Most first time Showrunner/Executive Producers have spent their professional lives in positions that haven’t needed them to provide leadership. Let’s face it, most of us spent years writing alone -- in our apartments, homes, and offices. Those of us who have had the good fortune to work on shows where we had producing titles weren’t usually expected to provide leadership beyond keeping the writers’ room going when the Showrunner was on set, in casting, editing, etc. But now you have your own show and you’re the Showrunner. That means you must provide leadership.

As discussed in Delegation, leadership isn’t about making all the decisions, it’s about determining where your energies and talents are most needed on your show. But leadership also means you’re responsible for creating a workplace that is welcoming, inclusive, diverse and supportive. The kind of workplace where everyone’s contributions are valued, and they’re able to do their best work.

To point out the obvious, this means a workplace that is absent of anger and aggression. You’re the leader. You set the tone. To use a time-honored cliché, the fish really does stink from the head. That means how you act will define the culture of your show. If you’re abrupt, stressed and angry, your show culture will be abrupt, aggressive and tense. It is on you to create a positive and supportive workplace from your first day on the job.

It really is the small things. You’re leading a team. Ditch your use of “I” and “me”, adopt “we” and “us”. Greet everyone. Smile. Listen. Laugh. Learn everyone’s name. You won’t learn everyone’s name right away but try and get one or two a day. Before long you’ll be remembering most.

Take the time to highlight how everyone is doing a good job. Your opinion is very powerful now that you’re the leader. As the Showrunner, one harsh comment can be devastating. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t criticize but keep it constructive and professional – and be sure to follow it up with praise for work you do like. With the pressures of the job, it’s easy to fall into a pattern of only commenting when you have negative reactions to other’s work (writers, actors, directors, crew). Everyone you’re working with is an artist, they care deeply about their work, you’re their leader, they need your approval. Don’t withhold it.

Never, ever yell or lose your temper. You will have plenty of moments when you want to (and may well be justified to) but don’t. It will haunt your workplace culture for months. Your team will be talking about it behind your back and waiting for you to do it again. People will be frightened of bringing you bad news and will withhold information out of concern you will lose your temper. I’ve worked on shows with Showrunners who vented their spleen on members of their team and it’s toxic, counterproductive and will make your job much more difficult. Take a walk. Close the door to your office and pound a couch cushion. Type an angry email or text to yourself -- and then delete it. Once you’re calm, return to the situation, and solve the problem without anger.

Never demean members of your team. I know, this is common sense. But it is routinely ignored. There’s no place for it in your workplace culture. Equally important, if another member of your team is demeaning others or losing their temper, everyone will be looking to you to put a stop to it. If you ignore it, others will question your ability to lead.

Don’t look to take the credit. In fact, actively deflect the credit to others. Practice humility. When your network executives, agents, and/or your staff praise you, praise another member of your team in response. An example: executive, “I loved that episode, you’re killing it.” You, “Thank you. Janel wrote a fantastic script and Kelly directed the hell out of it.” Or “I’m proud of the script I wrote, but Kelly directed the hell out of it and Robert was fantastic in that scene at the pier.” You’re already getting credit for the show because you’re the Showrunner, sharing credit and acknowledging others’ contributions makes you a leader. Your team will love you for it.

There are many small things you can do to let your team know you care about them and appreciate their hard work. Give start-up gifts (hats or T-shirts work well). Throw a Christmas Party if your production schedule stretches over the holiday. A nice one with everyone’s families invited, a Santa and small gifts for the kids. Throw a Wrap Party. Give Wrap gifts (something nice -- jackets, hoodies).

We throw a start-up Garden Party on a weekend before shooting begins for the season. We invite department heads, cast, editors, ADs, writers, network and studio executives. It gives everyone a chance to meet and put faces to names. The office and post-production staffs are especially appreciative of this event as they often feel removed from writers and shooting company.

