So They Made You a Lead, Now What?

good morning you guys welcome to GBC Europe 2015 and thank you so much for coming out at this early hour I appreciate it because I'm sure most of you okay yesterday night with friends and colleagues and this might be hard to get out and come here at 10 o'clock my name is Olga Lansky and I'm the lead programmer of broken age so I guess at this point I should say I was asleep on a broken age now that the project is essentially over so this is kind of unusual for me I tend to speak about more technical topics in fact two years here at GDC Europe I talked about some of the challenges we had was broken nation how we attacked them but today I want to talk about something completely different and non-technical but about the topic I think that you know it's not talked about very often in the games industry but that is of utmost importance and that is leadership so the title of today's talk is so they made you lean and now what so I really want to kind of look at kind of what happens after you are promoted into a leadership position and you know what is the best way to adjust to this role but before I gonna start talking about specific things and tools you can use I would really appreciate to get your guys's help it's early in the morning you still got energy so first one would be really curious who in the audience has any kind of leadership experience please raise your hand if that's the case Wow excellent awesome thank you so then to kind of narrow that question who here's neutral this leadership experience who's been promoting the last year or so into that role okay quite a few people awesome and then last question I promise after that you can sit back and relax I'm curious who here in the audience with leadership experience got any kind of preparation for this role so did your company said you the course I gave you books or anything of that please raise your hand if that's the case oh wow okay and to be honest this is exactly what I expected this is pretty much my own experience and also the experience of other people I talked to it seems to be the general practice in the games industry to promote people into a leadership position without really much preparation and people are kind of left to their own devices to figure out how to approach this role what to do and this is really hard and you know I want to do everything I can today to make that much easier for you and the most important thing to realize is that as a lead you will acquire a completely different set of skills and those are skills you would have to learn in addition to your kind of skill set you already have as an individual contributor so you know I assume you're you know pretty senior programmer artist a designer and you've been working in this field for a while and so you are capable of making games which is awesome but now as the lead you will have to learn new things to be able to be effective in that role as well and it might help you to know that mostly it's really really struggle to adjust it as role this is something that's really hard and that's why I don't really understand why there's so little guidance provided by most companies for new leads but the most important message here is that it is possible to learn these skills and to become a very effective lead and this is what you know I want to talk about today and hopefully you know provide you some tools to do just that now before I'm going to talk about again responsibilities and tools I want to briefly talk about my own leadership story because leadership is a very personal skill then every lead will approach this role in a slightly different way there's no like single template that you can use to become a good lead and therefore what I'm going to be talking about later on really depends on my own story so my leadership story began just essentially shortly after joined Double Fine productions in San Francisco when the project lead for the 360 kinect game once upon a monster that we were doing in collaboration with Sesame Street asked me why don't I want to be delete engine programmer on this project and I was excited this you know was something I always wanted to explore and I had it for longest time on my CV as a career objective you know I want to become a team lead so I said yes awesome I will do that and I accepted the job you know came into the office now with my new job title as the lead NGO programmer sat down at my desk and I really didn't quite know what to do and how my role is supposed to change in fact the other day was going some old photos and I found a picture of myself from exactly that time look at that guy he's all excited by he has no clue what to do so this was really kind of how I felt at this position as well now obviously you know I had supervised in a past and I realized that you know some of the supervisors I really liked and I found it very effective whereas other bosses I had in the past I didn't really like and I thought you know they weren't really good athletes but what does this really mean you know what does has boil down to what did these people may do differently and so I start to think a little bit about you know the kind of situation our team and I noticed that for supervisor that I thought was really good as a lead it seemed like team morale was generally really high people were happy they knew what you know we were working on and people were generally you know pretty enthusiastic and for me personally I always felt that my work really mattered in those teams and that you know made you know raised my own morale and made meant that I you know was spending all of my brainpower working on these things but then I also had you know bosses that I didn't like and what I noticed there's was almost the opposite team morale was generally pretty low people kind of complained about things and there was a lot of gossip because I've been going on people weren't really too happy to work in that stuff and you know a lot of times what people would be checking Twitter and Facebook and do other things and for me personally you know I always felt that my work didn't really matter as much so you know why am I even here maybe you know it's five o'clock it's time to go home but really we kind of want to be more like this guy so how how can we do that so after you know the boy once put the monster was over I realized that if I want to accept another position as a lead on a project I really should spend more time learning about this because I felt I wasn't be the effective first time around and so this is really the foundation for this presentation and I wanna you know provide you guys it was kind of like a beginner's guide to leadership and you know what you can do hopefully to hit the ground running and become a good lead and so that you don't need to struggle as much through these kind of early difficult times but first we should ask us a wise leadership important against industry right because if you work for standard games company chances are there's probably not