I happened to be watching a scene from The Transporter last night.
I’m not sure you’ve ever seen The Transporter before, but if you haven’t, rest assured that it’s worth seeing. It’s an incredible movie, especially if you have kids. By the way, I don’t have enough fingers and toes to tell you how many times I’ve seen it.
However, there was one thing that occurred to me last night after seeing it for the umpteenth time, which I thought I’d pass on to you.
The protagonist, the transporter, is under siege with his female companion as his picturesque house overlooking the sea is massively and aggressively attacked by machine guns, mortar, shoulder-launched missiles, and the like.
At one point when the transporter and his companion are trapped in the kitchen, he yells out at her at presumably just the right moment, “Don’t stay there…”
It dawned on me, as I was listening, that if I was within a split second of being annihilated by incoming tracer fire, the directive that says not to stay where I am, while appreciated, would not be terribly meaningful. Do I stand up? Do I run to the left? To the right? Do I lunge forward? Do I drop back? Should I roll over? And on and on.
In other words, it occurred to me that by framing the command in what is otherwise a negative directive, any number of possibilities could have been fatal to his companion.
It also occurred to me, in that split second as I watched the movie for the 50th time, that a more appropriate communication to save her life would have been a directive that said something like: “Crawl to the closet,” “Cover yourself with the table,” “Jump into the stove,” or any number of significant affirmative directives that gave her a clear direction she was to pursue to save her life.
Needless to say, in my warped and intellectually fastidious mind, I was able to extract a management lesson.
A visionary, an effective executive, doesn’t direct based upon what his or her subordinates should not be doing; he or she directs based upon what his or her subordinates should be doing. It simply doesn’t help, at the end of the day, to know what I should not be doing, because it leaves open the endless possibility of countless variations, many of which might be wrong. If I am being mentored, if I am being managed, I want to know what I should be doing at that particular moment.
When you are managing or leading, manage or lead based not on what others should not do, but based on what they should do or where they should go. Outline the vision, be clear as to the direction, and leave no ambiguity.
Original writing date: April 2005