Tough Questions to Improve Your Leadership

[Music] hi everybody welcome to tough questions to improve your leadership my name is richard atlas and i'm one of the co-founders of clever endeavor games we're a small studio from montreal of six people we make a game called ultimate chicken horse and so our studio consists of two programmers two artists a community manager and myself so today in 30 minutes i'm going to try to convince every single one of you that you can become a better leader i'm going to try to convince you of that and i'm going to try to give you the tools and motivation more importantly the motivation to do so so the goal here is to inspire you to think about your own situation and ways in which you can improve i'm not going to stand here and tell you what you should do because i don't think i or anyone else has the has the knowledge or the right to tell you that but i'm going to try and poke at certain things that maybe you haven't thought of and hopefully you can reflect on that and improve for yourself so we might be decent leaders good ones or even great ones but i think that we

can be better and there's three ways that i'm going to try and do this today with you guys so by admitting our flaws by talking to other people in our situation and by thinking critically about our practices we can become better leaders for ourselves and for our organizations hopefully that's why you're all here today so the best game development companies oops the best game development companies and the best companies in general are made up of the people who are the best at their craft so my slides aren't showing ooh this one we good yep that looks about right okay so i'm gonna go back [Laughter] admitting our flaws what's that little box there okay admitting our flaws talking to others in our situation and thinking critically about our practices those were the things that i just said so

um the best game development companies and the best companies in general are made up of the people who are the best at their craft so the best artists make the best art the best combat designers design the best combat and the best programmers write the best code um now i'm none of those people and you might not be any of those people either my role involves asking myself the tough questions that i'm about to ask and help make my organization better in the process so regardless of your roles on the team your craft as a leader needs to be creating and maintaining the morale and motivation of the people on your team and by working to become the best you can possibly be at this you give your company and your team the best chance at success so today we're going to talk about roles and relationships interpersonal communication information transfer structure planning and efficiency we're going to talk to each other about the problems that we faced and try to come up with solutions to those problems and you've probably noticed the handout that i've given you i realized i did not print enough of him and did not realize how big this room was but

if not hopefully you can follow along with someone who's next to you who has this and the idea is that on this handout you can jot down some ideas as the questions go along in this talk and so all those questions you'll see on the sheet and at the end there's a bunch of questions that i did not have time to stick into the presentation that i would like you to look at as well so my goal is that everybody in this room leaves with different notes as i said before and notes that pertain to their situation and the places where they can improve thinking about these notes after this talk and likely after gdc is might be the most important part of this talk so hopefully i can inspire you to do that so let's start with a question um first i'm going to ask everybody to stand up please can everybody please stand up thank you so are you your own worst boss sit down if you think that if you were your own employee you would quit based on the hours asked of you the work on weekends the stress imposed on you by by yourself

okay not too many um now sit down if you think that you could realistically manage your time significantly better than you do okay a few more now sit down if you think you could manage your tasks which tasks you're being assigned and how you're prioritizing them better okay now we're getting most of you um and finally this one might take an extra second sit down if you treat your employees better than you treat yourself all right so for the people still standing please hire everybody else around you no i'm kidding um thank you for that for that exercise so this example this question of are you your own worst boss comes from a blog post by the amazing seth godin and it made me think about how much i can learn about management by looking at how i manage myself and the question is how can you expect to be a good leader for others if you can't be if you can't be good for yourself i'm not singling out people who sat down all those guesses most of you um and myself included um

but we all have examples of this and we can all do better according to mr goday there are a few good books on being a good manager if you are still on managing yourself it's hard to think of a more essential thing to learn let's jump into another question how do you let your team know that you're listening to them how do you let your team know that you care about them as human beings as well as professionals how do you know how they're feeling about the work that they're doing their compensation their relationship with other members of the team do they have the space to be open with you about these kind of things either professional problems or personal problems can you think of a time when maybe there was an issue between you and your colleagues or an employer and an employee because there was a lack of this space to communicate so i'm actually going to ask you to talk about this for a second and we're going to do a little a little interactive session so i'm gonna ask you to break into groups of three to four people just turn around to the people next to you and behind you don't need to move much and what i'm gonna do is after a couple minutes i'm gonna ask these groups to

give me a one sentence idea a single sentence idea of how we can make our employees feel more appreciated and heard and empowered so um i'll give an example from clever endeavor games just to get the ball rolling so one of the things that i try to do is one-on-one meetings with everyone on the team the co-founders employees everybody and i ask them how they're feeling about their work how their health is going how they're sleeping and if there's anything i can do to remove roadblocks so my one sentence idea would be one-on-one meetings every few months so i'm gonna ask you guys to get to it and i think there's a timer that might be able to exist there maybe all right two minutes please go alrighty ding ding [Applause] everybody please wrap it up i didn't bring a bell i was supposed to bring a bell that i was gonna ring go ding ding ding ding ding but i didn't so i'm just gonna have to be the bell myself alrighty folks

