Almost everyone on this planet is a worker in some way, but only a minority deserve to be called craftspeople. This is especially true of leaders. We don’t often think of leaders as artisans, but like good craftspeople, good leaders go about their work thoughtfully and purposefully.
These good leaders want every piece they produce to be the best it can be, and to bear their stamp. Some even go a step further. They reflect on their craft and articulate what they do that is special or distinctive. Doing this delivers the great benefit of making it, to at least some extent, teachable. They like to develop the skill in others.
Sam Abell falls into the latter camp of truly reflective practitioners. With 33 years’ experience as a photographer for National Geographic — earning not one but two images in the magazine’s “50 Greatest Photographs of National Geographic” exhibit — he is a master of his craft. But he is also unusually aware of how he does what he does.
For example, a favorite observation of his is to say “I’m a ‘from-the-back-layer’ photographer.” What he means is that, when he composes a shot, he thinks about the layers from background to foreground and how they relate to one another. And, while an amateur would likely seize on the foreground subject (sometimes not even noticing what is behind it), he begins with the most distant part of the setting and builds forward from there.
Abell has figured out that the way to get a great photograph is not to take it but to make it. For him, framing his first photographs as a boy, this meant fighting his instinct to follow a moving subject with his lens. Instead he learned to follow his dad’s advice: “Compose and wait, Sammy. Compose … and wait.” Establish how you want those more static, background layers to appear, and – if you’ve chosen your spot well – the dynamic element you need to complete the image will eventually enter the frame. A woman will stride across the plaza. A bison will amble over the grassland. A sailor will toss a rope. The key, Abell learned, is not to chase its unfurling arc: “Let the rope come to you.”
Perhaps this is more of a photography lesson than you expected from a leadership professor. I share it because I’m working to make “compose and wait” my own habit, I realized it isn’t just a photography lesson. I first got to know Abell when I engaged in a one-on-one mentorship through the Santa Fe Photographic Workshop. It quickly became clear that his ongoing mentorship would benefit me on multiple levels. I was deep into a research project then on my favorite thesis – that great leaders and great teachers are gifted at asking “catalytic” questions, which allow their people to move forward in especially creative ways. That thesis fits Sam to a T. What I didn’t expect is that, in the particular insights he shared, I would find direct application for the enterprise leaders I usually advise.
Managers at every level in organizations also populate a range, from rank amateurs to reflective artisans. The former, when they go looking for the new insights that will take their companies’ plans or performance to the next level, tend to seize on shiny objects. They chase trends. They look at game-changing work by others — breakthroughs that in hindsight seem inevitable — and just as they look at great photographs, they assume they were the result of fast reflexes and the luck of being in the right place at the right time.
More deliberate leaders believe great opportunities must be made, and work at building the layers of creative insight from the back – just as Abell does. This is how I interpret Ed Catmull’s efforts at Pixar. Read Creativity, Inc., and you see him thinking in the broadest sense about how to establish the environment and infrastructure that will keep people constantly floating new ideas, and ensure that those ideas are creatively, productively challenged. Institutions like the Pixar “Brain Trust” and organizational designs that keep projects “filmmaker led” form the foundation from which moments of viewer delight emerge—and somehow seem both unexpected and inevitable.
I have also seen A.G. Lafley at Procter & Gamble operate in a similar back-to-front way, spending most of his energy on setting the stage for his organization to recognize a good idea when it surfaces. Instead of declaring a particular innovation he wants to pursue, he constantly poses key, cornerstone questions. Two of his favorites are: How can we delight consumers when they buy our products? How can they be more delighted when using them? Everything else builds forward from that.
How do leaders like Catmull and Lafley do this? One way to describe it is to say they are framing the background conditions that will allow creative thinking to flourish and be heard — in large part by tamping down their own impulses to be hard-charging, full of answers, and quick to intervene. Then they attend to the next layer, encouraging questions from themselves and others that will break down outdated assumptions and open up new realms of problem-solving. Having composed those steady-state layers deliberately, they can then wait — impatiently perhaps, but with the confidence that some fleeting, highly valuable insight will materialize. Most important, when that compelling element does cross their line of sight, they will see it for what it is: a flash of brilliance that deserves to be captured, and that will justify all the background work that gave it a proper setting.
As a literal example of this, with Abell’s method in mind, I composed the photo below by waiting in the car’s back seat for 10 sweltering minutes at an antique automobile show. Literally 100+ photos later, a family of curious onlookers finally entered the frame. One person poked his head in to ask, “Do you come with the car?” We laughed heartily as I tried my best to hold still and keep the integrity of the composition intact.
Source: HBR
