Perfect Supervision

“If you try to over-control the (creative) process, you limit the process.” –Brad Bird (writer of Disney/Pixar’s Ratatouille (2007)).

Leadership is a complex supervisory process. At one point it’s about empowering and encouraging those junior to produce works and outcomes toward the objective; at another, it’s also about providing an endless stream of feedback to ‘steer’ the process.

Brad Bird makes the observation that he’s always seeking perfection in the production of his animated classics; bringing to life the scripts and characters at Disney/Pixar. He says, there are “so many people who have greatness in them, [he’s the one who has to] coach it out of them.” It’s about keeping the creative process going, and going in the right direction.

His key direction though comes back to the quote at top and this is his leadership secret that sees people who work with him not turned off, but committed to perfection. It’s a real knife-edge balancing act not seeking to get too pedantic with what we say and how we say it to our charges. Perhaps it’s a case of giving a couple of points of specific feedback and trying elicit some osmosis regarding what is generally required.

We need to treat people well, respectfully, as if we’re on the same team. Yet there are a lot of supervisors and leaders who don’t get it. They’re the boss, and the team member is definitely sub-ordinate. The Brad Bird model, however, seems to demand performance out of their team through motivating them to achieve toward the common goal. This type of leader simply has a different job; they’re not so much the boss, just the customer who needs to have their needs met.

Sometimes when we get too directive and too controlling we stifle the creativity of someone who might just have the right ideas that we don’t. The Brad Bird model seems to be to “get people excited about what [he's] excited about.”

Copyright © 2008, S. J. Wickham. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.