much in terms of organizational structure you know you're gonna have maybe one supervisor but then you know the next level up it's probably gonna be already some the CEO or somebody else in a you know studio management level so it's very flat in terms of my company hierarchy and at the same time you're probably gonna be surrounded by people who have you know similar h10 you similar culture backgrounds similar interests and it's gonna feel like you know you're just sitting there with a bunch of buddies working on a game and that's also mean that's what makes the games industry so fun and that's you know why as I was taking around in the game's history for such a long time but in a way you know projects that we're working on these days become bigger and bigger and there's more and more money involved to making these projects and in order to make those we need interdisciplinary coordination where you need to make sure that your team is very effective this means if you are elite and you're responsible group of people then really you should take this role very very serious because you actually you know are way more important than you might realize like you know the stakes for you doing a job well are actually pretty high because it's a good lead you essentially make everyone on your team way more effective than they could be on their own and you know on the other side obviously as a bad lead you can do a lot of damage so let's start out by looking at some of the kind of core responsibilities that you will have as a lead and these are responsibilities that you know were added to your plate to you know what you were already doing before so I think one of the first and most basics one responsibility is to establish an environment of trust and this is important because now that you are a supervisor you kind of stepped out of the role of being appear right you know when previously it was okay to gossip and complain about things when things didn't go well as a lead you really have to work hard I'm communicating very professionally this is not okay to you know be negative and gossip because this will you know project you in a kind of as a person who's not very trustworthy because you know if you gossip or other things how can people know that you're not gonna go sit about them as soon as you leave the room so this is something we'll have to work on and you really wanna create as environment because you want to make sure that people on your team can feel comfortable coming to your M is negative news let's say someone on your team recognizes there's some kind of problem that will put the next milestone in jeopardy in perhaps we'll ever not gonna affect on the entire production schedule if you are known to your team as somebody who first of all is not approachable and generally freaks out when there's bad news chances are this person will not come to you is the ad and this means you will hear about it when the situation is already pretty dire and you have to go into crisis management mode so we don't want to be there you know you want to create an environment where people can really feel comfortable coming to you but this is something that doesn't happen automatically and I'm gonna talk about later on how to work on this so now that you're responsible for entire group of people that also means obviously your response before the entire workload that this entire group of people has and it generally is very helpful you should really you know to define a direction for your team and this means you know having both a short term as well as a long term plan short term plan can could mean you know the next month or two and long term plan is something like the kind of goals even achieve with your good team within a year or until the end of the project or something like that Wow and this should be like culminate in a very concise vision statement and let's say you are lead of a tooth programming team then a good vision statement would be as a tools group we want to make sure that every asset change that gets made by one of our calculators gets reflected in the engine in five seconds this is great it's very specific everybody can understand what this means it's challenging it should be and this is a good vision statement now the vision statement is something you shouldn't just keep to yourself this should be something you really should you know communicate to everyone on your team and people outside of your team and it's really important for people on your team because when people work on tasks you know in a day to day basis they might need to make a decision why not go down this way or that way and you want to make sure that people can make this decision with the long term plan in mind because it will make a difference but probably one of the most important responsibilities you have now and that's something that's often overlooked I think is to support your team so when I kind of before I became a lead and kind of thought about leadership I always envisioned kind of more like a traditional pyramid right you have to lead on top and a whole bunch of people underneath it and if you you know do Google image search for leadership you'll find images like that where I personally found in the games industry in this kind of creative environment it's actually almost the other way around it's a flipper image where you are there to lift up your team to make sure that your team can be successful right your job is to make sure that everyone on your team can achieve the goals that you specified and this can mean you know can be as simple as providing everyone with the hopper they need or suffer they need but it could also mean you know provide guidance for someone who is struggling to work on a task or maybe someone has problems you know working with work performance it doesn't quite know how to learn the certain skill this is your responsibility to and some of you might might now wonder what about my actual job right and this is a question I heard a lot when I talk to other leads or formerly it's about the experience very often I heard things like I really like being a lead I really like being involved in some of the more important kind of project Y decisions but all of these meetings and you know helping people and writing reviews I really don't know when I'm supposed to do my actual work and this is I think one of the biggest misconceptions when it comes to leadership in games at least because as elite leadership is your actual job right this is really essential if there's only one thing you take away from this presentation then leadership is your actual job all of these meetings you know writing reviews talking to people all of that stuff this is your main responsibility this is what you're supposed to do and that means that in reality you obviously have less time for project tasks like programming you know creating artwork or designing things so make sure to take this into account and because you will have you know only up to 50% and a big teams even less time than add available