What Pixar Understood About Respect That Most Organisations Never Will

There is a scene that Ed Catmull describes in his book Creativity, Inc. that tells you almost everything about how Pixar worked at its best.

A film is in trouble. The story isn’t landing. The director has been living inside it for months, sometimes years, and can no longer see where it’s broken. So a group of peers, directors, writers, heads of story sit down together to watch it. And then they say exactly what they think.

Not what they think the director wants to hear. What they actually think.

Catmull called this the Braintrust. And the single rule that made it work was also the rule that made it radical: the Braintrust had no authority. It could say anything. It could not enforce anything. The director walked away with every note and decided entirely for themselves what to act on.

It produced fourteen consecutive box office hits. For a creative organisation operating in one of the most subjective industries on the planet, that is an almost statistically impossible record.

And it was built, at its core, on a very specific understanding of what respect actually requires.

Respect is not the same as deference

Most organisations, if you asked them to describe a respectful culture, would describe something that looks a lot like what Ed Catmull was trying to prevent.

Quiet agreement. Measured language. A careful management of what gets said, to whom, and when. The unspoken agreement that we will protect each other from discomfort in the name of keeping things civil.

When you are fresh into a company and go to a meeting, it is only natural to be polite, show respect, defer to authority, avoid embarrassment, and avoid looking like an idiot. Catmull understood this instinct. He didn’t condemn it. He built a structure designed to make something different possible alongside it.

The Braintrust separated candour from hierarchy. It stripped feedback of its political dimension. You could say that a scene wasn’t working without it meaning anything about your relationship with the person who made it. Candour isn’t cruel. It does not destroy. On the contrary, any successful feedback system is built on empathy, on the idea that we are all in this together, that we understand your pain because we’ve experienced it ourselves.

This is the Charametrics distinction between deference and respect in action. Deference says: I will protect you from what I know. Respect says: I will trust you with what I know, and I will do it in a way that honours you.

The thriving expression of Respect, in the Charametrics framework, is precisely this: creating a culture where people can express their truth with genuine consideration. The key word is both. Truth. And consideration. Not one at the expense of the other.

The architecture of honest environments

What Catmull grasped and what most organisations miss, is that candour doesn’t happen because people decide to be brave. It happens because of structure.

The fear of saying something stupid and looking bad, of offending someone or being intimidated, of retaliating or being retaliated against, they all have a way of reasserting themselves. Catmull saw this clearly. Which is why he didn’t rely on culture slogans or value statements to maintain candour. He built mechanisms that made it structurally safe.

The no-authority rule was one such mechanism. Another was the deliberate decision to keep Steve Jobs out of Braintrust meetings, not because Jobs lacked intelligence or creative instinct, but because his presence would inevitably shift the dynamic. Catmull felt that Jobs’ strong presence would undermine the fluid truth-telling atmosphere central to the Braintrust’s value. Even the most brilliant person in the room can make a room less honest simply by being in it.

This is something coaches and HR professionals understand viscerally. A room with a senior leader in it is a different room. People self-censor. They hedge. They wait to see which way the wind is blowing before they commit to a position. Not because they’re weak or dishonest, but because they’re human, and humans read social signals.

Respect, at an organisational level, isn’t just an attitude. It’s an architecture. It has to be deliberately designed into the way people interact, give feedback, and hold each other accountable. Without that design, the natural drift is toward courtesy. And courtesy, over time, becomes a form of slow institutional dishonesty.

The part of the Pixar story that doesn’t get told

Here is where the story becomes genuinely instructive, and genuinely uncomfortable.

For all its structural sophistication, Pixar had a serious problem that the Braintrust didn’t catch. For years, John Lasseter, the creative force at the heart of the studio, one of the founding members of the Braintrust itself, was engaging in behaviour that made women feel disrespected, unsafe, and unable to speak up. Pixar and Disney employees close to Lasseter had been covering for his behaviour by keeping him out of the public eye for as long as possible.

The same culture that had been so rigorous about creative candour had produced a different kind of silence around something far more serious.

This is not a simple story. And it is not told here to diminish what Pixar built. It is told because it reveals something important about the limits of over-utilised Respect, and about what can happen when the care we extend to relationships becomes a reason to look away.

The Charametrics framework describes the over-utilised state of Respect clearly: allowing disrespectful behaviour in order to avoid potential conflict. Taking on the emotional strains of a situation as your own. Being compelled to protect rather than to confront.

The people who knew and said nothing were not malicious. Many of them likely cared deeply about the culture they’d built, about the studio they loved, about the relationships they valued. But care without truth is not respect. It is, as the Charametrics framework puts it, wisdom withheld. And withheld wisdom has consequences.

What this means for the organisations you work with

The Pixar story is not a story about a bad person destroying a good culture. It is a story about what happens when a culture’s commitment to respect becomes selective applied rigorously in creative feedback, and quietly suspended in human accountability.

For coaches and HR professionals, this is the diagnostic question worth sitting with. Not “does this organisation have a feedback culture?” Many do, at least in part. The more searching question is: where does that culture not apply? Where is honesty structurally available, and where is it quietly off the table?

As Catmull said, “If we are successful, we will be equally blind.” The culture you build to enable candour can create the very blind spots that candour is supposed to prevent. Success generates status. Status generates protection. Protection generates silence. And silence, as Pixar learned the hard way, is not the same as respect.

Building the real thing

Thriving Respect, the version the Charametrics framework describes, requires something more than a good feedback process. It requires the courage to bring truth into the room even when the relationship at stake is an important one. Even when the person is well-liked. Even when the moment is inconvenient.

Catmull didn’t win through force. He won by design. But design alone is not enough if the people inside the design lose the willingness to use it.

What Pixar got right was the architecture. What it missed, at a significant human cost — was the application of that architecture without exception.

For organisations building cultures of genuine respect, both matter equally. The structure that makes truth safe to say. And the collective commitment to say it, even when saying it is hard.

This month, ShareTree’s Character-in-Action Workshop explores Respect in exactly this dimension, not as a social grace, but as a structural and personal commitment to truth-telling with care. It’s designed for coaches, HR professionals, and leaders who want to build the kind of cultures that don’t just perform respect, but practice it. [Register here.]

For organisations wanting to understand what their people are actually experiencing beneath the surface, not what they say in meetings, but what they feel day to day, the Emotional Pulse platform provides continuous, confidential insight that polite cultures rarely surface on their own. [Explore Emotional Pulse here.]