I saw that Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation is now on Amazon Prime, and that got me to thinking about how the only reason to watch that film is to see Rebecca Ferguson, a Swedish-British actress you may not know, steal the entire thing from the likes of Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, and Alec Baldwin.
And then it occurred to me that, as odd as it seems, this is not a bad role model for how to conduct yourself in the office. Especially in a flat, matrixed organization like the business services firm I work for.
If you haven’t seen it, Rogue Nation is about what you would expect: Tom Cruise is 53 and too old (and still too short) to be the super-human tough guy he plays; he still does his own outrageous stunts; he and his crew are still fighting secret organizations and stumbling across hidden dangers in international locations. It feels like we’ve had 17 of these movies now, but in reality this is the fifth one.
But it’s Rebecca Ferguson’s film. When she is on screen she is the only person you are paying any attention to; when she isn’t you eagerly wait for her to show up. Her character Ilsa Faust is simultaneously ferocious and stoic, with an unsettling stillness – this is the opposite of a flashy performance. She seems to be a constant menace to nearly everyone even while she is in danger herself, although she ignores all that and remains focused on her goals. She is in nearly all ways professionally better than Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, though she isn’t competing with him – she just goes about her business being awesome. She is smarter, more decisive, and more resourceful than almost everyone around her, but that is just a by-product of her internal standards. She does not flatter or berate or threaten anyone, but firmly convinces others through her confidence and knowledge.
If you remove words like “menace” and “danger,” and forget that the film is about espionage, explosive violence and car chases, the paragraph above begins to sound like a model for how to get things done in a non-hierarchical business environment. In an organization where there are a lot of ways for projects to become derailed, if you gain the reputation as someone who can move things to their objective, then you’re going to be highly valued. You do that by being professional, skilled, confident, focused, calm under pressure, and resourceful. Finally, it’s good to do it by example; at no point does Ferguson’s character talk about doing things when it would be more effective and appropriate to just go ahead and do them.
Of course, you can only take this analogy so far. In real life our marketing and communications team doesn’t get into many savage knife fights in the middle of the night to resolve our differences.