Ask Yourself

Be the Weather

My friend Marisa Escolar once asked what I wanted to be when I grew up.
I answered, “I want to be the weather.”

The weather is an experience that people share. It is what people talk about with each other everyday. It affects people’s lives and the way they feel.

I want the entertainment I create to be like the weather (hopefully good weather). I want my project to alter a person’s experience in life.  I want a group of people to share a common bond together. Then I want people to go talk about it because they want to share that common bond.

As you develop and market your next property ask yourself, “How can I be the weather?”.

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*Stay tuned for the top 10 list of how to be the weather.

Hire Slowly - Fire Quickly!

 

Learning Styles and Training Part II

Michael Krug is one of my favorite TrendErtainment Subscribers. He often leaves comments that take the blog one step further.  In the last post about learning styles and training, Michael commented on the importance of evaluating the current level of skill prior to training a company member. I fully agree with his point of view.

I evaluate the candidate on three criteria outside of their resume itself when hiring for general positions: attitude, aptitude, and skill. I need to know that they have a specific level of “expertise” in order to join a company. Here is what I look for in advance when inviting someone to join my team:

The Criteria

1) Attitude
Is this someone who has a good attitude? If they don’t have a good attitude in the interview process when people are (hopefully) trying to be on their best behavior, they won’t have a good attitude in the work place. During the interview process, how does the candidate represent himself or herself? Will they be a pleasant person to work with or someone you and your team will want to avoid? Is this someone who is taking the job only because they need the money, or is this position going to help them grow? I often ask the individual to tell me about previous employers. I can guarantee you that if they trash the last person they work for, they will bash me too. I like to work with people who have an infectiously positive attitude towards the position they are applying for. It is amazing what a group of properly hired people with high enthusiasm can do for a company.

2) Aptitude
Do they have the ability to learn the specifics of the job assigned to them? Are they willing to learn something new or are they closed off and think they know everything already? Are they open to criticism or are they defensive? Will they learn quickly or will this be a long painstaking and expensive process?

3) Skill
Where is their current level of skill? I need the candidate to have a strong working knowledge of the technical or managerial elements of the role they are applying for. If I am hiring a sound engineer, I need to know they have the skills needed to operate and set up sound equipment.

Variations

Everything is contingent on attitude, regardless of your current skill. - I don’t always care what your level of skill is or your aptitude. In entertainment, we all work like a family. If you have a bad attitude, I don’t care what your current level of skill is or your ability to learn, you are not right for my team.

Just because you have the skill doesn’t mean you can do the job. – Live entertainment has many challenges. Every gig is different. Due to the demands of the theatre, you may have to be flexible with the way you are used to doing things. If you are not willing to learn the job the way it needs to be done for this company, then you are not right for us.

If you are a great person ready to learn but have no practical experience, I can’t use you, yet. – I can’t hire you to be a tour manager if you have absolutely no background in management. The road is tough. I don’t want you making beginner mistakes while in the line of fire. I will remember you though. Come back to me when you have some assistant training (or perhaps when I have an assistant position available).

Hire slowly – Fire Quickly!

It’s that simple, and that hard.

Several times I have made the mistake of not adhering to this golden rule. Every time it bit my team and me in the butt. If you are a road company, I fully acknowledge how difficult it can be to replace someone while in the trenches. Not releasing a bad company member is like staying in a bad relationship- don’t stay with the person if they are not right for you! (Another mistake I made too many times before meeting my wife.)

 

Tell, Show, Do and Review

Asking for Feedback at Training

This has been an intensive week of training for the StarQuest 2009 road staff.

The dance competition world is unlike anything else I have ever experienced in entertainment. It is a mix of reality TV, a pageant, and a pop concert. I can promise you that a new set of rules apply to just about everything when working in a youth oriented dance competition.

This year we have a very strong group of auditors (Judges Managers), and awards managers. After a long week of training, they picked up on the complexities that come along with their positions.  The other day we asked them, “…with all this training, and running through the motions of your role, is there anything else we could have done to enhance your learning experience?”. 

The young women, already very energized (from what I consider a successful training period) started to rattle off ideas on what could have enhanced the experience for them. The ideas varied and each one involved a different learning style.

Their feedback reinforced my need to revisit learning styles and the importance of incorporating them when training my staff.

The Three Learning Styles:

1) Auditory Learners

2) Visual Learner

3) Tactile/Kinesthetic Learners

Often as managers in entertainment, we don’t take the time to work with these concepts; however, we run into conflicts when we don’t acknowledge that what is a common learning approach for one person, is not the best for another. A visual manager, who uses images to demonstrate to their staff how to do something, gets frustrated with a company member (a kinesthetic learner) when he doesn’t get it. A kinestheic manager gets frustrated when a well-educated auditory learner doesn’t get it after having them do it for the first time.

I don’t have the time to figure out what the best learning style is to teach each and every company member (and I doubt you have the time either).  We often have to train entire groups how to accomplish a task – and everyone learns differently!

It is always a safe bet to incorporate the “Tell, Show, Do, and Review” method. It is really simple, and I have experienced and seen it work first hand.

Tell, Show, Do, and Review:

Tell – Tell the company members what the task is, and why it is being done. (This covers the Auditory Learners.)

Show – Do the task yourself, or have a skilled technician do the job. (This covers the Visual Learners.)

