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: Gen. Colin Powell (the former U. S. Army general) or Steven Spielberg (the award-winning filmmaker)?
Perhaps you don’t have an immediate answer. Let’s substitute a different question. What are the major differences between the types of teams these two famous men have led?
For example, 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. Spielberg’s is a film crew of perhaps 20 at a time, each team member highly skilled and perhaps personally familiar to the director/producer.
Powell’s has a top-down decision structure and expectations that the lowest-level team member will act quickly and fearlessly without much contemplation or creativity. Spielberg’s demands perhaps the direct opposite: original thinking and creative decision making, executed in a calm and professional manner.
Another difference: military or sports team members benefit from the body’s “fight or flight” mechanism: an adrenaline surge that increases blood flow to the muscles and reduces pain reception. But this same mechanism also narrows cognition and encourages behavior that is overlearned and drilled into the muscles (known as “muscle memory”). Film crew work requires careful attention to small, subtle details, and the decision-making authority to stop the production if measurements are not meeting quality standards.
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.
For example, the Lights! Camera! Action! (LCA!) technique focuses on the three skills new 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. The LCA! approach is also easily remembered, which helps with retention.
LCA! training begins with a focus on Lights! — the necessary skill of lighting the way for the organization by developing visioning, goal-setting and strategic thinking abilities. Team leaders have the unique responsibility to develop and set team objectives and goals. This can be both an emotionally difficult responsibility for new leaders and an intellectually challenging exercise requiring training and expert coaching or mentoring. “Lighting the way” is a unique responsibility of leadership, and a good place to begin leadership training.
Learning the Camera! skills require deciding 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. Reviewing each scene’s (or day’s) footage is an entirely new skill for those who have recently been promoted.
Finally, developing competence with Action! means becoming a better communicator.
Unlike in movie portrayals, film and television directors do not sit quietly and watch once the cameras start rolling. In real life, after yelling “Action!”, directors are talking on headsets and coaching excellent performance continuously.
The LCA! approach is a break from the military/sports metaphors of traditional leadership training, and applies to modern-day corporate and nonprofit teams much better. Fortunately, it’s also easier to learn, for who could forget a leadership mantra that goes “Lights! Camera! Action!”?
This article appeared in the Indiana Gazette on July 22, 2012 at http://www.indianagazette.com/b_community/article_18631b63-e7b6-585d-a1e2-876d607f29a9.html?mode=story