Kevin Glendinning:"SNL isn’t a show: It’s a playbook for building an unstoppable team"

In his latest Headliner column, pro audio executive Mike Dias profiles one of live sound’s most trusted monitor engineers, Kevin Glendinning, about his role supporting Lily Allen during her recent SNL performance.

Most great engineers will play SNL two or three times in their entire career. This was Glendinning’s 14th time walking into 30 Rock. What makes SNL extraordinary isn’t what you see on camera; it’s the invisible engine underneath it. The team nobody sees, but everybody depends on. Every organisation wants to become an institution – a legacy – but very few understand how that actually happens. 

Executives like to believe institutions are built through vision, talent, brand, or market dominance. But those are outcomes, not causes. The real engine is always the same: an indestructible team whose work is largely invisible but whose impact is non-negotiable.

If you want to understand how real team excellence works, don’t study Wall Street or Silicon Valley. Study the production crew inside Studio 8H at Saturday Night Live. They are the hidden operating system behind one of the longest-running shows in American history. And almost no one outside the building understands how powerful, disciplined, and culturally coherent that team truly is.

Naturally, I assumed the conversation would be about Glendinning – the skill, composure, and technical precision required to execute under true live-to-air pressure that many times. But that would have been a misplacement of credit; the narrative trap everyone falls into when they focus on talent instead of team. 

Because the more Glendinning talks, the clearer it becomes that the real story wasn’t him at all – it was them. The team behind the curtain. The people whose names never trend.

The individuals who make excellence non-negotiable, no matter the artist, host, or era.

Glendinning isn’t the hero here. He’s the witness – the recurring outsider who has been inside Studio 8H enough times to recognise the pattern. And what he reveals is a blueprint for institutional excellence that most engineers and executives never see: a culture so consistent it survives turnover, a standard so high it survives personalities, and a team so capable that the brand becomes as indestructible as they are.

The machine at 30 Rock: The tempo that makes SNL unbreakable

To understand why the team at Studio 8H operates at an institutional level, you have to understand the cadence of how the show is actually made. Glendinning walks me through it in a way that instantly clarifies the culture: Thursday is the real workday. 

That’s when the in-ears get dialled, monitors get balanced, blocking gets mapped, and the entire ecosystem of music, cameras, lights, set changes, and cues gets aligned. It’s not “rehearsal” in the casual sense – it’s the tightening of a machine with zero tolerance for drift.

Friday is completely off. Not because the team needs a break – but because the machine is already set. The only reason a day off works is that Thursday is run with such precision that nobody needs to chase fixes. Saturday is the longest day in television: Midday call. 

One more pass to confirm the entire signal flow. Then a full dress rehearsal. Then notes. Then edits. Then the re-block. Then the resets. And then comes the moment no other show has managed to replicate: Live to air. Three seconds of delay – then straight into millions of living rooms.

Glendinning puts it simply: “You go live, and that downbeat goes out to every living room in the world. Every paper on Monday will critique it.”

And here’s the part hardly anyone realises: the music doesn’t even start until 11:30 pm. On a normal tour, you’re loading your show out at midnight. At SNL, you’ve just finished song number one. And yet – here’s the paradox: the pressure doesn’t make the place tense; it makes the place better.

Glendinning describes it this way: “They treat you right. They don’t make you feel like, ‘Hey, we do this, you stand over there.’ Whether you’re hands-on or just advising, everybody treats you right. People come and go, but the ethos stays the same. It’s always been family.”

This is why the end of an SNL episode carries a different charge than even the Grammys or VMAs. Yes, there’s the usual, “Holy bleep, we did it” moment, but there’s also a deeper collective gratification, a sense that everyone in the building contributed to something extraordinarily difficult and made it look effortless. 

This is the invisible environment executives need to study: a team that operates with total precision under conditions that punish hesitation and reward preparedness. You cannot fake a culture built on this kind of tempo. You cannot wing it. You cannot improvise it. You cannot 'personality' your way through it. The system demands excellence, and the team rises to it every single week.