Your network/studio may or may not be prepared to pay for these parties and gifts. You need to throw them anyway and pay for whatever your network and/or studio partners won’t cough up. Your crew expects it. They know you are making many, many multiples of what they’re making. This isn’t a place you want to be cheap. You can write it off on your taxes as a business expense because it is. If you’re sharing your Executive Producer duties with a producing pod and/or another Executive Producer who’s helping you as a Co-Showrunner, they should chip in on these parties and gifts. They wanted the Executive Producer credit; they need to help you bear the costs.

Set treats are essential. We look for Friday nights when the crew will be shooting into the evening or days when your crew is working in difficult conditions (rain, cold, snow, heat) and we send something to the set to show we understand they’re working hard in less-than-ideal conditions. We send coffee trucks (always appreciated), waffle trucks, crepe trucks, In and Out Burger trucks. Shaved ice trucks on hot days. There are all sorts of treat trucks available. Your Line Producer and UPM will have plenty of them to recommend. Once a week or once every two weeks is plenty. But beware, your crew will notice if you’re not sending treats to acknowledge that they’re out there busting their butts for you. And yes, you will pay for these treats too. Recently some Showrunners have been asking their writing staff members to send treats on the episodes they’ve written – and have asked the writers to pay for them! Don’t do this. They won’t tell you so, but your writers will resent you for it.

If your show is shooting on a distant location (another city or even country) make sure you’re still sending treats and reaching out to make sure they know you’re aware of the difficult days and challenging conditions.

RESPONSIBILITY AND LEADERSHIP

While you are not the employer (your studio or network is), you are the leader and the decisions you make about how you choose to write and run your show directly impacts the quality of life for everyone on your team.

If you don’t have a diverse and inclusive team (writers, directors, crew, etc.), that’s on you.

If you writers’ spreads are too long (the number of weeks they’re in your writers’ room), that’s on you.

If your shoot days are longer than twelve hours, that’s on you.

If your crew is watching the sun come up every Saturday morning, that’s on you.

If your assistants and production assistants aren’t paid enough, that’s on you.

Let’s deal with these issues one by one.

EQUITY, DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION

As mentioned above, you’re not the employer, but creating a diverse and inclusive team is your responsibility. Racial, economic, ethnic and gender diversity are essential to your show’s success. While progress has been made in writers’ rooms and in the hiring of directors and producers, there is much work still to be done. As Showrunner you need to use your influence to ensure your writers’ room, the directors, and producers who are hired are diverse. Do it.

Putting together a diverse crew has proven to be challenging. This situation is often blamed on the unionized nature of the workplace, essentially blaming the unions for the slow pace of diversifying our crews. But I would like to take a moment to present another view. Your departments (camera, grips, gaffers, props, costumes, transportation, etc.) are made up of small teams of people who have often worked together for years. When you hire a DP, or key grip or costume designer, they have teams of people they feel responsible to employ and who they have confidence will do the job well.

I’ve often encountered reluctance when asking for a diverse crew along the lines of “Okay, I agree we should, but who would you like me to fire?” The department head wants to do a great job for you and has a team they trust can do it. Because these crews have traditionally not been diverse (or not very diverse) the opportunity for diverse crew members to be hired and become a part of the department head’s team have been limited. It’s a catch 22.

One way we’ve tried to counter this dynamic (when a department head has a team that isn’t diverse) is to increase the size of the department by one or two members who are diverse. Yes, this increases your budget, but that’s a small price to pay for building a more diverse workforce. These new crew members gain experience and become members of the department head’s team for the future. We’ve discovered that natural attrition on crews means that new crew members won’t be “new” for long and your crew size will return to its original size.

Our network and studio partners claim they are now committed to diverse crews but are often unwilling to accept that getting new (diverse) crew members the experience and credits they need to succeed will require them to spend some cash. They will often say “Can’t you find someone who’s already experienced?” In other words, “can’t someone else pay to get them the necessary experience and then we can benefit?” This is a ridiculous argument and the Kafkaesque predicament diverse workers trying to enter the industry have encountered for years. Take responsibility for helping change this situation. Insist on a diverse crew and insist that your Line Producer, your UPM, and your department heads understand it’s a condition of you hiring them on your show.

