Art isn’t about drawing; it’s about learning to see. ~Ed Catmull
In the last century, it was frequently stated that management is a science and leadership is an art. I recently heard Ed Catmull (co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, President of Walt Disney Animation Studios) speak at a leadership summit. When Ed made the statement, “Art isn’t about drawing; it’s about learning to see,” I immediately thought of the artistic nature of true leadership.
Ed’s explanation of art as “learning to see” is so much of what leadership is really all about. Leadership isn’t about what you do it really is about learning to see. It’s a different paradigm, a different worldview. For leaders, every challenge, every interaction is an exercise in learning to see.
I’m in the midst of doing a series of training sessions with a very large global company. The training participants are required to attend, and for the majority of them they are doing a job. Or as one participant stated last week, “work is a four-letter word.” Using Ed’s analogy, I’d say that nearly all of these training participants are focused on drawing. They come to work to complete a task they have been assigned and they count the days (or the hours) until the weekend when they can put down their “drawing utensils” and walk away from their work. It’s my hope, or dream, that somehow over the course of two days of training I can give them a glimpse of what it’s like to be in a state of learning to see.
Here are five commonalities between art and leadership or what I think learning to see looks like, whether painter or leader.
- It is learned and developed over time
- It requires passion and commitment
- It is born out of creative energy
- Artists make something out of nothing
- The true measure of success for an artist is not how many pieces are sold, but how they made people feel
Borrowing from Ed Catmull one more time:
Craft is what we are expected to know; art is the unexpected use of our craft.
Maybe we could say that “management is what we are expected to know; leadership is the unexpected use of management.” It’s about continually learning to see.