Iâd put my version of hierarchy in place by delegating to other managers, but I was also part of a chain of command in the greater Lucasfilm empire. I remember going home at night, exhausted, feeling like I was balancing on the backs of a herd of horsesâonly some of the horses were thoroughbreds, some were completely wild, and some were ponies who were struggling to keep up. I found it hard enough to hold on, let alone steer.
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In those first months, we also moved to bolster trust within the studio in another way: Just as we had refused to sign employment contracts, we now moved to eliminate contracts for everyone. At first, many people thought the move was an attempt to wrest power away from the employees and give them less security. In fact, my feeling about employment contracts is that they hurt the employee and the employer. The contracts in question were one-sided in favor of the studio, resulting in unexpected negative consequences. First and foremost, there was no longer any effective feedback between bosses and employees. If someone had a problem with the company, there wasnât much point in complaining because they were under contract. If someone didnât perform well, on the other hand, there was no point in confronting them about it; their contract simply wouldnât be renewed, which might be the first time they heard about their need to improve. The whole system discouraged and devalued day-to-day communication and was culturally dysfunctional. But since everybody was used to it, they were blind to the problem.
I wanted to break that cycle. I believed that it was our responsibility to make sure that Disney Animation was a place that people would want to work; if our most talented people could leave, then we would have to be on our toes to keep them happy. When someone had a problem, we wanted it to be brought quickly to the surface, not to fester. Most people know that they donât get their way on everything, but it is very important that they know they are being dealt with straightforwardly and that they, too, will be heard.
The lesson, and perhaps the irony, of Tsedal and Sebastianâs study is that executives who deferred to subordinates moved up the pecking order faster than those who refused to bend to their underlingsâ will and wisdom: Leaders were granted more power because they gave it away. Yet deference and âflatteningâ the hierarchy arenât always the right moves. The University of Michiganâs Lindy Greer shows that the best leaders are adept at âflexingâ the hierarchy.
The positive energy that came out of my early days made some people - and me - think that we had that cultural issue fixed. The unfortunate fact, though, was that there was deep-seated resistance to change - a feeling of âThis guy will be gone in three years and Iâve had my job for twenty, so why should I change?â With three hundred thousand employees, the problem is inevitably in the middle. It was relatively easy to get to the top management in line - if not, I could fire them - but I couldnât do that far into the organization. I couldnât personally determine, for example, who in the tax or logistics department was obstructing progress.
It would be easy to paint my realization around work as sacred duty as something sprung from some genius within. It was not. It sprang from exhaustion, from being lost myself, from having nowhere else to turn with my own suffering.
My co-founder, Ali Schultz, taught me the wisdom of horses. Horses, with their supernatural ability to use their limbic nervous systems to discern truth and congruency, do not base their choice of the leader of their herd on strength or intellectual wisdom. Nor is their choice based on which member might keep the herd safe from a predator wolf. They choose the one who feels the group best and who cares the most. They choose the horseâ usually a mareâwho is most capable of holding that care in a way that calms the whole group. Theyâre marked by the attunement to the inner and outer needs of those they have the honor to serve and lead.