Lead the Way! A Practical Guide to Team Leadership

[Music] thank you for coming to my talk I appreciate it's a pretty nice day and there's a happy hour going on the explore dope I should probably not tell you that I guess but thanks for coming so my name is Olga Lansky and I'm the lead programmer of broken age and so today this talk is a little bit of weed talk for me personally because as a programmer you know I'd like to talk about technical things and in fact the last couple of GDC sigh you talked about various issues or challenges that we were facing when making broken age and how we approach those but today I'm going to talk about something completely non-technical but a tech topic that I think it's really important and that in many ways is you know underserved and there's a bit of a mystery around it but it's such an important topic that can really you know make or break a game of

any size and that is the topic of leadership and specifically I want to talk about kind of this point in your career when you're promoted into a role of leadership responsibilities or in other ways maybe in college or whatever you get you know all of a sudden of responsibility for a group of people not just yourself anymore because this is you know very different or like a very interesting time and a lot of things kind of change in your kind of day to day job but that isn't talked about all that often but it's you know such an important topic that I want to kind of share a little bit of my experience and kind of what I've learned over the years and before I'm going to start talking about very specific things I would like to get you guys's help just three really short questions after that I promise you can sit back and relax you don't need to do anything else I realize this is the last session so it's been you know a

long day first of all I would be really curious who here the audience had at any point in your career any kind of like leadership experience please raise your hand if that's the case Wow awesome Wow that's that's a lot of people now to narrow down this question a little bit more I would be curious who is kind of new to this role right now so if you've been promoted in the last year perhaps please raise your hand I am okay awesome and then the last question is so for all of you who just raised your hand and the first question so you have any kind of leadership experience in the past I would be curious who received any kind of preparation for this role did your company sent you to a course gave you some books or like in any way prepared you for this role so please raise your hand if that's the case no no no okay okay that's actually good that's more than what I've seen in the past and so what I just saw is likely where a lot of people you know maybe even like half or 60% of the room you know had were

responsible for other people at some point but when it came to the question of like you know where you actually prepared for this role not all that many hands went up and that is in many ways after talking to many leads that seems to be pretty standard practice in a games industry and I find it really baffling because in a way as a lead you get kind of you know pushed into this role and you're kind of left you know to your own devices to figure out how you're supposed to now you know change your day to day job and kind of you know how you're supposed to deal with this and considering how important this role is I'm always kind of baffled by that now the first thing really to realize when it comes to leadership is that as a team lead you know leadership requires a whole different additional set of skills that you have to learn and these are skills that you know you're kind of added to your to your list of skills that you had previously as an individual computer contributors so if you've been you know programmer and artist a

designer and you obviously you know I've been doing really good work at your at your company and you know somebody in trusts you now to bring that good work to and you know be responsible for entire group of people but this additional set of skills that nobody ever tells you about that is really important and that's kind of want to talk about today and it might help you to know that most leads really struggle with this adjustment this is not an easy thing to do and it's not something that happens naturally and most people I talked to really said you know it took me a long time to kind of learn this skill on that skill and to really kind of get used to get used to this but I really thought for the longest time myself that you really have to be born to be a good team lead like you know you can't learn this but I don't think that's true I think this is just really a set of skills and you can learn this and you can you know become an effective lead and I you know if you're in this position you should really consider you know spending some extra cycles to to

learn to learn about this now before I'm going to start talking about very specific things and responsibilities and techniques and so on I want to very briefly sure share with you my own kind of leadership story and the reason why I'm doing that is because in my mind leadership is a very personal skill since it is a soft soft skill and everyone kind of approaches that in the in a different way and you know certainly for me every supervisor I ever had was very different and you know approach this role in a very unique way so I want to give you a little bit of context for you know what I'm going to talk about later on so my personal leadership story in the games industry began when just shortly after I joined Double Fine productions here in San Francisco at the time we were making a 360 Kinect game in collaboration with Sesame Street called Once Upon a monster and the project lead for the sport you asked me hey you know do you want to do you want to be the lead engine program on this on this game and I was really

excited you know this was an awesome an awesome moment for the longest time and my kind of career objectives I had the sentence like hey you know I want to be lead programmer or like you want to be responsible for a group of programmers so I said yes awesome I'll I want to do this fantastic and I accepted the job you know came to the office on Monday the following Monday sat down in front of my computer and I didn't really know how my day to day job was kind of supposed to change and in fact while I was going through old photos the other day I found a picture of myself from just about that time look at that guy he's all excited you know yet now he's responsible people or dogs I guess but he has no clue must be really old - because I just now realized that there's a really old cell phone and a picture you know it's the old school dog I guess but joke decide you know I really I think I've really felt lost in a beginning and I think my reaction to this which you know I hope this normal

human reaction is dead and times of uncertainty you just kind of continue doing what you know right you just kind of continue doing that and so I kept my head down I did a lot of programming and I think you know we ship this game you know I'm pretty proud of it but after the project was over and I had some time to kind of think about about my role as the lead on this specific project I realized that I really didn't do anything in this regard in this kind of leadership aspect and if I ever want to accept the role again and just forgot I really should spend some more time learning about learning about this and to be more effective and the first thing I did after kind of coming to this conclusion is to think about what supervisors I had in the past and I noticed you know obviously there were some some of my bosses I really liked and I thought they were doing a fantastic job leading a group of programmers but then there also were a few people I didn't really like and I thought you know they really should not be in charge of a group of people now I