for these kind of tasks so keep this in mind when you give yourself work so you don't over commit yourself because that will mean that you're gonna be doing a lot of hours and therefore we're gonna be stressed out and probably not gonna be doing good job as a lead and being a lead should always come first so you know but what about you know specific tools what can we do to become a good lead well unfortunately there is no individual single secret to good leadership despite what some Google searches will tell you there is no easy 10-step program to become a good lead or an easy like 15 minute video you can watch and that will make you a good lead you really have to learn these skills and you know improve them and I really like Mike Acton's quote from GBC earlier this year in San Francisco when he said if you absolutely must have a formula for doing a leadership work here's mine figure out what doesn't work into less of that and figure out what works well and do more of that and I saw something I that really resonates with me because just like in other things in life you're never done becoming a lead you're not like you know get a certificate hope you achieve maximum level lead you know this is not world of warcraft where you can max out you will always have to work on that and then sometimes mean you know taking a step back and reflecting on what you're doing and how effective that is but let's finally get started and let's look at what you can do so I think especially if you're really new to being a lead and you just been promoted think one of the most important things you can do is actually find a mentor and a mentor is someone in this case that you really respect for his or her leadership abilities it doesn't necessarily need to be a supervisor if you again coming back to example of the tools programming lead if you know you notice that someone in the art department is doing a fantastic job leading this team everyone is motivated pulling this direction and you know team is generally doing amazing work then encourage you to go to this person and ask him or her well not it's okay to you know come by every once in a while and ask question about leadership and kind of how to you know work on some of the problems you encountered or some of the difficult situations you didn't quite know what to do this being able to benefit from someone else's experience is really invaluable and I wish I would have done this way more in the beginning but even if you feel like you can't find someone in your own organization that you can talk to for whatever reason I encourage you still to reach out to someone in the games industry like for example the Australian game developers act after it when he sent Ron John Romero an email after he was promoted into a leadership role and just you know reflects my own experience because after I realized that I should learn more about leadership I spent a lot of time first of all talking to my tech director work but also sending emails to people in games industry that I really respect for their leadership work and asking the questions about certain things I wasn't quite clear about and I think I learned a lot through these kind of email exchanges now it probably doesn't come as a surprise that communication plays an important role when it comes to uShip in fact being able to communicate effectively it's probably one of the key skills you will need if you don't communicate you cannot lead and but this means you know you should which should really work on you know being able to represent information in a concise way and in such a way that it's tailored to what's the person you're talking to you if you are you know again towards programming lead and you're talking to someone in the art department you probably want to present that information slightly different and if you talk to someone on your own team and I think something that is often kind of done wrong or maybe you know it's kind of difficult for new leads is to realize that it's okay not to know everything right away you know I think there's sometimes this pressure is a new lead to you know have to have an answer for everything you somebody comes to you ask you question you're like oh I don't even know but I think it's like that it is totally okay to say I don't know that right now but let me you know talk to some people who know and then I gonna come back to you this is you really important aspect now other aspects for effective communication that are important is are these if you notice something that isn't working well don't wait for somebody else to fix the problem be proactive if you notice something and you can you know fix it yourself do that if you can't fix it yourself bring it up with sis to the leadership team and make sure that these things get addressed also being transparent is you know even more important now as a lead then it maybe was previously because things will inevitably go wrong and you know maybe your team runs into a problem that you couldn't anticipate and you're not going to be able to you know meet your milestone goals don't you know conceal this information or try not to talk about that and it's always better to be upfront let the people know who will be affected by the information and concentrate on finding solution rather than kind of hiding this or finding someone to blame for this mistake and then lastly I think something that's really important also be clear you know when you communicate and make sure that everything is very explicit because your team or other people you know in your company can't read your mind so if there's something that you want to say make sure to be again present us information such a way that people will be able to understand now something that I was I think that I underestimated in the beginning is how important listening is when it comes to leadership in fact I would argue that listening is actually more important than talking you know and I mind when a thought about leadership in the beginning was a situation like where I'm gonna be standing in front of a group of people and I'm gonna you know be giving a speech and if people are so inspired they run off and do amazing work and that's great if if you can do that fantastic but I think one important aspect is actually to gather information and that means you have to learn how to listen effectively and SS saying that as a human you have two ears and one mouth you should use them in a ratio and I think that very much applies in a games industry but what are some specific things you can do to work on your listening skills well first of all you should probably you know spend more time asking open-ended questions and open-ended questions are questions that can't be easily answered with yes or no so with these questions you're essentially inviting the person you're talking to to elaborate a bit more on the topic you're talking about and this will give you a lot of valuable insight into not just yes and no but also what is happening why is it happening and this is