Reality TV has totally destroyed soap operas. They’re gone. They used to be the biggest thing in the world - they’re gone.
[.source]~GILBERT GOTTFRIED, COMEDIAN[.source]
Everyone seems to dislike Reality TV and then many of the same people tune in to watch it. At Vim Executive Coaching, we can understand it. One person’s obsessive trend is another person’s angry judgment.
Reality TV came out of a major Hollywood writer’s strike, which is kind of funny on one level, for soap operas literally came out of a need to sell laundry detergent. Neither area of entertainment is “high art,” and frankly we have met some serious arts classicists, opera experts and professors of music who can point to so-called classical pieces that were written on commission for purely entertainment value [for tone-deaf Monarchs and wealthy industrialists], i.e. Junk.
Reality Executive Leadership
Reality TV is staged, edited and packaged, and indeed, most of it is intended to sell detergents, air-fryers, cell phones, bathroom cleaners or fish sticks. It’s OK, it’s all OK…as long as the viewer never takes it seriously. For those who absolutely love Reality TV, be it a wild cooking show or a series on adult morbid obesity and patients losing 400-pounds, understand the situations are cherry-picked and viewers get to see the better outcomes, whatever they may be. Sometimes, true-life outcomes are not pleasant.
Over time, there have been many Reality TV shows that are business-based, be it a fledgling company awarded a couple-hundred-thousand for a 25-percent stake or a group of strangers asked to solve a convoluted marketing problem or to clean up a failing retailer. Viewers get caught up in the drama, the flash and the glamor. Again, it is Hollywood. It is Reality TV as opposed to a serious business situation. Each situation, presentation, management headache and financial award – at best – is fabricated.
Here is the problem: true executive leadership requires authenticity, the willingness to explore, probe, plan, lead and study outcomes. Those seemingly mundane tasks, those essential leadership tasks, are distant from the lights and posturing. While all of these facts should be a given, while most of you reading these lines might say, “It is rather obvious, isn’t it?” As business coaches, we are here to explain that to many active and potential executive business leaders, it is sadly not obvious. Why is it not always obvious?
We used the phrase, “the willingness to explore, probe, plan, lead and study outcomes,” with intention. For each one of those tasks is not only a “business task,” but a journey of self-exploration. Effective, true executive leaders must explore themselves, probe their strengths and weaknesses, create a plan for themselves to become for effective leaders, learn to lead and respond rather than react Reality TV style, and to study how their authentic or inauthentic decisions impact situations.
Mindfulness creates choices
Understand, please, that a slick and staged plea for “a couple-hundred-thousand for a 25-percent stake,” is just that. No one in their right mind is going to fork over money on a televised whim. And honestly, does anyone believe that within a 12-minute program segment, anyone is going to pass or bash a complex marketing problem? It just doesn’t work that way. Great executive leaders are borne of mindfulness and genuineness, not a segment wedged between deodorants or natural vitamins.
The reality of those programs is the entertainment value. As we said, “It’s OK, it’s all OK,” as long as we keep in mind that when the show ends, it is ultimately about mindfulness and not performing.