Do – Have the company members do the task themselves. (This gets your Kinesthetic learners in on the action.)

Review – Go over with the company what you have done by asking questions and getting feedback. (Reinforces the task overall.)

Everyone utilize all the learning styles in one way or another, so this method embeds the task further for everyone.

So…Before you get frustrated with a very competent employee, ask yourself, “Am I showing them how to do this the way I learn, or the way they need to learn?”.

-- Welcome to the team: Lyssa, Jennifer, Patricia, Stacey, and Leah (The new StarQuest International Auditors and Awards Managers)

What type of learning style works best for YOU?

Quote of the Moment - Thank you Oscar!

In preparation for the 14 week workshop, I started reading the C.T.I. book on producing.

The first page of the book has this quote:

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“I think only people in the theater know what a producer is.
The public does not know.
It knows a writer writes, and an actor acts,
and a director tells them what to do.
A producer raises money.
Well, he does, and in some cases thats all he does.
 But the workers in the theater know that this is not the real thing.
A producer is a rare, paradoxical genius –
hard-headed, soft-hearted, cautious, reckless,
a hopeful innocent in fair weather,
a stern pilot in stormy weather,
a mathematician who prefers to ignore the laws of mathematics and trust intuition,
an idealist, a realist, a practical dreamer,
a sophisticated gambler, a stage-struck child.
That’s a producer.”

– Oscar Hammerstein II

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Never before have I seen my life summarized so perfectly. For those of you entering the producing realm or continuing to produce, I’m sure you feel the same !

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Have a favorite Quote? Post it in the comments section below....

Saturday Night Live Clip - Save Broadway

In times of trouble, we sometimes have to laugh at ourselves - See video:

Secretary of the Arts - What's Your Mission ?

We all have daily missions to accomplish:

-   to write a blog a day,
-   to be a great husband or wife,
-   to get a new job,
     or
-    It could be to get President Elect Obama to add a Secretary of the Arts to his cabinet.

Quincy Jones has set out to help drive the arts to new heights.

Are you interested in joining Quincy in his mission? Then sign his petition.

F-U !

**CALLING PAST, PRESENT, AND TOURING PERSONNEL****

When people ask me to describe life on a bus and truck tour, I tell them “It is the best Reality TV you will ever live!”.

For those of you who have lived or do live life on the road you know what I am talking about. Plop a camera on one of those tours and you have a network TV hit ! Why know one has done this yet is beyond me. (Anyone with a TV background want to pair up with me on this idea let me know.)

I am now gathering anecdotes from actors, crew, and management about the magical time of a tour that is right around February. What is referred to often as the “F-U Febuaries. I want to know how you and your team prevented the gloom from happening or how the gloom manifested to a gooey chaos. Email me your stories at Michael@michaelcedar.com or comment below. I will protect the innocent.

If you don’t know what this “mythical” F.U.F. is don’t worry you soon will!

Stay tuned at the beginning of February for the collection of stories and thoughts regarding this topic. Hopefully with all the experience of our readers we can develop “The Psychology on how to prevent the F.U.Fs.”.

 

Do Your Company Members Want to Be Measured?

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By a show of hands how many people set clear goals for themselves recently?

Now…

By a show of hands how many people set clear goals for their company members recently?

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Unfortunately, I know there were fewer hands raised for the later. Many different sources indicate that most company members don’t understand what they are working towards and what is expected of them.

With the beginning of the year at our fingertips, now is a great time to increase your company’s performance. Clearly define for your staff:

1) The Mission of the Project  
2) The Role of the Individual  

Here is some help:

Mission of the company: What is the overall goal of this project? Who do we serve? How do we measure our progress? If you are a for-profit entity, making money is probably priority. Hopefully though, your product has other goals in addition to making a profit.

Role of the individual: What is my main objective? What is my next challenge? How is my progress going to be measured?

It is crucial that the goals you set for your staff are measurable. If they are not measurable, there is no way to reward  (or discipline) company members fairly. What is common sense to you may not be common sense to your staff. Showing up on time to bus call means you have your luggage is loaded and you are in your seat at call time (while your leading lady may think “on time” means 10 minutes after is perfectly acceptable).

Setting clear goals doesn’t mean micro-managing your team. Detailed expectations will guide the way while allowing your company the room to add their own nuances.

You may say to a group sales representative, “It is your job to sell groups of 10 or more. Now go!”. If this is the expectation set to your group sales representative, he may sell two groups of 10 in one week and think he did a fantastic job; meanwhile you are starting to pull your hair out.

It may serve you better as a manager to set more specific expectations, “It is your job to sell $10,000 worth of tickets per week through groups of 10 or more”. Now, you both have a way to measure the performance.

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Twittering the Birth of a New Company

You can now find me on Twitter under the name MICedar.

Lots of incredible things in the works for 2009. I would love to have you join me for the ride.

Why did I join twitter other than the fact that it’s a fun toy for my iGoogle page and blackberry?:

1) It is a really neat way to archive the creation of Future Generations Entertainment.
2) Another way to market my services as an Entertainment Professional.
3)) I can see what other people in entertainment and business are doing.
4) Hands on experience of how I can incorporate Web 2.0. into my new projects.

Want to learn more about how Twitter can assist your business: A great blog posting on the benefits of Twitter here.

Do any of you have a Twitter account. Feel free to list it in the comments section below!