Getting to Great: The Other-Oriented Mindset
In a recent interview with Hoda Kotb, NBC News anchor Tom Llamas kindly referenced work that he and I had done together when he was anchoring the 5 p.m. news at WNBC.
I appreciated the shoutout (Coaches need love, too!), but what really struck me was what Tom said he remembered most about our conversation. It speaks volumes about who Tom is and why he’s risen to the seat he now occupies, but it also points to the single best piece of advice you can give to anyone who’s truly committed to doing extraordinary work.
You can hear Tom talk about it in the clip below.
If you want to be great, commit to making the people around you great.
Whatever your situation, this will always be a recipe for great performance, because it points you in the most productive direction possible -- both relationally and pragmatically.
Relationally, it challenges you to show up off the air in ways that are both honest and supportive. Pragmatically, it challenges you to work on the air in a way that lets viewers know you’re the real deal -- a journalist and a leader -- and not just a mouthpiece.
Think about it.
If you’re committed to making your producers great, you’re showing up wholeheartedly in the ways you help them plan and the ways you represent their work on the air.
If you’re committed to making your reporters great, you’re weighing in productively and supportively off the air, and you’re paying real attention to the work they’re doing on the air - watching and listening with the same levels of interest and curiosity you want viewers to be feeling. If they’re inexperienced and insecure, you’re committed to helping them grow in ways that raise the standards of their work on your newscasts.
If you’re committed to making your coanchors great, you’re present to them throughout the newscast in ways that are authentic and spontaneous, not obligatory and premeditated.
I’m not naive. I know there are places and times that focusing in these ways can seem near-unobtainable luxuries. Almost weekly, I hear stories about anchors using almost every second that they’re not reading to camera to scan and fact-check material that’s coming in while they are already on-air. It’s part of the hard reality of living with fewer resources and less experienced support. And it may be exactly when you need an other-oriented mindset the most.
Benefits of an Other-Oriented Mindset
If the newsroom team supporting you is younger and less experienced than ever, then chances are good that they need your help and everyday involvement now more than ever. And the steps you can take to help them succeed include some of the most important things you can do to get the best out of yourself, as well.
Things like these:
Define great work for yourself.
Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of watching and learning from truly legendary news talent. As unique as each of them has been, one thing they’ve all had in common was a strong conviction about what it meant to do the job well. They believed they knew what great work looked and sounded and felt like, and they were articulate about it.
It taught me to have real concern when an anchor gave me some version of, “Just tell me what you want me to do. I can do anything you ask.” It told me the person had no real core from which to work. In the conversation with Hoda, Tom references the idea of just being yourself. It’s something that’s often equated with the idea of somehow relaxing and being less performative, but the real power is in having a true professional Self to begin with -- a bedrock conviction about what you stand for and how you do your job well. And a willingness to stand for it.
Be as much about planning the newscast as you are about performing the newscast.
The days of doing the job as a figurehead - someone who just shows up and performs material that’s been created by others - are in the rearview mirror. You can’t help the people around you do great work if you’re not a part of the conversation when the work is being created. I often point out in workshops that I’ve never seen a newscast that wasn’t perfect in that it was the perfect result of the process that created it.
When Hoda asks Tom about his management style, he talks about being in as many conversations as he can every single day. It’s not micromanaging. It’s collaborating when collaboration matters most. Greatness is the result of the work people do in the kitchen. Not when the meal is being served.
Off-air and on, wear your passion for the work -- and the people you work with -- on your sleeve.
Show up as a true believer. This means 1) believing in the importance of the work your team does and 2) being relentlessly positive about their ability to do it well. What I find most impressive and inspiring about Tom is his passion about the work he’s doing and why it matters. There’s something about it that’s both real-world aware and infectiously positive.
He says to Hoda that he believes the attitudes that rule in a newsroom come from the top down. If you’re in a position of any influence, the buck doesn’t just stop with you. It starts with you.
Wage creative war on any temptation to settle.
At almost every level of the business, it’s easier than ever to list and lament the limitations that make the work harder. But breakthroughs happen when someone finds a creative way to transcend the limitations instead of bellyaching about them. When you’re committed to helping everyone around you excel, you focus less on what you can’t do and go wholeheartedly at what you can do.
Commit to being a coach as well as a colleague.
This is another thing that stood out about many of the best anchors I’ve known: They were great coaches in their own right.
Miami’s legendary Ann Bishop once volunteered to coanchor for a young anchor who was auditioning for a weekend slot with WPLG. Not long into the session, she interrupted him and proceeded to demonstrate how he could improve his delivery and, in the process, his chances of getting the job. That was ostensibly what I was there to do. Instead, I simply stood by and got a masterclass in great anchoring and great coaching.
Great coaches can see the potential in their players before the players see it in themselves, and everything they do is calculated to help those players live up to that potential -- and maybe even exceed it.
That includes never letting them settle for doing less than their best, but it also includes knowing how to give feedback in ways that can be candid and demanding but also leave them feeling encouraged and hopeful. You don’t sugarcoat the challenge. You help others see how they are up to it.
In fact, none of this is about sugarcoating anything.
It’s about holding yourself accountable for not just the quality of the work you do on the air, but for the quality of life in the world you work in. Watch the post-game interviews with the leaders of teams that win championships. They won’t talk about how they themselves played, except to say how it was the way that others played that made it possible. They’ll talk about playing on a team that has each other’s backs. And about how winning never surprises them, because they always go in believing that they can, whatever the odds. And, of course, they love nothing like proving any naysayers wrong.
Essentially, the point will be that they win because of all the ways they are there for each other. Whatever odds you and your newsroom may face, when you take them on with a commitment to make the people around you great, you increase the odds that you’ll win big, too.
And you’ll know exactly what to say when they ask you how you did it.