To Be A Theatre Director, First Know How to Manage People

Greg Ehrhardt, OnStage Blog Editorial Staff

This was originally published in the OnStage Blog Newsletter on 3/3/2023. You can receive our weekly commentaries in your inbox by subscribing here.

Have you ever wondered how the director of your regional musical production got to be in their position based on how horribly they managed the production?

Maybe you’ve wondered how someone at your corporate job got promoted to vice president without knowing how to run a department.

It always boils down to the Peter Principle, fundamentally.

The Peter Principle is a concept in management theory that says that individuals tend to be promoted based on their performance in their current role until they reach a level where they can no longer perform their job effectively. Once they hit that point, they remain in that position rather than being demoted or returned to their previous role.

Simply put, people are often promoted to positions as a reward for prior performance (or perhaps cronyism) instead of an evaluation that they would be capable of their new responsibilities.

We see this across industries and for many years; the Peter Principle was published in 1969! Unfortunately, I don’t have a magic solution to solve the Peter Principle nationwide.

However, we can solve this ourselves if we direct a play for the first time or teach a theatre class; we can also take an adult education class (virtual or in person) on managing people.

A theatre director of course, has to know theatre and should have a passion for the play. But fundamentally, they have to have people skills, as well as project management skills.

But unfortunately, we have “dictator directors” out there, and directors who know how to act but have no clue how to handle people of different personalities and egos. (We won’t even get to directors who potentially violate the law when it comes to handling actors)

Sure, there isn’t exactly a line of qualified people waiting out the door to run local theatre productions; sometimes, you have to take the only person raising their hand.

But it’s not a lot to ask new managers and directors to take a management class before their first endeavors. Here’s a handy list of free management seminars, many of which take less than 2 hours.

Broadly speaking, management shouldn’t be viewed as a natural progression for your career track (whether professionally or in the arts). Some people weren’t meant to manage teams, and that’s ok!

But people and management skills should be considered priority requirements for any management position of any scale.

We can’t control how other people promote people into management, but we can control how prepared we are for these roles and what we should tolerate from poor managers.