Career chats: Planning and leading
About this video
People in planning and leading roles describe their work: explaining the what, why and vision, using data to design solutions and execution plans; managing theater production budgets and builds; starting each construction day with a team toolbox meeting; and leading projects that last up to six years.
You'll be able to
- describe what people in planning and leading jobs do.
- explain why leaders share the 'what and why' with their teams.
- describe how a toolbox meeting helps a team start the day.
Key words
- vision
- A clear picture of where a team or organization is trying to go.
- metrics
- Numbers used to measure how well something is going.
- execution plan
- A step-by-step plan for how to carry out a goal.
- budget
- A plan for how much money can be spent and on what.
- toolbox meeting
- A short team meeting at the start of a work day, often on construction sites, to share safety reminders and goals.
Transcript
(upbeat music) - And so I spend a lot of my time helping make sure people understand the what and why behind what we're doing, the vision behind where we're trying to go, doing the analysis and obtaining the metrics on like what do we know now and how do we need to change things so that the numbers look better.
And then really helping people design the solutions and build an execution plan that we can meet.
- So as a production manager, we're really responsible for the things behind the scenes, primarily starting at the early stages of the process. We work with the general managers and producers to figure out what the budgets are gonna be for the technical side and for labor.
Then we also work with the designers to take their designs, and figure out how to get them built, go through an engineering process, do value engineering with them, and eventually award the show to various lighting, scenery, costume, you know, all those different shops that actually build a production.
- I always start my day with a toolbox meeting. So we gather together as a team. So sometimes it's the whole group, all 600 of us. Most of the time it's the trade, whatever trade is, for example, the masonry team. So we meet as a group and then we do our safety reminders.
We exercise to start the day, and then we pretty basically align with the goals of the day.
- These projects take many years, as many as six years, and my job is to take it all the way from year zero to completion. (upbeat music)
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