Being responsible for an enterprise is no laughing matter. Yet I’ve personally seen dozens of executives improve their leadership skills (and their business outcomes) by copying strategies from the man behind Saturday Night Live.
Lorne Michaels appears on camera occasionally, but he’s far from being a centerpiece of the show. He even downplays his role as the creator and executive producer of Saturday Night Live: “At the end of the day, that’s really all I am is the tiebreaker. I’m just the one to say, ‘Okay, it’s gonna be this.’”
It doesn’t sound like much. Yet Lorne managed to wrangle prominent personalities like Chevy Chase, John Belushi and Pete Davidson. He’s found a way to keep SNL running for 50 years (and counting) while it has collected more than 200 Emmys. Under his leadership, what started as a scrappy group of mostly unknown comedians turned into arguably the most recognizable comedic institution in the world.
There’s much to learn from the Tao of Lorne, and you’ll probably get results if you start with just three things.
1. Give your people room NOT to shine
As strange as it is to say when addressing a group of executives, SNL shows that a good leader gives their people the opportunity to not shine. Because stagger-steps, error-ridden yet freely experimental forays, are the crucial framework from which improvement arises.
If the humans on your team don’t feel like they’re allowed to make mistakes, they’re not likely to push the envelope or uncover the next great innovation. There’s a time for caution, sure, but your competitors are looking for ways to make you irrelevant while you hide from risk.
If you’re going to hide somebody, or something, in the back until they achieve perfection, you’re squandering opportunity. You need a bad dress rehearsal to yield a good show. This is Product Management 101.
Lorne has established a culture of self-organizing brains that are liberated (even encouraged) to fail, while also making those failures transparently inspectable. In the weekly dress rehearsal, they intentionally perform twice as much content as they need for the show. It’s ok, even good, if half of the sketches flop. That makes it easy to decide which ones to cut and which make it to air.
By encouraging failure and iterative improvement, Lorne makes it possible for his team to repeatedly deliver things that people (and the market!) have never seen before.
2. Change the way you think about waste and efficiency
“Efficiency” is one of corporate America’s favorite buzzwords. The word is fueling AI marketing campaigns and dripping from every conversation about head count. But efficiency is so much less important than productivity, and they’re not the same. That is, building the wrong thing at three times the speed isn’t going to do you any good.
This brings us to the SNL method, which is not at all efficient by any traditional measure. It starts on Monday with a free-for-all pitch. People strip away their filters and pitch all kinds of ideas: good, bad and ugly.
The collection of pitches becomes a list, which they immediately cut in half. The remaining pitches get sketched out, becoming a rough outline in the form of a script. Again, after a read-through, the cast and crew watch half of their work get thrown out.
Now it’s time to stage the remaining scripts, using all of the show’s resources to produce comedy sketches. The live audience at 30 Rock gets to see those sketches live and in person before the cameras come on.
Then, just before 11:30 (when Saturday Night goes live), yet again, half of those completed sketches get cut. It sounds wasteful and certainly inefficient.
The goal of the cast and crew at SNL isn’t to be efficient, though. It’s to produce the best live television they possibly can, week after week. Don’t look for ways to churn out widgets faster when you should be doing the exploratory work required to solve a much more critical problem.
3. Deliver small doses of value with high regularity
For those not familiar with business agility concepts, Scrum is a framework based on the idea of breaking your work into short, constantly recurring timeboxes (of, say, two weeks). At the end of every timebox, or sprint, you should have something production-ready and incrementally better than what you had before.
For Saturday Night Live, their increments during the season are only a week long. That’s not much time to make everything perfect, so they don’t. As Lorne aptly summarizes it: “We don’t go on because it’s perfect. We go on because it’s 11:30.”
That’s not a call to ship substandard work. It’s about doing the best you can with the time you have, and constantly keeping your product at or near a state that’s ready for your end users to see.
This gives you a tight feedback loop. You’re building for people, so get them involved early and often. If you build in a vacuum, you can get way off track, get stuck in a project management wasteland and burn through your entire budget before you have anything to show for it.
It’s far better to come up for air every couple of weeks, put your latest changes in front of the people who matter most and get their reactions. If they give you positive feedback (for SNL, the laugh is the feedback that matters), great, keep going in the same direction. If you learn you’ve missed the mark, it’s not a product killer or a failed project. You’ve only gone two weeks in the wrong direction, and you’ve just been told where you should be headed instead.
What would Lorne do?
According to Lorne (see the quote in the second paragraph), he might not do much. If nothing else, it might not look like much because he intentionally distances himself from hands-on micromanagement of the details.
He’s created a high-performing, self-organized team, which is a feat in itself. He’s given them a system that allows them to push creative boundaries without meeting too many obstacles. Now he just has to stay out of their way.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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