E-Mail   |   Print   |   Request Reprints   |   E-Mail Newsletters   |   RSS

Tina Brown, perhaps the world’s best-known magazine editor, started at the top—as editor of England’s cheeky Tatler while in her 20s. She next landed in America to revitalize Vanity Fair , where she made stars of unknown writers and made known writers more famous than ever. Her flair for the hot and now turned the magazines she helmed—VF was followed by The New Yorker and Talk —into virtual buzz factories. Along the way, Brown refined her knack for identifying and nurturing the finest reporting, writing, editing, and management talent and, just as important, using their disparate strengths to a magazine’s best advantage. These days Brown is working on new-series ideas with HBO. Her bestseller, The Diana Chronicles , will be released in paperback in May, and she recently began work on a book about Bill and Hillary Clinton. Brown spoke with us about the delicate art of putting together a first-rate staff, prickly personalities and all.

In building a team, the goal is all about meshing different kinds of intelligence to a common purpose. You need to balance the intuitive people with the pragmatic, the out-of-the-box thinkers with the organizers. One person alone can’t do it all; despotic enterprises come apart. You need to synthesize and incorporate others’ ideas.

What I love is to mix a team up. That’s very important in publishing. If someone’s forte is getting on the phone wrangling material or getting out and around to bring in ideas for articles and books, you have to mix them up with the trained people back at the ranch processing the follow-through.

To hire effectively, you have to go outside your own type, and that takes a certain awareness of your strengths and weaknesses. Managers who keep appointing people too much like themselves end up burning out and limiting the range of what they’re doing.

I cast people to be foils to me. I want people who think very differently from me, people who bring different strengths and expertise and can amplify what I come up with. I’m high-energy/idea-generative, so I need organizers around me who will help sort things out. Of 24 or 25 ideas, only six are apt to be really worth pursuing. So I need people who will hold my feet to the fire and figure out which will be practical.

Passion Matters

Assembling a team is almost like casting a play. First of all, passion is really important. I see things as missions and causes, so I want people around me who are incredibly excited about the project, and there has to be positive energy. I like straightforward people who do the job quickly—can’t stand whiners or downers who see only the problems and not the solutions. If I ask and they haven’t done it, I have a very short tolerance. I do not want to find that I’ve been working on a false assumption and then some kind of fire breaks out.

Getting deep background on job candi-dates is important. Some people are good talkers, but you want to find out in a detailed way what they have done and what other people say about them. I want to feel real substance behind what they are doing.

I’ve always hired in an unconventional way, from all over the place. I’m very impulsive, and I go very much on my intuitive feeling. And I’m a great believer in mixing amateurs and professionals. For instance, when I was at Tatler, I hired a travel agent. She didn’t have any journalistic experience, but she was energetic and organized and came up with great ideas. Sometimes I just have a feeling that a person has a great voice. I hired Dominick Dunne when he was a movie producer because, hearing him talk so sensitively about his daughter’s murder, I felt he must be a good writer.

Managing “Crazy Creatives”

I’ve always found that I have a long tolerance for crazy creative types—they can be irritating, unruly, and unreliable, and they require a great deal of handling and patience, but they’re the best. You need a certain amount of tolerance for the creative temperament, and I would spend a lot of time figuring out ways to handle talent and seeing that the staff could follow through.

The optimum team size for senior management is three to five—more can come and go, but that is the key. It often comes in threes—look at Eisner, Katzenberg, Wells at Disney or Spielberg, Katzenberg, Geffen of DreamWorks SKG—the core three plus always two other people, kind of their protégés, doing a huge amount of work.

It’s always painful when someone doesn’t work out. Take one person out and there are all kinds of repercussions. It destabilizes the pyramid in some fashion, and you always have to think of the impact on the rest of the team. You have to figure out how to reconceive the team to absorb the loss and be better and stronger for it. It’s incredibly time-consuming. I’ve found myself thinking for hours of what would happen if someone left and how to handle it. I’ve learned it takes two or three meetings with a person to make an exit happen in the right way.

The hardest thing is someone you like enormously personally but who keeps on failing to deliver. I had a key member who was so smart, appealing, nice, and I liked him so much. He talked so well, but gradually there was rising anxiety. Everything I gave him didn’t happen. I left him in place for a year and a half—but you end up absorbing more and more of someone’s work because you can’t accept that the person isn’t doing it. You say, oh well, I’ll pick up the phone myself . . . after a time you find you’re doing two jobs. Then you burn out, and it’s so important to recognize it and grasp the nettle.

The Ultimate Loyalty

Building a team takes a long time, and it can be agonizing. Trust is tricky—you have to go through some fires together. But you quickly get a sense of who is trustworthy. Then I let them do it.

What’s very important is to be loyal to your team. Once they’ve proven themselves, you have to be able to cut them a lot of slack. You can lose their confidence in a heartbeat. If they’re going into a malaise or have family issues, it’s really important to be supportive and to show that you return their loyalty.

Ultimately, you and your team have to share an understanding of what is good for the end product. The point is not for frolic. You are all trying to make the magazine more exciting to readers. The ultimate end loyalty is to the readers, but when it comes to ideas, a good team is halfway through the door ahead of you on them.

We'd like to hear your thoughts on building a successful work team. Email us at flew@forbes.com.

Article Controls

E-Mail   |   Print   |   Request Reprints   |   E-Mail Newsletters

del.icio.us   |   Digg It!   |   My Yahoo!   |   Share   |   RSS