Leader vs. Boss: What a Green Crew Is Teaching Me This Week

This week I'm building a show with one of the greenest crews I've ever worked with. All but one member of the team is new to this. Half the cast is new. A lot of freshmen, a lot of first-timers. And that means the rehearsal process isn't just about learning the show, it's a crash course in team work and leadership building.

Which brings me to this week's story, and the conversation I had with my new crew.

The Situation

I made a very young person my deck chief. She is, by a comfortable margin, the most experienced member of the crew. She has the knowledge. What she doesn't have yet, at her age, is the maturity that usually comes with that kind of experience. I knew that when I gave her the position. I gave it to her anyway, because she'd earned it, and because my job is to help her grow into the position.

Four or five days in, a few members of the crew came to me with concerns. Bossy. The position was going to her head.

Now, here's the thing that made me really listen: the students who brought this to me were very careful with their words. They didn't say, "She doesn’t know what she’s doing." They said, "We don't think she's doing a bad job. We think she needs to work on how she's doing the job." They recognize two things at once: she's young, and she's genuinely good at this. She does know more than they do about working backstage, but she is being a boss, not a team leader.

That's a level of nuance most adults don't manage. And it tells me something important, this young woman has a team of potential leaders around her.

There's one more piece of context. The cast members who know her love her. She works hard, tries hard, and shows up. Everyone who knows her recognizes that this behavior is out of character. That's a gift, actually. We're not fixing a bad person; we're correcting an early bad habit and catching it early matters, because nobody responds well to disrespect, especially not from someone they already think highly of.

The Conversation I Had

This week I got to sit down and teach one of my favorite lessons in educational theater: the difference between being the boss and being a leader.

Being in charge does not mean telling other people what to do. A lot of young people think a title, deck chief, stage manager, whatever, means you've finally arrived at the place where you get to boss people around. And I get it. Most of them have never been in charge of anything before. They're working from every movie and TV show they've ever seen, every bad summer job manager they’ve encountered. But that's not what the job is.

Here's what the job actually is:

You're the responsible party. The first thing I tell every stage manager: it's always the stage manager's fault. Whether you made the mistake or not, it's your responsibility because you're the one everyone reports to. You're the line leader. You're the head of the charge. That sounds harsh, but it's actually the point of the job. If you're not willing to step forward and take responsibility when things go wrong, you're not leading. You're just standing at the front of a line.

You're the holder of all the information. If one crew member runs flies and another's entire job is moving set piece A, the deck chief has to know when the fly cues are and when the set piece A cues are. You have to know where everything goes. You have to know every track for every piece of scenery and every individual on your crew. You're the final pre-show check.

You're the contingency plan. If someone is missing, if someone goes down mid-show, if someone's foot gets run over by a set piece and they’re in the greenroom with a bag of ice, the shift still has to happen. It's your job to figure out how. That means you have to hold the whole puzzle in your mind, all the time, so that when a piece goes missing you can see where the hole is and fill it.

You know everyone else's job so you can help, not just command. When a crew member doesn't know what their job is, the deck chief's job isn't to bark "report back to me." It's to know enough about everyone else's job to step in and help. And if you don’t know the answer cold, you have to be the person who knows where to find the answers.

That's the difference. A boss stands there and tells people what to do. A leader stands at the front, holds the whole picture, and makes sure all the other jobs get done, with confidence.

The Weird Place She's In

Here's what I kept in mind for this conversation: she's the youngest member of the crew and the most experienced member of the crew at the same time. That's a strange place to stand, and I've been there. I've been the youngest person on a team and the one in charge, and that was as an adult. I still got resentment and pushback.

So this wasn’t a lecture about her character. This is coaching. She has the knowledge. The crew even sees that. What she needs is the maturity part and the only way you get that is by being in the position and making the mistakes, with someone willing to sit you down afterward and walk you through it.

That's the deal, by the way. That's what educational theater is. I don't stand on deck anymore. I take notes and I hop up when I need to, but it's their job to get the job done and my job to teach them how. So when a student's leadership goes sideways in week one, that's not a failure. That's the curriculum.

How did it go?

Remarkably well, thank you. I was incredibly impressed with how receptive my new deck chief was to the feedback, because that’s how I framed it. Feedback on a job performance, not criticism of her as a person. What came back was that she was feeling a little overwhelmed by all the questions from other crew members. On the one hand she knew she needed to have everything written down, but she hadn’t gotten caught up with the changes yet, so her bossiness was more a stress response. That’s a reasonably easy fix. And she was relieved to know that her team does think she’s doing a good job, which made her all the more invested in being a good leader for them.

The Takeaway

If you're running a crew of young people, here's what I'd offer from this week:

• Correct the behavior early, not the person. "Bossy in week one" is a habit, not a character flaw. Name it while it's still small.

• Listen to how your crew complains. There's a world of difference between "she's terrible" and "she needs to work on how she's doing the job." The second kind of crew is worth its weight in gold. That's your next generation of leaders talking.

• Teach the job before the title means anything. A title without an understanding of the job is just a costume.

• Be the person who's been there. The youngest and most experienced person in the room needs to hear from someone who has stood in that exact spot.

Being the boss means you get to tell people what to do. Being a leader means they'd follow you anyway.