very very essential but let's look at a very specific example so let's say we have a situation where a feature needs to be added for a next milestone you could ask this question in an open-ended form and you would do it like that for example hey what do you think about this feature and how how long will it take to implement now compare that to the closed form which could sound like that we're going to add to that we going to add that feature can you get it under sprint now the difference kind of might seem very subtle in the beginning but if you use the latter form you're essentially dumping some work on someone else's plate right and then asking him or her whether or not you know they can get it done chances are this person you know will probably not be too happy about it because he already had you know a lot of work and now here's more and a question is just you know can you get it done so you're not gonna be as invested now you know asking this as an opening question you will actually get way more information out of it and you will actually hopefully get to a situation where this person is kind of more invest in this feature because you're asking for help or scoping and ask you know opinion on that feature and what it means because maybe there's something you weren't aware of that actually gonna make this feature much much more complicated implement and you naturally thought so this is a really easy thing you can do another very important listening technique it becomes specifically helpful in situations where there's a potential for miscommunication is active listening so this is really important when you're having difficult conversations or you know in situations where conflicts need to be resolved because any miscommunication at this point I will probably you know lead to a major blow-up and the idea here is to essentially restate or paraphrase what you heard the other person saying back to that person and this will mean that your communication partner can hear what you think he or she said and if there's any disconnect between the two messages then hopefully the person talking who can you know clear this up right away and you won't spend half an hour talking about something completely you know different so this is something you may have already noticed some of your supervisors are doing that and you may have never put a word to that in fact as GDC speakers we're often invited to kind of repeat the question back you know in the Q&A section I guess here the main idea is to make sure it's recorded with the camera but it's also you know helps in the same situation that you kind of make sure that I really understood the question and maybe you know it's because my mental context is gonna be different from yours so this is where this becomes really helpful and both of these listening techniques you know are essential for one of the most important tools as elite as you can or we have and that's one-on-one meetings because now that you are responsible for entire team and leading a team that means you really have to know your team right you have to know what they good at and not so good at and this also really means you know you need to work on this kind of trust relationship that I was talking about earlier and this is where one-on-one meetings and become really helpful so the idea here is that you meet with everyone on your team on a regular basis I generally you know you know follow a monthly schedule so every every month meet with everyone on your team for half an hour or so and the SS tendency or is danger to potentially skip these kind of meetings because that you know maybe the project is at the end it's kind of getting stressful or maybe it seems like there's not much to talk about don't do that get in the habit of doing these you know it's okay to just have a meeting for five minutes totally fine but you know just get in the habit of doing that because once you break the cycle it's gonna be much easier to just completely forget about it and I don't think that's a good position to be in and it's important also to make sure to have these meetings at a location where you both can feel comfortable talking about potentially sensitive topics so in a meeting room in the office obviously works nearby coffee shop also works as long as neither of you have to feel like kind of worried about somebody else or the company walking in and overhearing things that he or she here now one thing that I think often misinterpreted when it comes to one of our meetings is what you should talk about and it is really important that one-on-one meetings are not status updates the goal of this meeting is not to talk about hey you know how your tasks doing and you know are you gonna be done on time this might be an opener but this should not be the core of the message you should you know really spend time talking about questions like you know do you enjoy your work where do you want to be in five years is there any skill you want to learn if there's any if there's one thing you could change in the project right now what would that be and these kind of questions to you know get information are really the things you should be talking about and lastly when it comes to meetings make sure you're really listening and you're really there and I don't just mean physically you know don't have these meetings where you can potentially get distracted don't have these meetings in front of a computer where you can see email notifications popping up if you have to take your mobile phone into the meeting you know switch it off so you can't see any notifications popping up because nothing you know shows disrespect more than having this kind of half-ass conversation were just kind of responding like uh-huh uh-huh while you're writing emails not very helpful because the goal is here to make sure you know that the person feels important and valued and that's how it should be if you don't think that's the case then you may want to reconsider your position and generally and if there are things that you agree on in terms of specific action items like we want to send you to a course we want to send you to GDC make sure to write this down and then also you know send an email to the person so both of you have kind of like a written down version of what you agreed on okay so another thing I think that's very hard sometimes for new leads is dealing with expectations and I think it is really important as a lead to set very clear guidelines with your team and this is not micromanagement this is something where you want to set make sure that everyone a team knows the things that would frustrate you if there wouldn't be done well because what would happen otherwise is that people you know provide work that you're happy with and you're gonna either have the populist person ask for changes which is gonna make you know this person feel unhappy because it's something you know this person might not be aware of and you could have easily you know done it the correct way the first time or even worse than