Lastly, you will sometimes hear that your team leaders don’t know where to find diverse crew members to hire (both experienced and aspiring). This may have once been true, but it’s no longer the case. ARRAY has created a fantastic data base of diverse crew members (https://arraynow.com/). The major film schools are creating or have created similar hiring databases (https://careers.usc.edu/channels/participate-in-diversity-initiatives/). The below- the-line agencies are now representing more and more diverse crew members. And, of course, hiring diverse department heads, Line Producers and UPMs will likely give you team leaders who are already engaged in the campaign to diversify crews and can bring their resources to bear.

WRITER SPREADS

When selecting writers for your team, you need to keep track of how they’re being paid. Your lower-level writers will be on weekly WGA minimums. If you go over the budgeted number of weeks your writers are contracted to work, they will continue to be paid the WGA minimum -- but you need to make sure your show continues to pay them after the budgeted number of weeks has been exhausted. Your writers, their agents and managers are often not keeping track.

Your writers who also have a producer title will be getting the weekly WGA minimums plus their episodic producer fees divided over the number of weeks you’re budgeted to have them on the show. Once you surpass that budgeted number of weeks, they will keep getting paid the WGA weekly minimum, but they will have already been paid their episodic producing fees – so now they’re working for minimum. If you’re going to exceed your budgeted weeks with your writers, you must make sure your writer-producers are still getting paid their pro- rated weekly episodic producing fee and the WGA minimum. In other words, it’s your responsibility to make sure they’re not being taken advantage of because you’ve exceeded your budgeted weeks with your writers. I realize this is complicated, but the WGA has an excellent pay calculator on their website for figuring out writer-producer pay that you can use -- (https://www.wga.org/members/career-advice/weekly-vs-episodic-pay).

Being concerned about your writer-producers’ pay and making sure you’re not taking advantage of them by working them past the date their episodic producing fees have been exhausted is your responsibility. At JWP we have someone in production (or in our offices) calculate these work spans so we know in advance the dates when each writer will have exhausted their budgeted weeks. We then do a weekly memo to the Showrunner listing when each writer’s budgeted weeks will be exhausted. As previously suggested, make sure to get your writers payment schedule so you can be certain they are being paid WGA scale plus their portion of their produceorial fee.

This is one more reason that a writers script schedule is so important. If you stick to your Writers Schedule, you won’t be taking advantage of your writer- producers. Equally important, by comparing your Writers Schedule with your writers’ budgeted finish dates you’ll be quickly able to tell if you’ve budgeted enough weeks to get your scripts written and produced before your writers are done.

SHOOTING HOURS, NIGHT SHOOTS AND CREW SAFETY

Keeping your shooting company safe and healthy is your responsibility and is directly connected to what you choose to write. No other industry I know of considers a twelve-hour day to be a normal workday. That be as it may, you need to ensure that twelve-hour days are the maximum work hours on your show. We all routinely hear of fourteen and sixteen-hour workdays. This is not only inhumane, but also dangerous and it is budget suicide.

The inhumane part is common sense. I suggest that every writer on a show that’s shooting days longer than twelve-hours spend a full workday on the set. From call to wrap. Don’t sit in a chair, stay on your feet all fourteen or sixteen hours, then see how safe you feel driving home or hauling equipment back to the trucks – and then do it again in ten hours.

Having your show work longer than twelve-hour days destroys your crew. People get hurt. People get sick. People quit. Oh, and the next time you’re on set and you see a teamster (driver) asleep in the cab of their truck don’t think, “Look at that, sleeping while he’s getting paid a fortune.” Think, “Look at that, he had to get up at 4:00am to get the wardrobe trailer to location and he won’t be home before 10:00 tonight.”

