The title of this post sounds like the set-up to a bad joke. One anticipates a response containing references to energy vampires, psychopathic bosses, or labyrinthine bureaucracies that will trap you in their red tape until you turn into one of the army of zombies shuffling between their desks, bathrooms, and Xerox machines eight hours a day, five days a week until their eligible for Social Security benefits and Medicare.
Yet, it’s no joke when you really think about it. Horror films have a lot to teach us about organizational leadership. They’re all about people experiencing fear, uncertainty, and ambiguity. These are the very topics any lecture about organizational change are bound to cover.
People resist organizational change out of fear of the unknown. Like the jump scare in horror movies, it’s a deeply rooted emotional response. People think - if we change how we do things, how do we know the results won’t be catastrophic? Worse, how do I know that I won’t lose something I love about my job?
That’s why building trust is essential to any organizational change. Not only is it critical to navigating the uncertainties of change, but it also makes the team more resilient and cooperative when a crisis emerges – especially a cosmic one like an alien invasion. That’s ultimately what we learned in our latest Sense & Signal episode - The Haunted Podcast.
Take the first film we discuss in the podcast. In John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), the inhabitants of a research station in the Antarctic are unable to work together when their community is infiltrated by an alien creature who inhabits its victims on the cellular level. Because the inhabitants of this base seem to have low levels of trust toward one another already, there isn’t much of a foundation to build on when they really need it – and the fate of humanity hangs in the balance. If the leaders at the research facility had done more to build trust among the team, maybe the characters in this film wouldn’t have experienced such a (spoiler) tragic end.
Likewise, the second film we discuss – Columbia Pictures 1931 Frankenstein – speaks to the fear aroused when employees pursue ambitious but transgressive projects like robbing graves to collect body parts, assembling them into a creature with a strangely flat head, and reanimating them using some sort of cosmic energy – thus stealing the mystery of life from God and nature. Would things have turned out differently for Dr. Frankenstein if he had been more cooperative and worked on a communications plan with his university’s public information officer? We can only imagine what the contents of that press release would have looked like.
And sometimes we put too much trust in organizations when they may not have our best interests at heart. Take the third film we discuss – Stanley Kubrick’sThe Shining (1980). The hotel is clearly looking for a man like Jack Torrance to bring his family up to its isolated grounds in the Colorado mountains because it knows he possesses the right personality traits to go mad and murder his own family like the previous caretaker Delbert Grady did a decade before. The ghosts of Grady’s two little girls in the iconic hallway scene say it all – “We want you to play with us – forever.” They’re the two most terrifying HR representatives in film history. Sadly, Jack places too much trust in the hotel, but doesn’t have trust in his wife and child – which only fuels his fear and madness.
Finally, the fourth film featured in this episode – Q the Winged Serpent (1982) – delves into themes of fear and trust on an economic level. Michael Moriarty plays Jimmy Quinn, a former junky and heist driver who stumbles upon the nest of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl at the top of the Chrysler building in New York City. The creature has been terrorizing the city by eating the heads off window washers and absconding with naked sun bathers. Instead of reporting his discovery to the police as any ethically upstanding citizen would do, Quinn negotiates a million-dollar deal with the city before sharing his information. Because he’s a guy who feels society has denied him opportunity, he doesn’t trust that people will do right by him unless he uses the lives hanging in the balance as leverage to get some sort of reward for his knowledge about the monster’s nest.
It turns out horror movies are a good reminder than fear and trust are powerful forces in organizational leadership. Fear will drive people and organizations to make bad choices that will lead to death, mayhem, and mobs of people with torches showing up at the door. Likewise, these films also highlight that trust is an organization’s most valuable commodity when facing crises like zombie attacks and vampiric epidemics.
So, let’s start building some trust out there before the next alien invasion arrives.