that you go in and fix it yourself which gonna make you appear like really horrible micromanager so this will really you know help your team to know what you know the kind of contract is between you and your team and it also help yourself because you're gonna be way less frustrated when it comes to you know checking our work now obviously there's also the problem of work right you know as a lead you need to make sure that everyone your team has something to do and that the work gets done and for that you will have to distribute work with your team now I found as a new lead specifically the easiest way to kind of get used to the idea of delegation is to have this kind of sprint planning meetings so the idea here is to get everyone on your team into a meeting room and then first talk about all the things that were done you know for the previous sprint all that stuff they get done and you know also the stuff that didn't get done and why it didn't get done and then you know talk about the specific things that need to get done for the next sprint and at this point you know let people grab toss in like say oh you know I this is something I'm interested in I would like to work on that and just let you know let people roll with that and just hopefully gonna lead to a situation where people gonna have mostly tasks that they're happy about into testing about now there will be tasks obviously that nobody wants he will have to assign them that's part of your job and you could take it yourself but always remember don't over commit yourself and one thing here that's important I think is as a lead you should really work on helping your team to think to the tasks so you know why you're having this meeting ask probing questions like oh you know have you thought about multiplayer how will that work or you know what about split screen you know these kind of questions obviously that you know the questions have to apply to your domain or what's gonna help your team to think about potential dependencies that you know they might not have thought about up to this point but delegation goes further than just distributing work delegation is really is also you know about trusting your team and the importance of realizing that your team are the domain experts these are the people who are you know working on the systems and working in the visual tasks all the time and they might know things that you don't know and that's totally ok so I think it's generally a good practice to get your team involved when it comes to questions about these systems or features of house and scoping and everything you know related to that and I think I made this mistake in the beginning where somebody from the audio part Minh to me and asked me a question about the limitations of the audio system now I'm not usually the person who works you know an audio system on a day to day basis but I had enough knowledge to answer the question though I thought to myself all right well let's not get the team distracted I'm just going to answer that question now what I didn't realize is or should have realized at this point that the person who is actually working the audio system all the time for sitting nearby and overheard his conversation and from this person's perspective it appeared like I'm not trusting this person with this question and that's not a good position to be in again establishing trust is really important so you know get your team involved in these kind of things as well and then the last thing I want to mention in relation to delegation is that is also a fantastic tool for skill development and this is something that might kind of seem counterintuitive as first but let's assume for a second that you want art-lete and for the next milestone you have to model an orc for your game now at first glance it might make sense to give this toss to somebody who has already you know model ten orcs for the previous game and it's super experienced with that but you previously hired a junior artist and from you one of our meetings that you're having now all the time you know that this person is really interested in you know character modeling and it's really enthusiastic about the topic in general and so in this case if time permits it I actually might make sense to give this task to the more junior artists because it means this person can learn the skills which is a great long-term investment for just the kind of general skill level that your team has and it also means that this person will probably work in this task really highly motivated and will you know put all of his creative energy into that into you know getting this task done and I'm contrast if you would give this task to the person who is really experienced with that you know they're gonna be like yeah I've done this a bunch of times I'm you know I'm gonna get it done but I'm not too excited because generally people don't really enjoy working a repetitive task I'm sure you notice with yourself that you really you know probably prefer to leave work at the end of the day realizing oh I learned something new right you know working on some exciting new things and this is the same here as well so it it's good to kind of remember that okay so now that tasks all given out and everyone on a team is doing something your job as a lead is obviously not done as a lead you represent your team and it means you know in kind of project white meetings you will have to know not just what your own task load is and how things are going with your tasks that you grab but also what the rest of the team is doing right there seems that can make sense but I think as a new lead sometimes this is a dangerous place to be because like I said earlier this kind of my actual job syndrome kicks in because everyone is working you kind of have the feeling oh you know I really should start working on my things too and you kind of start forgetting a little bit about your leadership responsibilities and it's only natural because you know you came out of her role as individual contributors so you kind of are very used to working on that so make sure to also allocate time to stay up to date with what's going on and their different ways to do this you know some people like to read the perforce check in comments if you have a producer going around checking on toss anyway have a coffee with the producer or of course you know just walk around yourself and ask people what's going on and in addition to learning kind of what the progress is this will also help you to realize if there any problems that are developing and hopefully gonna hear about them soon enough or early enough that you can easily fix them okay so this is probably one of the hardest things you can learn I have to learn as in you leave and that's the importance of providing feedback and how to provide feedback and this applies opposed to kind of praise on a positive side and as well as criticism on a negative side let's start you know by talking about criticism and you know as a lead obviously you're responsible for what