Everything I know about managing people, I learned from reality TV.
On my about page, I say I'm reality TV obsessed and that I call it research on stakeholder management. That was a joke. Mostly. My syllabus: Real Housewives (Beverly Hills, Salt Lake City, and Orange County), OG Vanderpump Rules, Selling Sunset, and Selling the OC - to name a few. (Please don't talk to me about the Bachelor/ette. I know nothing.)
After 15 years in tech ops, managing teams, escalations, and more than a few group chats that got out of hand, I'm convinced reality TV is the most honest management training out there. Every season is a case study in what happens when people with different goals are stuck in one house, one boat, or one Slack workspace.
Here's what it's taught me.
1. The confessional is where the truth comes out
On camera in the group, everyone's fine. In the confessional, alone, they tell you what they actually think.
Your 1:1s are the confessional. People say things one-on-one that they will never say in a team meeting. If you're skipping 1:1s or turning them into status updates, you're only watching the group scenes, and you're missing the whole plot.
2. Everyone is playing the game they think they're in
Watch Selling Sunset or Selling the OC: same office, same listings, and everyone has a different idea of what winning looks like. The agent chasing the big commission and the one building a personal brand are not going to make the same choices. Neither is wrong about their own game.
Same at work. The person optimizing for a promotion, the one protecting their work-life balance, and the one who just wants to stop getting paged at 2am will all read the same decision differently. Before you're frustrated with how someone's acting, figure out what game they think they're playing.
3. Don't manage off the highlight reel
The villain edit is real. Twenty seconds of footage, cut the right way, can make anyone look terrible.
At work, the highlight reel is the secondhand complaint, the one tense meeting, the screenshot someone forwards you. Before you act on it, get the full footage. Talk to the person directly. Context changes almost everything.
4. The reunion always comes
Any Housewives fan knows this one. Every conflict that got brushed aside during the season shows up at the reunion, bigger and louder, with receipts.
Unresolved tension on a team works exactly the same way. It doesn't go away. It compounds. The kindest thing you can do is have the awkward conversation early, while it's still small.
5. Watch the alliances
The people with the most influence aren't always the ones with the title. They're the ones everyone else checks with before making a move.
Every team has an informal map of who trusts whom. Learn it. When you need a change to land, talk to the people others listen to first.
6. The quiet ones often go furthest
The loudest person in the house gets the screen time. The quiet one who gets along with everyone, never starts drama, and just keeps showing up? They're often still standing at the end.
Your quietest team members are probably doing a lot of work nobody sees. Go looking for it, and say it out loud when you find it.
7. Regular check-ins beat big dramatic ones
The shows with a weekly “are you staying or leaving?” moment force everyone to say how they really feel before it's too late. Awkward? Yes. Useful? Very.
Teams need that too, minus the dramatic lighting. A quick, regular, anonymous pulse check tells you where things are heading while you can still change the ending.
The reunion special
None of this means your team is a cast. It means people are people, whether they're at a brokerage in Newport Beach, behind the bar at a restaurant in West Hollywood, or on your Tuesday standup. They want to be heard, understood, and treated fairly, and they notice when they're not.
If you want the tools for this, my free team health check is the weekly check-in, and the manager cheat sheets have scripts for the chats you'd rather not have.
Now tell me: which reality show would your team be? Mine swings between Selling the OC, and a Housewives reunion, depending on the week.