wanted to break this down a little bit more and so I started to write down some of the similarities in kind of these these groups and what I noticed is that for the supervisors I really like generally team morale was really high you know people were motivated to work on the tasks that they had assigned were assigned to them generally the direction the team was going and the entire project was going was clear and even if there were changes they were communicated well ahead of time in a good way and for me personally and probably most importantly as an individual contributor I always felt that my work mattered and that it was valued and important to my supervisor and because of that you know it felt I felt motivated to give this extra bit of like creativity and energy to make this project awesome now on the other hand in times where I didn't really like my supervisor too much I realized generally team morale was pretty low there was a lot of complaining going on gossiping like company politics happening Direction

wasn't clear and even if you know there was some kind of goal that would change frequently so you know that was not a very predictable working environment maybe some of you kind of recognize some of these symptoms now most importantly for myself too I felt that my own work didn't really matter I didn't really feel that my supervisor thought that what I was doing at the time was really important and Mellon anyway so you know why should I be excited about it you know spend X amount of energy on it so usually I just wanted to get this project was to move on to something else now obviously you know we want to figure out how to be like this guy right like how can you be this person who hopefully you know motivates the team and make sure that everybody you know feels empowered so this is what I want to talk about today so if you're new to this role of leadership hopefully I can give you a few things that will help yourself to know if it's practical ways how to kind of get used to this role you know

if you've been if you're like a senior manager and you've been in charge or you are in charge of other people who are leading people maybe this will help you to reefa millwrights yourself is the situation that you know this is not a natural thing to do this is not easy for most people and you know maybe there's something you can do to help to help other leads in your in your company now but why is wise leadership kind of even important the games industry and that's not a bad question is actually pretty good question because if you're working for Stan a games company chances are you're hierarchical in terms of like organ organizational structure is not very deep you probably have like a department lead and then chances are it's already like project lead is like the CEO now this combined with the fact that you're surrounded by people who are probably a very similar interest in you and in many ways are probably going to have very similar hnu leads to this kind of environment where it feels like kind of like in college you just make in a game with a bunch of buddies and this is

great I don't want to put us in any kind of negative light because this fun creative environment that's really why I you know personally stayed in industry for such a long time on the other hand I think these days while projects are getting bigger and you know costs more money it is important to realize that you know it is an industry and you know now that we you know projects have become so big there are different divisions and different departments and then subgroups in there it's a become and feasible became infeasible for everyone in the company to know everyone else and to effectively communicate with everyone else to make this project a success and this is why we're your role as the lead it's just incredibly crucial because this kind of interdisciplinary cooperation and coordination is what you know will make or break potentially the game so I guess what I want to say is like if you know your title your job title chunk includes the word lead I encourage you to just really take the series because your contributions are really really

important and sometimes it can feel like you know only your kind of programming or art or design tasks really matter but that's not true the leadership aspect is really really important now what are some of these responsibilities I talked about earlier now I think personally first and foremost as a lead you should really work very hard on an established environment of trust and this is important because now that you've been kind of you've been promoted into this role and you kind of left this group of peers you actually have to work hard on to make sure that you know you can communicate professionally and that you're approachable and that you have trustworthy because you know people might come to you with sensitive information and in how can someone you know talk to you about something that's going wrong if you're known as someone who gossips that's not a good environment to be in or you know if someone on your team notices some kind of issue that will potentially put the next sprint at risk or you know have

even further reaching implications if you're known as someone who generally is not really approachable or generally doesn't take bad news well chances are you're not going to hear about it because the person either going to step around you talk to somebody else or maybe not even say anything at all and then you know just wait for the train wreck to happen that is not a good thing you don't want to be there and but you know getting to this environment where you can trust your team and the dream can trust you it's not automatic you need to work on this and you know this is something that's important I'm going to talk more about a later on how to go hard to get there now of course also now that you're responsible for entire group of people and their work that means you're not just responsible for your own kind of tasks anymore and that means you should also work on kind of setting a direction for your team and ideally this should end up in a kind of near-term and long-term kind of plan so

near-term maybe like you know a month or two down the road a long term plan perhaps you know six months down the road or end of the project and this should ideally end up in kind of a very concise mission statement you know let's assume for a second you were responsible for a group of truth' programmers you could imagine you know a good vision statement would be a virtual team we want to make sure that every content update that gets made by a conic later is reflected in the game entered within ten seconds this is great everybody can understand this it's very clear it's short and it's challenging it should be challenging and so this is this is great now this is not just a thought experiment for yourself it's not just so you can write it down on a piece of paper you know ideally you know you make sure to communicate this to your to your team as well because day-to-day decision making process you can be influenced by where you want to be in a year you know it's a programmer you may notice if you start writing a very complicated system

that will be and you know games for you know the next 5-10 years that will make a huge difference you know to your decision-making process if you know that some feature or some constraints will be they'll be important later on and then lastly I think the most important responsibility really is to support your team and I think I got this totally wrong in the beginning because when I thought about like leadership I always thought about this kind of traditional image like of a you have to kind of delete on top and then kind of you know more and more people on the knees and work distribution kind of triples down and stuff gets done and this works well if you're an environment way if you know where authoritative leadership style is important like the army but I don't think this works very well in the games industry in this kind of creative environment in a way you there to make sure that your team can be successful to achieve the goals that you said so it's almost like a fillip pyramid where you're there to kind of hold up your team to make sure you know that they can get there that they have everything they