The final rule: Come prepared or get out of the way

There’s one more truth Glendinning keeps returning to: the truth that makes everything about Studio 8H make sense. The SNL team isn’t just excellent. They’re busy – intensely busy. They are managing dozens of simultaneous, interlocking demands in real time. They don’t have the bandwidth to fix your mistakes because they are already holding the entire show together.

Glendinning’s words are blunt: “You need to be rehearsed going in. You’re not there to figure out your parts. You’re not there to have ideas. You need to walk in ready: ‘This is our two minutes and 49 seconds. Boom-to-boom. Done.’ Because they have way too many other things going on. It would be rude and unprofessional to show up any other way.”

The stage manager, Chris, whom Glendinning calls “the loveliest of guys,” isn’t hovering over your shoulder. Quite the opposite. “He’s got 19 other things happening while he says, ‘All right, Kev, you guys good? I’ll be back five seconds before you’re done.’ And he means it.”

That’s the expectation: They are not there to hold your hand. They are there to trust that you won’t make their job harder. And if you meet that standard, they will have your back completely.

This is the hidden leadership lesson most executives never see. Everyone wants a high-performing team. Very few want the accountability that makes one possible.

At Studio 8H, accountability isn’t punitive – it’s structural. The team is simply too occupied with set transformations, camera blocking, wardrobe and makeup cycles, and a countdown clock that never stops to tolerate someone wandering around not on script. And sometimes that even manifests in unexpected ways, like when an artist panics about not hearing anything in their ears during a changeover, before their slotted time.

Glendinning always tells them the same thing: “Hang on – it’s not your turn yet. When they go to commercial, you’ll hear the room mics come to life. They’ve already line-checked everything. These people are the best in the world at what they do.”

SNL doesn’t panic because the team doesn’t panic. And the team doesn’t panic because everyone entering the building knows the rule: Respect their time. Respect their workload. Respect their standard. And that is what real institutions do – they set an uncompromising bar, and allow you to rise to it. 

Elite teams become institutions not because of fame or longevity, but because they enforce a standard that protects the whole. Studio 8H has been doing that for 50 years, and Glendinning has seen it from the only vantage point that truly reveals it: as the recurring outsider good enough to be trusted, disciplined enough to deliver, and self-aware enough to tell the real story and to give credit where credit is due.

In the end, the lesson is simple: If you want your organisation to become an institution, reward the individuals who enforce the standard and make coordinated excellence possible. That’s the hit factory behind why SNL endures. Their team makes excellence unavoidable, excuses irrelevant, and ego obsolete. T

hey don’t seek visibility because they are the infrastructure on which the visibility depends. If your business operated this way, “culture” wouldn’t be a slogan – it would be a system. Because systems create behaviour, behaviour creates trust, and trust creates institutions.

Besides mixing 14 musical guests at Saturday Night Live, Glendinning has spent 25 years on tour with artists including Justin Timberlake, Miley Cyrus, Maroon 5, Alicia Keys, Gwen Stefani, and Paul Simon. 

His career began in Chicago at db Sound, where sweeping floors led to early road work with Metallica, AC/DC, and The Rolling Stones – a baptism by fire that shaped his professional DNA. 

Today, he is regarded as one of live sound’s most trusted monitor engineers, known for his precision, composure, and ability to deliver under pressure on the world’s biggest stages.

Mike Dias writes and speaks about pressure, performance, and the Relationship Economy — translating the hidden operating systems of world-class entertainers into leadership frameworks that actually work. His lens makes one thing clear: trust is the condition, translation is the act, and experience is the outcome.

The Names That Actually Make SNL an Institution

Kevin Glendinning and Headliner Magazine would like to thank:

Music Mixers
Jay Vicari
Josiah Gluck

FOH
Caroline Sanchez
Burton Ishmael
Frank Duca

Monitors
Christopher “Coz” Costello
Al Bonomo (former)

Backline / Cowbell Mixer
Speedy Rosenthal

Stage Managers
Gena Rositano
Chris Kelly

Artist Relations
Tina Fernandez Sanfratello
Melanie Malone (former)

These people are the institution. Everyone else is a guest.