Who’s job is it anyway?

Imagine:
You’ve founded a company for dancers who dance awesomely.  You and your best friends, Maria and Tony, have banded together and started producing shows.  The first one goes super well!  The second one, you even managed to get some arts council support for.  But by the third one, the three of you are disagreeing a lot.  During the fourth show you get tired of doing all the work and have a screaming match with Maria who has been your friend since the third grade!  Now, you aren’t sure whether there will be a fifth show.

What might have helped?  What could have delayed or even completely avoided this breakdown of lifelong friendships?

A small helping of that big concept ‘role clarity.’  You can sometimes call them job descriptions, or implicit agreements of capacity, or even just ‘here is the junk you will do if I do the stuff I say I am going to do.’  This is a key component of putting together any sort of production or company.  Ideally at the very start of the project you will all get together and explicitly work through the process.

If Tony’s job is the program, and Maria’s job is the dance, and your job is the set design that’s all well and good.  What you have to determine is how do those roles interact, who will make decisions and how?  The more detail you can give to the situations that are likely to arise during the project, the less ambiguity there is later on.  I always like to write this stuff down, that way everyone remembers what is expected of them and there are no surprises later.

The best part about this is that in your post-mortem after the show you can all review the stuff you said you would do and compare it to what actually happened.  This way you can find the areas where things got stuck, things went well and make a plan of attack for the next time!