Anyone who reads this blog knows I have the utmost respect for Ed Catmull and his approaches to leadership of a creativity company. Ultimately he trusts the artists to do the right thing and he values people.
In this interview, I love that he talks about picking people and pushing them outside their comfort zone...so they will rise to it. I have been both sides of the picking and being picked and it's a great way to get creativity and innovation out of your employees.
I also love how he handles post mortems. First of all he values a post mortem as a tool to better production. 5 things you would do again vs. the 5 things you would not do again. How awesome! He speaks on protecting the dynamics of leadership you have built while listening to what is not working. It's important to him to get the honest answers from his employees in order to fix the problems. To do this, you need a safe environment or else the resentment and distrust will fester.
One of my favorite quotes from the talk is below:
One of my favorite quotes from the talk is below:
"They don’t want to walk in and embarrass themselves, they don’t want to say anything stupid, they don’t want to offend anyone, so these personal pressures and responses start to emerge. So I do see it happen, and it happened fairly recently, and I walked out, and I knew they weren’t honest. So then you call them in, maybe two or three people, and say why didn’t you say what you thought. And it’s a personal thing. So we have to change the dynamic. When we have something tricky and that’s holding things back, we have to have a four person or five person meeting, where the dynamics are different. And sometimes where things are actually going pretty well, then you want to have a room of 25 people, see how it works, and let them express themselves and have them grow. But if you have 25 people in the room some of them then start to perform, rather than participate. So there is this balance, what is the state of the thing… we need to have honesty, we want to have honesty, but honest is a buzzword. Its one of these things we hear, everyone nods their head on, ‘it’s all true’, [but] the gap between the abstractions and where people actually do it is enormous. And people fill it in with all sorts of crap."
Here are some more posts I have made of Ed's talks online
I also found another quick interview with Mr. Catmull