need and this can be as simple as making sure that they have software and hardware they need or you know talk with to talk with someone on your team about a certain like tasks and how to approach it or if somebody struggles with with work performance that's also your responsibility to help this person now some of you may ask yourself this question now but what about my actual job and this is the question I heard a lot when I started to talk to other leads you know about it's like after I realize you know I should learn about it and I start to write down a little bit of some of my experiences I kind of talk to a lot of other people to kind of get their view and what I heard very often was a story like you know I really like being a leader I like to be involved in some of the kind of more project by decision making process but with all of these meetings and you know talking to people and and all of that stuff writing reviews I really don't know when I'm supposed to do my actual job and this is I think probably the biggest misconception when it comes to

leadership because as a team lead leadership is your actual job now this is really important to me so if there's only one thing you take away from this talk I really hope it's this as a team lead leadership is your actual job all of these meetings writing reviews talking to people helping people supporting people all of that stuff that is what you're supposed to do first and foremost now of course this means that you will have less time to work on programming cos artist or designer house so depending on you know the size of the company in your team you can expect to spend between 20 and you know maybe up to 50 percent of your time on kind of leadership and management tasks so you know make sure to take this into account and don't I'll become it yourself because if you take on too much work itself chances are you're gonna be working a lot you're gonna do over hours and you might not be as approachable as you should be and that's again not a good place to be but how can we you know what specific techniques can you do and what kind of

skills are important well just like with many things in life unfortunately there's no real single secret to good leadership and as I found out myself if you go to Google and you know type in like oh you know how how can I learn about leadership we will find a lot of things like ten minute videos that will promise that you know after you watch this you will be the perfect lead or this 20 step program you can read on I don't know WW leadership come this is part of it but I can guarantee you that this will not be like that single thing you have to read in fact if there's only if there's a singular kind of formula that I accept in this regard it's really this code for my act and I really like this if you absolutely must have a formula for your leadership work here's mine figure out what doesn't work and do less of that and figure out what works well and do more of that it's so simple but yet it is important because it also shows that you never really done becoming a lead you know just like as a

programmer you never really done acquiring a maximum kind of skill level in this regard so it's important to realize that every once in a while you have to take a step back and kind of think about think about what you're doing and like adjust your strategies but what specific things can you do you know now that you've been promoted let's get to the meat of things personally I think one of the most important things you can do especially if you you know just really really new to this role is to find a mentor and the mentor and this regard is someone that you personally really respect for his or her leadership abilities ideally there would be someone in your own organization just to make communication much easier and kind of have a faster turnaround time so to speak when you know talking about specific topics it doesn't need to be your direct supervisor at all so you know if you're a programming need if you see someone in the art department doing a fantastic job you know communicating and leading this team and everybody's motivated and doing fantastic work I

encourage you to go to this person and ask like hey is it okay to come by every once a while you know talk about some of the challenges I'm facing adjusting to this role and kind of the progress I'm making because this kind of practical advice that you know has been gathered over years and years of working in this in this specific role is really invaluable and it will allow you to you know talk about specific situations you ran into and how you handle these and whether that was a good thing to do but even if you feel like there's nobody in your own organization that you can talk to directly for whatever reason they maybe I encourage you to reach out to somebody else in the games industry to ask questions if you have them for example the Australian artist the act after did this when he was first promoted into an art leadership role when he brought you know a male to John Romero to ask questions about this topic and as it seems I have not seen his email but as it seems he felt that was pretty helpful and this definitely also reflects no one experience you know after I kind of came to a conclusion

that I should probably do a bit more on this regard I started writing emails to people I respect very much for the work in this field and I asked very specific questions and I found that people are pretty generous with their time and really helpful and really want to help because you know these people have gone through this kind of struggle at some point so you know they're well aware they're well aware of of this problem said now it shouldn't come as a big surprise that communication plays some role in in all of this in fact you know effective communication is probably the key skill that you will have to work on now that an audit your lead and if you can't communicate you can't really lead and it just makes sense now it's important to realize that this may take more time than you think and you know as a programmer I certainly went through this myself you know as a program I guess we're a programmers are generally I guess known that you know maybe they're not as understandable to the art department or design department and I'm

sure there's you know certain truths to that and for me I had to learn that it's really important to make sure that you know I change the way I communicate depending on who I talk to if I want to talk about even the same system or to or whatever it is to someone on the art department I have to use different vocabulary in talking you know different about different details then if I would talk to someone on the programming team this is really important so just you know make sure to to do this and one thing I want to mention at this point as a new lead it's I think important to realize that it's okay not to know everything sometimes I feel like that can be this there's pressure that you kind of have to know everything and you have to be able to do everything all of a sudden because someone in your work kind of entrusted you with this position so I know this pressure but it's you know it's okay not to know everything it's okay to say you know what I don't actually notice right now but let me find out and then I'm gonna come back and talk to you talk to you later on now other things that are really important are these you know be proactive if you