your team does and this means that if they're things they're not going well and your team you will have to deal with that so let's assume for a second someone in your team keeps breaking the bill despite the fact that you explained that this is not a good thing and it will actually you know make everyone on the project unhappy and stop them from working and you explained that the best way of not running to this problem is to check the changes locally before checking them in but it keeps happening so at this point we have to deal with this right and this is you know let's be honest this is not going to be fun this is not gonna be a happy conversation and probably not going to be one of the greatest days of your life who knows but the problem the what point is that you will have to address this problem now one of the most important things here when it comes to criticism is to never have these conversations in public so don't go into the cubicle or work area where this person is working and kind of start this conversation there because what what happened this point it will put the person you're talking to in a naturally defensive stance because this person is going to be worried about not you know losing respect and front of his or her peers and this is not a gonna be a very productive conversation so instead get a meeting room in the office and have this conversation there and at this point it is really really important to approach this conversation with empathy you're there to support your team and this means also helping people if they have problems because I would assume that you know if you have a kid you're not gonna threaten your kid with firing them him or her from the family just because he's not turning in English homework right instead you're probably gonna be you know asking you know what's going on is to anything I can help you with so that you know we can work on this together and it's exactly what you should do here as well you know first find out what is going on maybe there's you know something you weren't aware of previously maybe it's something a personal life that you know makes this person very distracted whatever it might be find out what's going on and then with this person talk about a specific plan what you can do to get out of that situation make a plan agree on it and then once you've done you know write up notes and send it send it as an email to this person so that you both have something written down form what you agreed on and after that is done you know make sure to check in on this person and follow up on the kind of development and you know hopefully or not hopefully provide help and support where necessary to you know make this person to get out of this problem now obviously there might be situation where things are even worse and I hear this question a lot about like oh but what if I need to get a person fired or something like that in my experience this doesn't happen very often and this is really one of the most extreme cases and I think as a new lead I have not talked to a single person who where that was really necessary so I'm actually gonna skip over that but if you want to talk about it later please you know come to me after the presentation and we can talk about that as well now on the other end of the spectrum there's also praise as a form of feedback and sometimes as new leads I think it can be also tempting to concentrate on a negative things or the things start going well and by doing that sometimes new leads forget about praising people but praise is something really important most people really want to know how they're doing and they want to know that they're doing well so just a few little words like oh you know well done you did a great job with that actually go a long way and in contrast to criticism it is totally okay and you know actually encouraged to to praise people in public so if you for example have a project white meeting where you're representing your group you know please feel free if there's something you know really good that happened during the week mention that and say also who's responsible for that because I will boost team morale and that's you know very important for your productivity and sometimes I heard the question I was like but you know I never remember at these meetings what happened I'm kind of on the spot so everything is periodic for me personally it really helped me to have a piece of paper next to my computer and I would actually write down all the good things that I noticed happening during the week and you know this is great at the end of the week again you you have a nice list that first of all gonna make you feel very good because you realized that your team was really productive but it also gonna provide you with enough you know points to talk about doing these kind of meetings that's a lot so some of you may now say wow man this leadership thing is actually pretty hard it seems like you know a lot to learn maybe there are some things in there I didn't really realize and I should really do all those things and yeah it's it's true like becoming a lead or adjusting kind of from this role as an official contributor into the cedar ship position is really really tough but it is important to remember that this is not impossible and you can you know become a great lead if you work on these skills apply them and then you know again take a step back and kind of think about how well this works and then adjust your strategy I like Ryan Sharpe is quote from a talk in 2012 at GDC about leadership when he said there's this kind of misconception that comprehension also equals mastery and that's really not true right because just because you read all the books about leadership or you know came to all the presentations by the way thank you for coming to this presentation doesn't necessarily mean you know that you're also automatically gonna be a fantastic lead you really you know have to apply these skills and work on it and rather than hoping that you're gonna be just like all the inspiring leads that you see around you you know practice is the only way to get there and all the things that I talked about today are really just the beginning just just count the basic steps the kind of foundation that you know you should have as a new lead and this is really you know an exciting step for you in your career right being in this position we're now have this principle instability and you have a high group of people that you're responsible for is fantastic and it is actually to me still amazing when I realized at the end of a milestone like how much work at you know the entire team you know was working in a lion fashion everyone's super productive and it's just kind of such an amazing feeling to be there so being elite is awesome but it is work and this is really all I want to talk about today is kind of the basic steps so thank you guys for listening and I'm gonna leave you with the most support leadership tip from Captain Dakar and I'm open to answering some questions okay I'm