The dangerous part of long working hours is well documented. Crew members have died driving home after brutally long days. Crew members have been injured. Health suffers. Haskell Wexler did an excellent documentary on the subject called Who Needs Sleep. https://theasc.com/ac_magazine/April2006/Sundance2006/page4.html

And long days kill your budget. The crew works at time-and-a-half after eight hours and double-time after twelve (a simplification because of differences in the various union contracts but you get the idea). That means that for every hour you shoot over twelve hours you’re paying your crew twice what the first hours of your day cost. Not hard to do the math -- shooting more than twelve hours costs twice what the hours cost at the beginning of your day. This kind of constant overtime adds up quickly and you’ll find yourself over-budget fast.

What does this have to do with you? Well, you wrote it (or had it written) and the script dictates the hours required to shoot it. If a writer pitches, “This entire episode is going to take place in a railyard at night...” and you agreed to do it – you just trashed your crew and your budget. Exterior nights are expensive and working nights consistently destroys your crew’s health and any hope of their maintaining relationships and a family. If your Line Producer tells you that the show isn’t producible within twelve-hour days for the number of days you’re budgeted to shoot (7, 8, 10, 12, whatever) you need to take responsibility for changing the script to ensure it can be shoot in twelve-hour days. Way too often Showrunners don’t make changes (you love what you wrote), cross their fingers and hope it will work out. It won’t. That’s not leadership.

Commit to twelve-hour days. Tell your Line Producer you’re committed to twelve- hour days, and you need her/him to help you make it happen. This means you will be making changes in your scripts. Be responsible. Keep your crew safe.

A quick note on Fraturdays (the hated term crews use to describe Fridays that begin with a 5:00pm or 6:00pm call and end with watching the sun come up on Saturday morning). Fraturdays are a terrible for your cast and crew. They finish on Saturday morning. Drive home (unsafely after being up all night). Try to catch a couple of hours of terrible daylight sleep. Barely get back to being human on Sunday, then set the alarm for 5:00am on Monday morning and head back to work. Don’t do it. Make it your mission to require the crew wraps no later than midnight on Friday nights. Your budget and your crew will love you for it. If you do have to shoot into the wee hours of Saturday morning, make sure it never happens more than once or twice during your entire show. And send a coffee cart treat, they’re going to need it!

Another quick note on weeks of all-nighters (the dreaded shooting all night for days on end shooting schedule). Don’t. Really. Don’t. Figure out a different way in your script. Put it in a basement that can be shot day-for-night. Black in a house so you can shoot day-for-night. Do everything in your power to protect your cast and crew so they don’t have to endure this torture. Better yet never write it in the first place. When the idea of an “all night episode in the forest” comes up in the writers’ room, kill it. That’s you anticipating the problems and costs to come and showing leadership in protecting your crew’s health and sanity.

When tough days and nights on sets are avoidable, when you’ve written, or allowed to be written, a scene or sequence that requires a hundred people to be outside late on a Friday, in the rain, in the snow, on a 100+ degree day, etc., show up to demonstrate you understand that what you’ve asked them to do is a hardship. Sets are a hotbed of “Bet the writers wouldn’t have written this if they’d have to be out here freezing their asses off!”. Show up. Stick around until wrap if it’s going to be late. Get cold or hot or whatever with your crew (and don’t forget the treat truck). Your willingness to experience the tough times with them will not go unnoticed.

FAIR PAY FOR ASSISTANTS AND PRODUCTION ASSISTANTS

This is an easy one. People need a fair wage. Making sure they get it is on you. For much too long entry level positions have been underpaid. Ask your Line Producer and UPM what’s in the budget for these positions. Then ask how many hours they’re going to be working (Production Assistants are often working the same or longer hours than crew members). Then make sure what they’re getting paid is enough to pay for an apartment, a car, gas, insurance and groceries. If you couldn’t live on it, how do you think they’re going to be able to? The low pay is one reason it’s been hard for people that come from less privileged economic backgrounds to get into our industry. Many entry level positions have been filled by people who come from families that can afford to supplement the applicant’s finances while they work an entry level job. Make sure your assistants and production assistants are being paid a fair wage that allows them to live in the area where you’re going to be based.

In conclusion, be a leader who listens. Who makes decisions that create a safe and inclusive workplace. Be a leader who cares.

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