notice something that's not going well don't wait for somebody else to to solve this problem you know you're on a position where you know you're taking on this extra responsibility too so make sure you know you actually fulfill this role so if you see someone you know and your team being rude to somebody else don't wait for somebody to come to you like this is something that you know you should should deal with on your own terms or by yourself now also especially when it comes to communicate I think to supervisors you know do make sure to be transparent as a new leader I think it can be sometimes for some new leads it can be hard when things don't go well and you know maybe there's a problem and maybe you feel like you know maybe I shouldn't tell anyone I can probably fix this and nobody will ever know don't do this you know if something is going wrong go to the people that will be affected by their tell them about this and then you'll find a solution you know things will go wrong this is the games industry and it's probably applies to all the other industries it's just the way the way it goes also be

clear and I kind of covered this a little bit already you know people can't read your mind so make sure to break down whatever you want to say and as simply as you can or as clearly as you can rather and you know if you feel like maybe somebody it's not quite on the same page you know ask probing questions you know this does make sense you know is there any way I can break us down should I like draw diagram whatever it may be you know beep really work on this and this is you know takes takes some time now one thing I think I completely underestimated before before being in this role is I think it's the importance of listening in my mind when I thought about leadership I always thought about someone standing on a podium giving an inspiring speech and everybody runs off and does some amazing work but that's in reality not how it works and what's actually way more important is that for you to find out what's happening and gather information and to listen and to really kind of

understand who these people are and what their problems are there's a saying as a human you have two ears and one mouth you should use them in that ratio and I certainly think that this applies to leadership now one thing you can do is a specific technique that could help you with improving your listening skills is to ask for open-ended questions and open-ended questions are questions that can't be easily answered with yes or no and in fact these are kind of questions we want to invite your communication partner to elaborate a little bit more about the topic and so you can find about find out about the kind of what and why and these things are really important to get this extra information now I was for a while thinking about whether I should make this an interactive part of this presentation but I decided against it but as an example let's assume for a second your project Lee decides that you know all the vehicles in your game should be drivable by the player now you

may be you have to in delegate this this work so you could bring this up to someone your team asking assess or asking and open the questions like this hey James what do you think about this feature and how long do you think this will take to implement now compare this to the closed form where you would say something like this hey James we decided to add this feature can you get it done this sprint now this may seem kind of like a very similar question at first glance but it's actually huge difference because in the closed form really what you're doing you're dumping some work on someone else's played you're not really interested about any kind of potential side effects or stuff that you may not be aware of and you're certainly not interested in this person's input on this feature and you know how is this person supposed to feel like you know this is something to be excited about so you're not going to get a much Buy in on the other hand you know asking this is an open-ended question what you're really doing you're inviting you know writing your teammate to kind of work on this feature and this problem together with you and because of that you know you're going to first of

all find out about potential side-effects problems that you may not be aware of or maybe it's not a good idea because of that or this and generally it shows that you trust this person and that you value this person's input and you know that's gonna lead to a very different place this person hopefully gonna have some buy-in and this feature by the end of it and you know it's it's just an important thing and you know it takes a little bit of time to get used to kind of restructuring the way you ask questions but it's it's really helpful so I can only suggest you do this now another listening technique that's really helpful especially when kind of dealing with kind of difficult conversations so you know something is not going well there's a problem maybe people blame each other for the problem emotions are running high this is an ideal situation to use a technique that's called active listening and active listening the ideas to essentially minimize the chance of miscommunication and you do this by restating or paraphrasing what your

communication partner says back to him using your own words now obviously you know think about you want to first think about what the person said and then you know paraphrase that so the idea here is that you essentially make sure that the other person can hear what you think he or she said so that if there is any miscommunication that it can be resolved right away I certainly had my fair share of conversations both at work and it was my wife where you know we're talking and I just feel like why does this person or get it like it's so clear only to find out eventually that actually we're kind of actually talking about different aspects perhaps of the same topic this will help you with this it's a very very helpful technique and it will also become in very very handy in one of the most important things you can do as a SL eed and this is one about meetings now as the name suggests the idea here is to meet with everyone your team on a kind of regular basis to kind of a face-to-face conversation and this is important because now that you're responsible for the workload of

the group of people you really have to know the people on your team because how else are you going to be able to to lead these people right you have to know what they're good at what they're not good at what they enjoy working and what they don't enjoy working on and the only way of finding out is by asking them about these kind of topics and this also will really help you to kind of establish or hopefully to establish this kind of environment of mutual trust you know hopefully you're gonna get to a situation where your team will realize you know yes I can talk to my lead about these topics and potentially also about something that's going wrong and you know nothing bad will happen so this is a great thing to do now one thing I kind of found out myself is you know definitely made this mistake myself ideally don't skip these meetings you know towards the end of project things can get stressful so you know it's easy to say you know let's just not do it right now it's okay I think to have a short meeting but ideally you would keep this

going and this is you know something yeah dad I don't myself also pick a location where you can potentially just discuss sensitive topics so a meeting room in your office is a great place of course you can also go to a nearby coffee shop if you want as long as both of you can feel comfortable you know or don't need to be worried about somebody else just kind of dropping in and potentially overhearing a part of the conversation that that you know they shouldn't hear now one thing that's kind of I think often misunderstood I feel is that what you should talk about in these meetings and it's important that this is not a status update so ideally the core of this conversation should not be about what the task load is and we know when it will be done this can be a starter but you should concentrate on trying to figure out you know career goals can a problem start happening in other things so after try asking questions like you know do you enjoy what you're working on is there something else you want to