running bit early so I need to come to you the question right right so the question is like if you become a lead and finding a mentor is very important but you can't find someone in your company what you should do in this case yes this is really important and I think what you should do in this case is actually to reach out somebody to somebody in the games industry who you noticed you know gave talks on the topic at GDC or who you noticed kind of throughout of forms that you know they were doing a good job or paid to do a good job in in terms of leadership and in my experience I actually did exactly that you know brightness person email saying hey I'm new to the role of leadership if you have the time I would really appreciate if you could answer a bunch of my questions that I have and then just you know not bombard them with questions kind of spaced them out but you know ask these questions and my experience people are very very generous and you know I think since it is kind of a taboo or seems to be taboo topic in the games industry and people don't be like to talk about it too much individuals are really helpful because they've been through that themselves and they realize oh you know I should do everything I can to help other leads and another thing you can do so I have some of these things so at the end of presentation if you download them they are a bunch of resources that you may want to check out there is actually relatively good material but it's certainly nothing that gets me know discussed all that often but yeah that's answer cushion okay yep over here oh wait there's a microphone coming hi thanks for the great speech so I have a question about code observation so most likely during your work you are checking a lot of code written by your teammates so how much time does it take usually from you so how what's the time budget for that and how do you usually feedback what you are checking so that's the question yeah yeah so the question is specifically for programming you know when it comes to code quality or the stuff that gets checked in like how much time should you spend or how much time will it take to kind of look at all the things in how should you provide feedback on that yeah so right okay you know this is something that kind of depends on you I think some leads program needs have a different standard kind of what they find agreeable money obviously as a lead you should make sure that the code is not completely crazy right but it kind of also depends you know you get a feeling for how people on your team works so you know I guess in most cases what happens probably most of you have experiences there's some kind of coding standard it gets specified and this you know very much ties in to expectations that I was telling about talking about earlier I think it really helps if this is something you really care about that the code is structured in a very specific way because otherwise you're gonna be unhappy then make these very obvious make these clear you know write these down have a document and tell everyone on your team like to hear the coding standards please follow those and you know also obviously make it possible for people to provide feedback if it's completely unreasonable what you're asking then people should you know be able to voice that concern as well in terms of how much time it takes I mean that really depends on you I generally like like to check in on perforce check-ins every once in a while I'll just kind of see you know the list of check-ins to go in and generally I look at what's happening I kind of you know look at files more that I really kind of have the the tendency to cause a lot of damage more than with other files and all depending on maybe who checks seven but it's I can't really give you a specific time you should spend three hours a day doing that is really hard I had a one of my supervisors in the past he literally checked I don't know how he did every single purpose check-in even when he was on his honeymoon I still got an email from him like from Denmark hey I noticed you did that is this really intended so you know they're different scales you have to kind of figure out what works for you and if people you know start grumbling on your team that you're too precise make sure that you have a you know reasonable expectations there is that okay does that answer your question somewhat okay over here yep that's coming actually I have two questions that's alright so the first one is about delegation if you have a large team you usually want to delegate tasks but you also want to maybe improve the skill set by your team by doing that or I launched them and so on I always found it tempting to connect these delegation tasks to actual career goals of the people who I'm delegating tasks so sometimes if someone wants to get promote it and well I think okay there's this task I would like to delegate to someone in the team and this person wants to be promoted I kind of link these two things together and I say well it's a win-win situation you can get promoted after a certain time or it's one of the things that I think could be useful to you in your development and usually that's something that I sometimes found a bit difficult because I thought well I'm asking this person who asked me before and I delegate this to him but maybe another person in the team would be suitable as well and I'm not considering him because this makes it so much easier for me and also um this person is of course so much more motivated eventually because okay so the question is when it comes to delegation is it okay to connect things like promotions to kind of toss you perhaps when I give out and don't want to deal with yourself is that about I mean well I have good experience with that I just wanted to ask how you are handling it right is that something you had in the past right yeah in situations I think what is really important in these situations I mean you know as you pointed out correctly delegation is a great way for skill development and sometimes if you have some type of skill set or something that somebody needs to learn and this is a great way to get them you said even you know even if it's something that you realize this person really should know that because they want to be a senior programmer or something like that and they really should know these things in even though they might not realize that right now but I think what you should do before you do that is actually talk to this person about their kind of general career plans and you know have a one-on-one meeting and talk specifically okay let's talk about you know are you happy with your role you know in two years down the road do you would you be happy still being a standard programmer or what do you want to be senior programmer and you know if the person indicates that you want to kind of rise and the hierarchy then make a plan make a specific plan of things that you seem important you know you should work on this should work on your communication skills should