building teams for success.
Get Buy-In: Just because you love and believe in a show doesn’t mean that everyone in the organization will immediately share your vision. For that, you need to gain buy-in from internal departments like marketing, sales and PR. Greenlighting At Home With Amy Sedaris was an easy decision for us, both as fans of Sedaris’s offbeat humor and as executives who understood the benefit of having her on the air, but it took time to get others onboard. By providing context for our decision we were able to rally the team behind this one-of-a-kind series and ultimately earn three Emmy nominations. New hires should be set up the same way: When welcoming a new employee, explain to the existing team why this person was hired, list the specific skills they bring to the table and communicate how you believe their presence will help everyone thrive.
These four steps represent a framework for team-building and should be supported by regular check-ins to make sure creative expectations, deadlines and budgets are being met. Developing a TV show is a creative endeavor designed not to churn out the same product over and over but, rather, to discover a standout show to add to an already strong lineup — just as the members of a high performing team elevate one another through their individual talents and contributions. There’s no single path to success, but by following this development framework — for ideas and people to grow — you’ll increase your odds of ending up with a hit.