would prefer to work on it says something you want to learn where do you want to be in five years you know it's some if there's one thing you could change on the project right now what would that be now of course don't ask Allah these questions and the first meeting you meet with when you meet with your teammate all you're gonna find out is how patient your teammate is at this point so don't do that but it's just to give you some kind of idea of hopefully what you should talk about and you know try to find out and what's really important is to make sure to really listen when you go to these meetings you know don't have this mediator in front of the computer where you can see like even notification popping up every minute or if you have to bring your mobile phone along you know make sure to silence it because the important part is to make sure that you concentrate on this conversation and that you know your teammate can feel varied and important and that's how how it should be because nothing is worse than having kind of a half-assed

conversation where you're just kind of like responding with yeah okay that really chose this respect so don't don't do this and lastly if there's something like an actual actionable item that comes out of this like we should send you the course or we should send you to JCCC make sure to write this down so you don't forget about it and send it to the person you talk to see both kind of have this as a baseline and written down form and it will also help you to kind of later on look at okay what did you what did we talk about in the past what kind of specific actionable things that should happen now one thing that's I think really hard especially if you're new to this role is how to how to deal with expectations and that it's important to set clear expectations because as a new lead you know it can be you can feel like you know who are you or like you know Who am I to tell these people how to do their job yeah I'm not you know I'm so new in this role but

this is not really what it's about it's not about telling people how to do their job it's about letting people know what is important to you and what would frustrate you if not done well because what is really bad would be a situation where you know you get back some kind of task on someone and you look at it and then you say like yeah you know this is good but can you change it according to this rules I never told you and that's very frustrating so ideally don't do that and of course you know try not to go in and change things yourself that will really make you appear like you're micromanager and you know chances are people you know don't wanna you know why should they invest their time if you're just gonna go in and change it anyway so this is really important if you want to you know reduce your frustration so as a programmer it's a specific example if coding standards are really important to you you make sure to let your team know that this is the case because nothing is worse than having some kind of unspoken rules that nobody really knows about okay so one thing

that's also I think really really hard for a lot of units is how to delegate and and to kind of get used to this idea of delegation and I personally found that one way of actually doing this getting used to this kind of in a good way is on the easy way is by having sprint planning meetings and idea here is to get everyone you know and the team into a room and then you first talk about what you did in the previous sprint and kind of you know what kept and what didn't get done you know why I didn't get done and then you talk about what needs to get done for the next sprint and at this point you can invite you know your people on your team to just grab the toss they would prefer to work on and hopefully it is gonna lead to a situation where people on your team are actually pretty happy with the majority of the house now of course there will be stuff that nobody wants to do you know whatever this may be riding an hour get another safe system you I I don't know whatever it is so you still have to deal with that now you could take that task on yourself that's

totally okay if you want to be a nice boss and you want to make sure everyone in your team only is as the tossed a wand but of course you know do remember don't over commit yourself don't say like area I will do all of these things if you just want to be stressed out afterwards so also at this point this is a good place to talk about kind of some of the potential implications that come with these with these tasks you know how will that work this multiplayer will dead bloated you know the texture the texture limit action when we limit stuff like they're just kind of ask probing questions and you know hopefully your experience as an individual contributor will guide you here to kind of ask the relevant questions now one thing that I kind of had to learn over the you know Wow Justin do this is kind of the leg that delegation really goes further further than this it's also it's not just about work distribution it's also about making sure to keep your team involved in the kind of day-to-day kind

of decision making process because it's important to remember that the people on your team are really the domain experts these are the people who are down in the trenches doing extra work they know all the details about whatever it is that you know you grouped us and even you may not know all those details so if it comes to kind of questions about these parts do make sure to keep them to keep them involved in this as well and I certainly you know found this out found us out the hard way and you know you can certainly if you you know start kind of always stepping over people and like not thinking about this you can certainly lead to like hurt feelings and people feeling like either you don't trust them with with answering question or something like that now lastly delegation is also a great great tool for skill development because most people don't really enjoy working on repetitive tasks I don't know about you

but I certainly most happy at work if I'm doing something that's challenging me and I feel like at the end of the day I learned something new and that's true for most people now of course you know one of our meetings are a great way to find out what you know how somebody feels about kind of doing the same thing again over and over again or maybe you know wanting to be challenged and you know it at which point or how much this person wants to be challenged so let's assume for a kind of a made up but specific example let's say you're leading in our team and for the next sprint you have to model an org now you could give this task to one of your senior artists us you know model several Oaks for the you know for last for the last couple of projects and you know this person will get us done in a pretty short amount of time and to the quality level that you expect now but maybe you recently hired a junior artist who has expressed his interest in character modeling in you know one of the one-on-one meetings now if time permits you may actually want to consider giving this task to the

junior artist even though it will take this person probably longer to to get it done and to the kind of will take a couple of iterations to get to the quality level that you want to but it will help this person to develop these skills and that will you know become helpful you know probably will help yourself because later on your team can take on kind of more challenges and it will also help this person because you know as you learned he or she is very excited about it so hopefully this person will be very motivated about it and if you want to get extra point as a lead try pairing up the kind of senior artists in the junior artists study can share experiences you know that will never also help a lot now of course now that the work distribution aspect is then your job SLE eat is not over as a lead you really represent a good team which means you have to know you know what's up and you know what the progress is of everyone in your team not just your own workload and I think this is a point where sometimes this kind of my actual job syndrome can kick in you feel

