I am six feet under with writing work and also experiencing the emotional whiplash that comes from being a consumer of political news these days, but since I skipped last month’s entry, I felt compelled to write about a topic that’s been circulating in my brain: how much we all crave alignment and partnership, ESPECIALLY when it comes to work.
Earlier this month, I watched Godzilla: Minus One, a film released last year in the style of old-school Godzilla movies, meaning, no Millie Bobby Brown or Brian Tyree Henry and, thankfully, a minimum of murky dark scenes where you barely glimpse the famed monster. This Godzilla film centered a Japanese perspective – it is an origin story about how Godzilla came to be and it also functioned as a commentary on the suffering and horror of war.
Anyway, it was a GREAT movie. So beautifully shot, and scored, and the shots of Godzilla were terrifying and momentous. But I’m not here to provide a film review – I wanted to talk about the astonishing fact I learned after watching the movie, which is that it was made for only fifteen million dollars. Vulture interviewed the director, Takashi Yamazaki, before they won the Oscar for special effects this year, and of course they asked about this insanely low budget, because it’s been a hot topic in the past few years, how overworked and underpaid VFX artists are, especially for massively-budgeted films like the ones Marvel Studios produces.
Yamazaki was both polite and respectfully deferential when asked about the Hollywood movie studio system, and talked about how cost-savings were achieved because as the director, he also served as the head of VFX. But he also talked quite a bit about the fact that his own team did all the work of producing the movie in-house. There was no outsourcing. And the team came together around the director’s vision. Structurally and through the relationships built within this team, harmony was achieved – it was part of the operating design, as was treating the employees well.
Here is what Yamazaki had to say:
In Japan, we literally call a company “white” or “black.” “White” is a company that doesn’t exploit its employees and “black” is one that makes you work overnight at all hours and really doesn’t pay you well. Our studio name is Shirogumi (“white team”), so we want to believe we are setting up standards and an environment that is very workable for all the artists and everyone who is with us here today. As a creative myself but also an employer of creatives, I feel like what they make is so beautiful, and I hope and wish I would be able to pay our staff members better, at some point.
This quote contains so many elements that are often expounded upon in Harvard Business Review articles. Let me list just a few of them:
- An employer who doesn’t want to exploit their employees
- An intentional effort to create a positive working environment for everyone involved
- A shared belief in the value of the work they are doing, together
- A respect for everyone’s creativity and skillset and what they are contributing to the effort
- A humility that he is trying to be a good leader but does not know if he is succeeding (e.g., “we want to believe,” his agreement that his employees are not paid enough)
When I read this interview, I felt like crying, because it captured so much of the promise of what work can be when it goes well And while I’ve worked in jobs that had many of these elements in place, I’ve also worked in quite a few that had none of these elements in place.
I am perennially puzzled by the phenomenon of people knowing what works well, but then they do exactly the opposite of making something work. For example: I don’t understand companies that require their employees to work brutally long hours, at disproportionately low pay (relative to executive compensation), with no clarity around roles or purpose, that have persistently high turnover rates. It’s so expensive to recruit new hires, and your company gets a reputation for being a shitty place to work. I don’t understand companies that virtue-signal when it comes to expressing support for diversity, equity, and inclusion instead of investing in efforts to truly learn and evolve and create an organizational culture that supports and benefits all of their employees.
Similarly, I don’t understand why more companies don’t adopt the team-centered vision and leadership of Yamazaki, especially since there’s one obvious benefit: the end result is so good! The movie was beautiful and it was cost-efficient! What’s not to try and emulate about this? Why do we build such crazy-big, corporate structures in America to do creative work that involves endless outsourcing and bloated budgets and then you get a mishmash of badly overworked scripts, terrible greenscreen acting, or messy VFX scenes?
I want to be clear: I am not advocating for “lean” structures at work. “Lean” was a big thing back in the day, when everyone was going on about Motorola and Toyota and creating super-lean, super-efficient processes that would hypothetically deliver superior results. But like many business trends that have come and gone, a lot of people derived the wrong lesson from that trend. They went for the “lean” part (aiming for maximum administrative and operational efficiency, cutting costs and people) and forgot about the alignment and the harmony part of making those processes work. I remember reading about the famed Toyota production process that was taught across multiple sectors such as healthcare systems and hospitality businesses. The important thing about the Toyota production process was (as it was back then, I dunno what it is today), everyone had a voice and a way to give input at every step of the process. Yes, the process was beautifully designed for efficiency. It was also beautifully designed for alignment and harmony so that all the people who worked on the cars had a stake in achieving the best outcome.
So: I have now been a consultant for several years, and everything about the consulting process seems designed to not achieve alignment or harmony. Number one, I’m being hired because work considered important enough to do is also being outsourced. I am, positionally, outside the team and outside the organization’s core set of operations. Number two, I am isolated: I lack the relationships and shared social capital that on well-functioning teams can help make the work feel much, much better.
However, I’ve found that being a writer often helps mitigate these anti-alignment aspects of consulting. It is often in my job description to listen to many different points of view and then synthesize these perspectives with other types of information – background information, or data points – and develop a coherent storyline. In other words, sometimes I can be the force for alignment and harmony. Several times, I’ve had the truly remarkable and fulfilling experience of presenting a draft of a something-something to the client, and all of the people on the client side – the people I interviewed, and the people I’m reporting to – are profoundly grateful and moved that I have written something that reflects what they experienced, what they believe, and most importantly, who they are and what they’re trying to achieve in their work.
But then, other times I am helpless in the face of chaos. I’ve worked on projects where the goals keep changing; people disagree, vehemently, on what the thing should be about and what the final product should say; and I am buffeted about, with no real authority or power to create the alignment and harmony that is lacking.
So this is the simple thing I am saying: alignment, and harmony, make for better results. Lack of alignment makes for worse results – and also, causes much stress and forehead-smashing for all involved. I would suggest that while the Yamazaki approach to work is probably not easy to replicate by all of us who find ourselves in mis-aligned work situations, we can still aim to be forces for alignment. We can:
- Diagnose where and when the mis-alignment is happening. Is it in defining people’s roles and expectations of that role? Is it that people seem unclear about the desired outcome?
- Ask for clarity, while giving grace or understanding. Like me saying, “I thought this case study was about X, and now it seems to be about Y. I understand that your thinking on this may have evolved – can we confirm that, together?”
- Try for deeper conversations now and again. I used to work with lots of different agencies and contractors and during our weekly meetings as a group, when we were all working on various aspects of a giant campaign/reform effort, we fell into a habit of simply dutifully reporting on our tasks. Until one day I asked: “Can we return to the strategic big picture here? What did we originally set out to achieve, and how are we doing on that? And what has changed, and if so, was it for the better?” And although people hemmed and hawed at first (agencies, in general, like to justify their billing with long lists of items they’ve checked off), the conversation felt like a meaningful taking stock/strategy refresh moment.
I’m spitballing a bit here, but overall, I’m saying to those of you at any stage of your career: seek alignment. Be a force for alignment. And if you’re in a place where you can’t achieve alignment (let’s say you have a toxic boss, or colleague, for example), then make that a priority for you to find in your next work experience. (And as a final note: the Democrats’ oh-so-painful lack of alignment around Biden, and their urgent and speedy movement towards aligning around Harris as the Democratic presidential nominee, is a meta-example of how consequential alignment is, when it comes to big efforts with many moving parts.)
Minna Jung Consulting 