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The Lights! Camera! Action! Approach

If you had to sit through eight hours of leadership training tomorrow, which leader do you think would teach you more about how to lead your particular organization: Colin Powell (the former U.S. Army general) or Steven Spielberg (the award-winning filmmaker)?

Perhaps you don’t have an immediate answer. Maybe you’ve been a big fan of one or the other and one personality attracts you more than the other. But our question shouldn’t really be about who would you enjoy more as your instructor, but instead should be about who has the most to teach you; whose leadership situation and experiences match your situation better. It is probably Spielberg’s. Let’s explore that a moment.

To begin, Colin Powell’s organization is much, much larger than Steven Spielberg’s. Powell’s is layered with bureaucracy and governed by thousands of pages of policies and procedures. The team members follow a strict hierarchy and authority structure, and everyone is taught to follow their leader. Above all, the lowest-level team members are expected to act quickly and fearlessly without much contemplation or creativity.

Spielberg’s is a film crew of perhaps 20 at a time, each team member highly skilled and personally familiar to the director. Spielberg’s crew is made up of people who know more about their individual tasks than perhaps Spielberg does, at least with regard to that particular piece of equipment. Particularly, each team member is empowered with decision-making authority and can stop the production immediately if there is a technical or quality problem. Spielberg’s crew is expected to be creative and original thinkers, constantly contributing their talents collaboratively toward the team’s product.

At the moment of execution, Powell’s and Spielberg’s teams also have an important difference. In Powell’s case, military (or sports) teams benefit from the each person’s “fight or flight” mechanism: an adrenaline surge that increases blood flow to the muscles and reduces pain reception. This mechanism allows individuals to “storm the hill.” But this same mechanism also narrows cognition and encourages behavior that is over-learned and drilled into the muscles (known as “muscle memory”). Individuals will charge forward with maximum energy and pain suppression, but they won’t be doing much thinking.

The Difference in Teams

Film crew work is very different. It requires careful attention to small, subtle details, and the execution of timely, orchestrated decisions. An adrenaline surge would have a very bad effect on team execution and “remaining calm” is a constant mantra. To a great degree, the task requires detailed analysis of continuously changing inputs and creative, “outside of the box” decisions by every team member. It is perhaps the opposite of doing the exact same thing the exact same way every time because it is in “muscle memory.” Film crew work is “thinking” work, and it is supported by very modern technologies.

So which describes your team better? The charge-up-the-hill, adrenaline-fueled confrontation of a military or sports team, or, the complex, skill-driven, calm environment of a film crew? If it’s the latter, then perhaps the Lights! Camera! Action! approach to leadership training applies to you.

The Lights! Camera! Action! (LCA!) technique focuses on the three leadership-specific skills team leaders need in today’s modern organizations. These talents are above and beyond whatever expert abilities the leader brings from his or her previous experience because they focus on exclusively the leader’s responsibilities. They are not about management or logistics per se, but on the responsibilities of the person at the top of the hierarchy — the person who must lead.

Fortunately, the LCA! approach is also easy to remember, so it is easy to teach. It capitalizes on a familiar phrase and allows nervous or stressed out leaders to focus on the three things they must do in every leadership situation.

Lights!

It begins with a focus on Lights! — the skill of lighting the way for the organization with visioning, goal-setting and strategic thinking activities. Team leaders have the unique responsibility to develop and set team objectives and goals. This is both an emotionally difficult responsibility for new leaders and an intellectually challenging exercise. It sometimes requires training and it generally gets better with expert coaching or mentoring. “Lighting the way” is a unique responsibility of leadership and many newly promoted team leaders have not tried it before. However, it is an absolute necessity of leadership. Someone must have a vision of where the team is heading. In Spielberg’s case, as director, he has a vision in his head of the film they are trying to make. This allows him to guide and coach team performance. It is absolutely essential the leader have a very clear vision, though developing that vision doesn’t have to be the sole responsibility of the director/team leader. Goals and objectives can be developed collaboratively and probably are in today’s skill-driven teams.

Camera!

The Camera! skill in leadership is about what to focus on, how to measure it and what to do with the results. All teams need to progress toward their goals, but focusing only on outcome measures, or what leadership experts call “lag” measures (because they “lag” behind the efforts of today), is not sufficient. Determining what intermediate objectives will contribute to long-term success is an important activity of leadership and is referred to as setting “lead” measures (these intermediate results will “lead” toward success on the “lag” measures.) Focusing on lead measures is the Camera! work of today’s complex leadership. For example, in Spielberg’s situation it might refer to reviewing each day’s footage to determine if anything needs to be re-shot or if adjustments need to be made in equipment or acting. Developing and implementing measures can be an entirely new skill for some as they suddenly find themselves responsible for the output of the entire team. However, like all skills, it is entirely learnable.

Action!

Finally, developing competence in Action! means becoming a better communicator. In real life film directors do not sit quietly and watch once the cameras start rolling. Instead, after the word “Action!” all directors start talking on their headsets, continuously coaching excellent performance from their team members and gathering feedback and ideas from everyone involved. All leaders need to develop their communication skills, in part because in most situations they are not actually “touching the equipment,” i.e., performing the task. Instead, they are directing others. Learning how and when to say certain things, and not other things, is an important skill for all film directors and leaders.

The Lights! Camera! Action! approach to leadership skill development is a break from the military/sports metaphors of traditional leadership training. It recognizes that today’s modern corporate and nonprofit teams are not about military hierarchy and “charging up the hill” in an adrenaline-fueled rush. Instead, it explicitly draws an analogy between the highly-skilled, collaborative team environments of film making and the experiences of today’s tech-driven teams. Lights! Camera! Action! is easy to remember and helps focus new leaders on the skills and responsibilities that are suddenly theirs: visioning and goal-setting, measuring and feedback, and communication.

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