like you know I distributed work great everybody knows what to do for the next two weeks I'm just gonna like be heads down and write some code or some textures or you know balance some some specialist four units make sure to take some time to stay up-to-date what's going on in your team and there are different ways of doing it I know people who really like reading check in comments and purpose for example to kind of stay up-to-date what's happening there if you have a producer that's walking around in your team who is kind of checking in anyway you know have a coffee with the producer and figure out what's going on this way or of course just walk around yourself and talk to people and this comes us the added benefit that you hopefully hear about potential problems way before they become an actual issue and so that you can do something you know the earliest possible time okay so now I want to talk about a topic that's probably the hardest lesson for most new leads at least that's you know came out of the conversations I had with other leads and

the importance of providing feedback and how to provide feedback and I will talk about both kind of the negative side of things as well as the positive side of things let's start with criticism and as early it's important that that you take this part of your role also seriously because you're responsible for what's going on your team and if something is not going well you have to deal with this you can't just push this out because in my experience problems never go away they just become worse so you know deal with it and this won't be a fun conversation of course you know and this probably not going to be the best day at work but that's okay it's just you have to get used to this let's assume for a second again as a kind of a made-up example is that someone in your team is keeps breaking a build and that's beside the fact that you explained that this will disrupt the entire team or project and you even explained okay the way to avoid this make sure to test all your changes

locally and then check it in but it didn't help this you know you tell that it's still happening now you have to deal with this like you know which don't wait for somebody else to from another team to come and say like hey what's going on you know with this person now one thing you shouldn't do is to walk into this person's work area and start you know criticizing the person right there because if you criticize people in in the kind of in the open and public all that will happen is that this person will end up in the defensive position right because what they're probably mostly concerned about at this point is not to lose respect in front of his or her work colleagues so instead get a meeting room and has a discussion there and at this point you do make sure you know to approach this conversation with empathy there may be things going on this person's life that you're not aware of whatever this may be so don't storm in there and wave your finger and say if you don't stop this you know the next week I will make sure that you get fired that's not a good way to approach that you know if you have a if you have a kid and maybe you're here

from school the kid is not handing in the homework on time you're hopefully not going to storm in your kid's room and say you know what if you don't start handing on your homework I gonna fire you from this family instead you know I hope what you would do is like say you know I heard about this the the issue with the homeworks there you know what's going on as to any way I can help you with this and ideally you want to approach this situation exactly the same way as a team leader as I said earlier one of your responsibilities is to support your team and that means sometimes to make sure to help people who struggle with whatever it may be at this point now you know do make sure to spend find out what's going on you know if you if your team made a trustee with that information and then we're going to plan together like figure out you know these are specific things we can do to not be in a situation anymore then write us down and you know send it set it as a form in form of email to this person you talk to and then of course going forward you know do make sure to check in and see how it's

going and you know ask well first of all you hopefully should see well the situation is improving but also you know do inquire like hey this does plan working for you says something we should change so this is kind of an important aspect now on the other end of the spectrum is also praise and I think sometimes as a here we go it's praise and I think sometimes there's a new lead it's - it's very easy and kind of natural to concentrate on the things that you like to change and you know you like to tell people hey you know don't do it like this don't do it like that and it's way too often on very common that leads will kind of forget - to tell people that they're doing well and to praise them but it's important - to tell your teammates that you know if they're doing a good job that they are doing a good job because most people really want to know how they're doing and hopefully that they're doing well and so just a few little words like hey you know well done or the way you kind of solve this

problem I really like this you're already a long way and unlike with criticism it's totally okay and I would say in fact encouraged to praise people in public because it you know you share kind of this the success with with a wider audience and you know hopefully this will kind of boost team are all so you know if you have a a meeting at work where you're representing your team maybe two entire project make sure to kind of you know mention that hey you know these cool things happen and this is the person who's responsible for that you know hope you know this will make feel make people feel important and that's really an important thing now after hearing all of these things you may think like man this leadership thing it's pretty hard maybe there were a few things I let me think about before and that's true you know adjusting to this role it's pretty tough

and takes a wireless it's not an easy thing to do but it is impossible it is it is not impossible it is possible that would be the weirdest message ever guys sorry thanks for spending an hour with me but it's actually not happening no it is it is definitely possible and you know you can work on these skills and you can adjust to this role even if it right now it seems like you know how am I going to even start getting used to this and you know maybe I already been elite for half a year I haven't done anything it doesn't matter you know start doing some of these things set up one-on-one meetings put in your calendar and whatever it may be I really like this quote from brian schatz talk here at GDC in 2012 when he said that you know when it comes to do ship there's this misconception that comprehension equals mastery when it's clearly not the case you know just because you read all the books or you know seeing all the presentations about leadership by the