work on this specific skill set if you will need so you have a general plan and then this can tie in to specific delegation tasks because what will happen in this case you can say in this case you know when we talked about you know all the things that you should do and all to get promoted you know this is I think a good pass for you to attack so this is a way to approach it but yes I mean delegation is sometimes hard work specifically when it comes to things that nobody really wants to do but you just want to get them off your plate unfortunately you know you don't have the benefit of doing that you have to deal with these kind of tasks as well okay thank you the other one is about one-on-ones sometimes in one-on-ones you come about well you start talking about other team members so and that's always a bit tricky ground I would say because actually it's quite usual to for example speak with the senior about the new junior into the team so that's quite you can ask him how he's doing and all that stuff because maybe it's mentoring him all that and the other way around you can also do that of course but my question is what you do with that information you get because I do all these one-on-ones every month like you do and I have all this very specific event information about career passes and so on and this is of course confidential but when it comes about information what people think about others I learned a lot very useful information and sometimes I don't know how to use it because when the team is rather small it's very obvious where the information comes from in certain cases so you have any advice to this situation yeah so the question is in one-on-one meetings or I guess generally talking you know to your team if somebody else comes up on a team and you know you want to talk about this person either doing good we're not too good job what do you do with this information and you're right this is a very tricky crown and to first you know the most important rule here is a lead all this information you're getting is confidential even if this person doesn't explicitly say oh please don't let anybody else know so I would argue personally under no circumstances go and to this other person say okay I heard just you know from someone that you know you're doing a horrible job programming this feature you know sometimes this is just you know information that you get and it's you know sometimes as a person who's working you just want to get it off your chest right you kind of really frustrated maybe somebody is making it alive really difficult one thing that's all you gonna make them feel better is just being able to to voice that now obviously there are mortalities to that if you own a situation where you know somebody is actually making somebody else miserable then becomes a problem let's say somebody is showing some kind of racist kind of tendencies or sexism or anything like really bad things that could happen you will have to deal with that and in this case what I would do in this meeting when I talking about the person who brings this topic up nice to say okay well this is really bad and I think we need to deal with this you know is it okay for me to confront this other person to talk about and explain that this is not a good thing and just be sensitive because you noticed as you said especially in small teams it becomes kind of difficult and you know if it becomes really major and you just notice it in the open then you should bring it up anyway you can say I was walking around and I noticed you were making a really disrespectful comment to someone I don't you know this is not okay this is not how we communicate on this team and again we really clear don't you know this is again something that's not gonna be fun but you know you will have to just you know you know tense your fists and say this is not okay this isn't how we communicate police changed is because otherwise we know we have to you know use more drastic measures like a warning or something like that but again you know treat all this information with confidence even if it's not explicitly mentioned I would say okay somebody else out back there hi how would you encourage proactivity because sometimes people on your team might not do that by themselves and it's of course something that you would want to to see mm-hmm yeah that is that is a real hard one um so the question is how do you encourage productivity a pro activity in your team because this is a good skill and you want people to kind of you know if they see something going wrong you kind of solve it themselves rather than waiting for somebody else to do it I think in a lot of ways there's also kind of ties in to something like Career Development so you know let's say you have a one-on-one where you're talking about okay where do you want to be in a year or two years down the road and this person says well you know I want to get promoted you know this is a great point to say well fantastic and you know here a few things to talk about and I think one of the things you could you know be better at is actually being proactive and if you see something that's broken you know don't wait for somebody else to fix it if you notice it yourself you know this is something that senior programmers artists designers do you know go and like attack these problems by yourself so sometimes this helps by kind of pointing out it is as part of the kind of skill set that's necessary for some of the more senior roles other than that I had to experience myself it's sometimes hard because sometimes people say they really want to do something and then I for example had a programmer who wasn't too happy not doing all this kind of scripting gameplay work and I said okay what are you interested in you know would you be interested in doing some tools work and the person yeah that sounds that sounds awesome I would love to spend more time with that and I said like okay well let's you know try for the next sprint I'm gonna put you in charge of the tools so you know you gonna you know do all the things that you seem necessary and make sure you know that our team has what they need and then you kind of observe obviously if something going always going horribly wrong you should step in but just kind of see what happens this way in this case you know this person realized that maybe he wasn't too interested in working tools I don't know because there wasn't that much happening but you know try to encourage it this way as well I think that's another good way just giving people more responsibility just to see also you know how are you gonna be able to deal with that said okay once a question okay it's not a question somewhere all right well if just nothing let's talk about then again thank you so much for coming out and I hope this helped you thank you much you

Channel: GDC

Views: 10,645

Rating: 4.961165 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design

Id: Z98rF3bllao

Length: 55min 4sec (3304 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 29 2016