I learned one of my favorite management lessons at the expense of director Peter Jackson. After bringing us the spectacular Lord of the Rings movies, Jackson was set to retire from the world of hobbits, orcs, and elves. You can imagine how tired he was, having spent the better part of a decade prepping, shooting, editing, and releasing the wonders of Middle Earth to the masses. And you can also imagine he was pumped to go out on top: the Lord of the Rings series captured 17 Academy Awards and was nominated for 30 more. Take a bow, Peter, you’re a legend! Unfortunately, things didn’t work out that way. As we now know, Peter Jackson returned to Middle Earth to produce the much-maligned Hobbit trilogy. Here’s the part you might not know, relayed in the words of Jackson and his crew:
Richard Taylor, Creative Director: On The Lord of the Rings...there was incredible planning. There were three and a half years of pre-production before we rolled the cameras.
Brigitte York, Unit Production Manager: Peter never got a chance to prep [The Hobbit] movies...I can't say that! But he didn’t.
Taylor: The sequence of events that unfolded on the Hobbit never really allowed for that.
Dan Hennah, Production Designer: We had a couple of years with Guillermo working up designs, working up concepts...
Peter Jackson, Director: ...and then because Guillermo del Toro had to leave, and I sort of jumped in and took over, we didn't wind the clock back a year and a half and give me a year and a half prep to design the movie I was going to make, which was different to what he was doing.
Taylor: What that all eventuated was a very short length of time—just a matter of a couple of months—before we started shooting.
Jackson: Which is impossible. And as a result of it being impossible, I just started shooting the movie with most of it not prepped at all.
Taylor: [We were] laying the tracks directly in front of the train.
Jackson: When you're in the momentum of a film...day after day, you're shooting. Week after week, you’re shooting. What you’re lacking is time to think. I don’t even have time to think for half an hour if I’m on the set directing, because in that half an hour I’ve got 30 people coming up to me asking me questions. So, I can help everyone else, but I can't help me.
That last quote from Peter is the lesson in all of this. Read it again. Notice how much it sounds like the struggle of so many managers. They try to help their teams each day: taking on every question, trying to solve every urgent problem. They juggle so much that before they know it, the week’s over and they never got to that next-quarter planning they’ve been meaning to get to. The same story repeats each week, each month, until the manager doesn’t believe it’s possible to plan anymore—so they just keep shooting from the hip. And the employees suffer for it.
Peter Jackson got a bad hand here, and I imagine he did as best as he could with it. But you and I are not destined for the same fate. If you’re a manager, you have the power to limit the chaos. Here’s how:
- Get out of the office.
- Use that time to plan.
- Remember that your team will figure it out in your absence, and will benefit more from your preparation than your perennial presence. So, leave the office, plan an offsite, or just find a quiet place where you can ensure that next quarter or next initiative is thoughtfully considered and reasonably planned for.
To produce a great movie (or a great team)—make time to prep.
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Max is the CEO and co-founder of Lessonly, the world’s leading team learning software. Lessonly helps thousands of learners around the world do better work by translating important company knowledge into lessons that improve team productivity.