way thanks for coming to this presentation doesn't necessarily mean that you're automatically going to be the most also bleeped the next day at work and we'll be able to apply all these things in a German language you have to saying that no master ever fell from the sky meaning that nobody ever like gets all the skills that you know he or she needs overnight and it takes time to learn these things and you know dedication and you know another thing that Brian said in his talk is that practice is really the opposite of hoping so rather than saying oh man I hope I will be like one of those awesome bosses I had in the past the only way to get there is by actually you know working on this and taking a step back think about that this work you know should I say hint on some of my strategies and really this is just the beginning if you're new to this role this is a fantastic time in your career it's really exciting you know some obviously people at your work think that you know you're ready for this and that you have what it takes to fulfill this role but it will take time to kind

of learn this and to kind of flex your leadership muscles and and you know but it is you know being a teammate is a great place to be and it still baffles me to kind of think about at the end of the week you know how much work gets done it is just like such an amazing feeling and really all I talked about today is really just kind of the fundamentals of this it's the most basic things I think you should know about and you know I hope this will help you to hit around granny to hit the ground running and you know it will hopefully make it easier for you then you know then it was for me perhaps and some of the other leads I talked to and unfortunately before I make any more weird things and say weird stuff this is all I have time to talk about so thank you very much for your attention and I'm happy to answer questions

thank you hello hey yeah yeah can you share your thoughts on the role of the leader when things go wrong who should have the blame especially going up to management what not so can you repeat the first part of this question what are your thoughts when things go wrong mm-hmm what is the leaders role well I think first and foremost I think blaming people is to complete oh I should repeat the question what is the role the leader has when things go wrong and think first of all most like blaming people on your team I don't think it's the right approach in fact you know very often what you'll read is something like you know it's a good leader really what you should do is like accept all the blame yourself and then you know share but you know share all the praise and give that out and I think my my personal opinion is that try not to make this an emotional thing like if there's a problem you know try to be as Russian as possible like look you know these things

happened you know well whatever reason this this may be let's try to figure out what what can be done and then you know do everything you can to to kind of solve this problem but I would definitely say like don't go around and you know go to a boss and saying you know it all went wrong because James did it wrong I could have told you and even if that's the case even if James did something wrong I hope they are know James even if that's the case then it's still your responsibility right because what did you do during the day like how did it get to this point that you did notice that this happened so I like this book I actually have it in my resource section let's see if I can get there it's called difficult conversations how to discuss matters that matter most and in this book the author's discuss kind of how to approach these kind of situations from a different angle and to essentially kind of change your way you look at this from kind of a blaming point of view - more like a contribution like how what was my role

in this like how did it get to this point and you will find hopefully that this will actually resolved the problem in a much better way than otherwise okay hi I'm Natalie I wanted to ask about well often when you know team leader then you have a situation where you have people working under you who are much more experienced much more like objectively have more knowledge and I've been there so I'm kind of wondering if you've had any difficult situations around that decision-making that has been hard and if you can share our story about that right right so the question is what do you do if you responsible for people who actually have more work experience in this field than yourself is that correct yeah so actually this is kind of how I started out so when I talked about in the beginning like that was you know my situation where you're kind of really in the spot where you feel like I mean how can I you know Who am I to tell this person who is way more experienced than

me that how to do things I think it's important and you know this is really hard I think what you should do is like you know have a one about meeting and actually be pretty candid and say like you know look I realized that you you know you have way more work experience in this in this field and myself and I'm really new to this role so you know if there's actually anything if you learn from you that would be great to just kind of get to this point where it's hopefully not as awkward anymore and that you kind of feel like you can trust each other and if this person is been around for a long time and perhaps been in the same situation then you know chances are that this person will actually understand what you're talking about so try not to I guess try not to like you know pressure on the carpet but actually bring it up and like talk about this very specifically first of all thanks for the talk that was really amazing thank you um and so my question is more so I'm a game designer and at work we end up being part of donors

right so we're tasks with leading multidisciplinary teams that are more feature focused so I was wondering if you have any insight or best practices or experience that you can share regarding leading multidisciplinary teams right so the question is what to do if you're not just responsible for like a small well like a group of programmers artists but like actually for entire umbrella of people to be quite honest with you my own experience is mostly been focused on leading leading programmers but I think especially in this situation I think what I would do in a situation is to make sure to talk all of the kind of the people on this team to kind of get their opinion on things so you know the senior designer is so artists or whatever to make sure they're gonna solicit their feedback especially about topics that you're not sure about yourself and that you actually have any specific examples with just like mr. hodda answer you know you know bring this up in the open and

say like you I I know that I you know I'm a programmer you know now I'm in charge of artists as well this is something I'm not really I've don't have any experience in but I you know I will try to do my best and you know I do want to learn from you guys I do want to learn how you approach the situation so I don't know I don't think I can give you more like specific practical advice unfortunately and disregard sort of making the transition from peer to lead with when you're sort of faced with a group that still feels you as the peer sort of what it's a rocky transition and you have the the group that's refusing the one-on-ones refusing to like participate in the things you're sort of instituting and how you sort of prepare the relationship or even in a upcoming project just making sure it doesn't you know things are going forward so the question is when you like adjusting to

its role and like people that you now so your teammates it is supposedly responsible for don't recognize you as the leader essentially right or see you as a peer right right continue to see it appear yeah well I think this is actually really hard situation I had talked to some people who have really had problems with it because also you know like friendships were really put under stress because you know you're kind of a different angle and maybe you have to make decisions that you know may somebody else might not feel are on the right way of doing things so it's hard and I think I feel like witty weird give me the same answer three times but I think it's it's really important for these things that usually go unspoken you know that kind of stuff that you like this is so awkward but I know what to know and they I think it's important to okay five minutes okay awesome thank

