Tastemade

Shadia C. Weeks is Head of Content Operations at Tastemade. Beginning her career in on-air scheduling, she entered the television industry after completing an internship with AMC TV’s program scheduling team, where she credits The T. Howard Foundation for the experience. She later applied for the open on-air scheduling coordinator role at the Travel Channel, thinking it must be related to the show scheduling work she had just been exposed to over the summer. She soon learned that on-air was a function all its own and spent the next several years of her career programming the graphics, promos and interstitials that take television from a playlist to a channel. The on-air department sat at the intersection of commercial operations, program scheduling, marketing, ad sales, media planning, research, and creative services, exposing Shadia to the complex and tenuous workings of running a channel. The experience taught her how to critically think about the process of taking content to air, which she now finds to be even more valuable as an operator than immediately knowing the answer to every new question. She learned how to connect dots, mediate opposing objectives and facilitate workable solutions. As the scale and scope of her work grows and evolves, those early lessons on how many differing teams intersect to create the final product have remained invaluable.

Balancing Process Discipline with Creative Excellence

Striking the balance between process and creativity can be challenging. When does a process become harmful to the output? Bureaucracy for the sake of bureaucracy is the killer of creativity, but ideas without structure lead nowhere. I try to build processes that can adapt to the needs of the project at hand and the people who are working on it, leveraging their strengths and removing friction where possible. That said, everything needs a paper trail. Whether in a Notion or Monday.com board, email chain or Slack channel, I always direct my teams to record and track progress in one centralized location determined early on. In addition, I try to identify the stakeholder whose opinion will be most crucial to the final product’s highest-quality outcome and build in an approval step that passes their desk to some degree before final delivery.

Focusing on the Right Problems to Drive Growth

Learn to pick your battles. You can find a problem to fix around every corner, especially for smart, self-starting problem-solvers. Trying to put out the little fires everywhere is a quick way to burn out. While you may be praised for your proactive approach, you may find yourself stuck cleaning up mess after mess rather than adding incremental value. Sure, you may make the communications pipeline between programming and ad ops a little more streamlined, but ultimately those house promos were going to make it to the ad server regardless of how confusing of a path it took them to get there. If cleaning up that pipeline is your assigned duty and there is a meaningful growth opportunity for the organization by making it more efficient, then by all means yes, that battle is yours to conquer. But if the dysfunction is simply a pain point between those two teams and the outcomes still land as they were intended to, regardless of how it came to be, consider whether your time and attention are really needed here.

“Education and experience are key to shaping a mind that can f igure out the right thing to fix.”

If you try to fight every battle you come across, you’ll eventually begin to resent people for seemingly ignoring the issues you clearly see, and you’ll be looking to jump ship before you have a chance to figure out the problem leadership actually needs to solve. Humility is helpful here. Know that you are right, and also know that you don’t know everything. You don’t need to fix everything. You need to find and fix the right things. Growth lies in figuring out that right thing to fix.

Preparing Leaders for an AI-Driven Future

Einstein said, “Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.” Education and experience are key to shaping a mind that can figure out the right thing to fix. AI is a powerful tool, but it cannot replace critical thinking. It can build out a highly effective project plan, but only if you have the education and experience required to ask the right questions, and the critical thinking required to discern discrepancies in objectively true outputs.

As the world inevitably adopts more AI tools, I would urge leaders to encourage internal resources like book clubs, talks and panels to foster an environment full of curious thinkers who can leverage AI tools to optimize their thinking rather than replace it.