The Surprising Secret Todd Henry Reveals About Becoming an Irresistible Leader Everyone Depends On
Schawbel: Can you talk about some of the people you interviewed for the book and why they were effective leaders?
Henry: One of my favorite interviews was with Brian Koppelman, who is a screenwriter and producer for many movies, and co-creator and showrunner for the Showtime series Billions. He is obviously working with a ton of people across dozens of creative disciplines, all of whom are trying to work toward the best end product they can achieve. However, there is no possible way that he could be directly involved in every creative decision that needs to be made in order to create a television show from beginning to end. He told me that the only way that the show gets made is for him to have a clear vision and point of view for what the end product should look like, but to allow others to own that vision and run with it. If he doesn’t, the he knows that the director will be calling him every five minutes from the set with questions about how to shoot a scene or what a character’s motivation or backstory might be. That would not only make it impossible for all of the work to get done, but it would compromise the work. Most of all, he wouldn’t be able to retain talented people for very long if they were only following orders. Creative people need to be challenged and given permission to experiment and take risks if you want them to stay engaged and produce great work.