you it's it's important to bring this up like say have a you know have a one-on-one meeting or you know whatever catch them on the way to the coffee shop it's like you know you know this I notice that you don't want to do the one-on-ones or you the way you communicate with me maybe it's not in the same way or how you should communicate Vista lead and we I realize you know we used to be peers and just is really hard and I'm adjusting to this but I would really appreciate if you know you could you could help me with this and like just make sure that this person understands that which position you are in and you know sometimes even for the people that you responsible for that's also kind of a weird thing to adjust to so so maybe I should shift the generalized answer is make sure for everything that's unspoken you know do make sure to bring this up and that's hard I mean this is not an easy thing to do and it's very uncomfortable very often but I think it will feel much better about it afterwards and I think honestly that's the best thing you can do in this situation Thanks you're welcome hi fantastic

presentation thank you for that so I when a lot of us that are in a lead position are likely experts or past you know have had a lot of experience in our field doing a particular job that we might now be responsible for other people doing so when we are bringing someone in that position will want to train them show them the tools and the things they need to know but on there's there's a point at which I think we each have our personal processes right and how we do it and what worked really well for us and I think there can be a point where our I guess the question is is there a point at which we can be too we can try and push our own processes on someone else too much and then also how to identify that point where what do what do our you know employees need to know to to do what they need to do because my my cure ah City now is like whether to take an approach of all right here's what you're responsible for go for it you know and kind of let them figure it out right so the question is like once you kind of

riding up the hierarchy you get to a point where your own kind of process is so used to this that you perhaps don't realize that other better ways of doing things and like what you know when when do you get to this point and how do you realize that and how do you perhaps deal with this just about right like a summary yeah yeah I want to know when to not have to tell someone now rightly I might do it yeah well I think this will definitely happen and you know it's kind of depends I think sometimes on your team size also ideally you know if you have let's say let's say you're leading some kind of tools team and at some point you were truthfully myself and but now you have people under you I think it's ideally you would keep the people actually working with it on a day-to-day basis involved as well so if you have someone in your team it's like a Senior Programmer make sure to bring him along and like also solicitors question like so you know the way we're doing it

around right now does this make sense or for me my own experience with this perhaps the closest to that is sometimes at least amongst my own experience like when tools specifically don't work very well and but artists are sometimes too shy to bring this up like it can be hard to get to know this point and sometimes it just takes you to go around and kind of realize in our psyche wait what's going on and then like talk about this specific situation like you know I notice you're doing it this way why are you doing this way what is you know something that's broken business process and I'm just trying to be sensitive I think as soon as you start actually being kind of sensitive to this topic and kind of take a step back like you want to think about it I think it will already change your perspective on it and then you know as I said generally like make sure to kind of keep people on your team involved like people are actually working the specific aspects you know make sure to ask their opinion as well and even you know even if it's if you make a decision otherwise they don it's good to have this information

anyway about no yeah yeah though I appreciate it thank you hi pay so I recently started taking up some leadership responsibilities on my job really recently so one of the things that I struggle with that I find really hard is when I'm put on the spot to make a call the decision-making because I can't help having the back of my mind these what if you make the wrong choice and one of your superiors calls that out and say oh actually we don't do that that way we're going to do the opposite so this kind of anxiety or this kind of you know we're gonna have to make a call I guess it just feel fear of failure or you know impostor syndrome or something like that you're having advice for this kind of situation so so the question is that you know while decision-making process is happening kind of handing off some of these kind of decision-making parts to your peers but you kind of wanna you feel like oh you know maybe this person will make the wrong choice is that about kind of like how do you yeah kind of also from the

point of view of still feeling I crave the opposite of the previous question where I still feel kind of a peer by itself so if you like I want someone else to verify what I'm doing is cool okay right okay so first of all just will be the let's do this and make this the last question like with the microphone and if people still want to talk to me I will be around yes this is a really hard thing I think especially as a programmer this takes a while because it it's kind of hard to kind of take your hands off the keyboard and say like okay let's you guys do it I don't you know I trust you it's not I mean the thing is I think just the problem of feeling like you know maybe somebody will make the wrong choice you can get around this by making sure to talk to the people actually worker and this pretty frequently and kind of like you know don't tell you know don't do it in a way way say you know don't do it like this don't do like that but kind of just ask you like hey you know what are you doing what do you what's your approach and then try to take the statements or

like the recommendations that you have and try to put them into questions so you would say oh well okay that's well that's interesting you know but have you thought about this and I try to guide them in a way and if you Judis right it takes a bit I think to get used to but if you do this right you will actually make it make people feel like they arrive to this conclusion completely you know on their own terms which is great this is where you want to be the people feel really empowered but you can also be feel really proud because you know you help them to get there so you know I think trying to just communicate and you know try to find out what's going on and then if something is happening first try to be nice and you know ask questions and if something is really obviously going the wrong direction then you know you may have to say like oh you know what I don't think we should do it like that we should like this because of this and that and this so I try to you know obviously use the experience that you have in this field okay thanks yep that doesn't sound too satisfied then we maybe should talk afterwards

you