so i'm gonna ask a couple of groups just at random someone wants to raise their hand i'll ask them to just yell out their one sentence idea that they discussed in their little group and then i'll repeat it back on the mic so we have any volunteers um a company survey every six months companies survey every six months and that is asking people about how things are going like everybody in the company yeah great i try to do something with any piece of feedback okay so using actually using feedback do you have another one i can't really see you guys so sorry great uh one last one on this side um maybe daily reviews or week end of sprint reviews to let people stand up and show that the work that they've done and talk about

awesome so daily reviews where people can showcase their work great good stuff we're going to hop into another question because time is short um but thank you all for that participation so how much cognitive diversity does your team have so cognitive diversity is the measure of how the measure of how different the approaches of problem-solving styles are of the members of your team so for example a new feature is proposed to a team one person might might be hesitant about technical challenges and want to do some research another person might jump in and be like let's build it right now the other person might say well that's going to be really expensive have we considered how much that's going to cost over the long run etc there's an article published by the harvard business review and they found evidence that a team that is not cognitively diverse was shown to perform worse in problem-solving tasks because it was homogeneous in how it homogeneous and how it decided to think about change and

despite um despite this team being mixed in terms of age gender and ethnicity they weren't able to do this problem-solving task as well and this is something that's harder to see than ethnic or gender diversity but is shown in their studies to be critical to success as well so a good exercise to to think about cognitive diversity is this six thinking caps exercise that maybe you might have seen the idea is that um a different thinking cap has a different sort of personality and each people can put on those thinking caps and bring to the discussion the the personality uh or the point of view of that thinking cap so um so the first one the white cap is facts it's just the information that's needed in the discussion the yellow hat is optimism so talks about what kind of positive benefits this uh this new feature or this discussion could have the black hat is caution so it's kind of the devil's advocate of what could go wrong the red hat talks about feelings so they're open to share if they love or hate the idea

and give their hunches or intuition the green hat is creativity so they talk about new oops new possibilities and alternatives and the blue hat is process so the blue hat is the person who keeps the thing on track and makes sure everybody is is speaking according to their role by the way these hats are taken from a game called king of the hat which is made by another montreal team and they're fantastic so check out king of the hat all right next question how much psychological safety does your team have so psychological safety is the feeling that you won't be punished when you make a mistake and that you can be free to speak your mind so google conducted a large large-scale two-year study that looked at what made for the most successful creative teams and psychological safety was one of the five key elements that they landed on and so i'm gonna ask you to do something for me uh you might notice throughout this talk i'm doing lots of little interactive stuff so bear with me um so i'm gonna ask you to close your eyes for a second and i can't see any of your eyes so i can't prove that you're doing it but

please close your eyes um and think about the last design discussion or important team meeting that you may have had try to picture what the room looked like who was in there what kind of chair you're sitting on just to get an idea of what you're seeing now think about how aware you were of the dynamic in that room could there have been someone holding back from saying something because they felt it wasn't their role perhaps imagine the the new design intern who's surrounded by senior designers and they come up with a what they think is a stupid idea how do you think they would feel trying to share that idea this psychological safety is not an easy thing to create you can open your eyes now in case they were closed the psychological safety is not an easy thing to create it's rooted in your company culture in the way you carry yourself as a leader and in every relationship between every person in the room at all times i don't think there's any secret sauce to this and i wouldn't claim to know it if there was but as i mentioned before in the the one-on-ones and as we heard from a few people who gave feedback there are

things you can try to do to make your employees feel more empowered and make your workplace more psychologically safe now on the topic of cognitive diversity that we just talked about and psychological safety there was another harvard business review which a study which combines these ideas of cognitive diversity and psychological safety so you'll see this little chart here that is currently empty you actually have one on your handout as well so in the bottom left quadrant of this chart we have an area of low cognitive diversity and low psychological safety so teams don't feel super safe to express themselves or members of the team and there isn't a lot of diversity of thought these people these groups tend to be defensive or conforming in the top left quadrant we have high diversity of thought but low psychological safety so people have very different ways of approaching problems but aren't necessarily comfortable sharing those so this can lead teams to be oppositional or or too cautious or

resistant in the bottom right quadrant we have a team that's easy to express itself and but somewhat homogeneous in the way that it solves problems so these kind of teams might end up being very uniform now the goal at least according to this study is to end up in this top right quadrant which is high psychological safety and high cognitive diversity so this kind of this kind of atmosphere makes for generative curious and experimental teams now the question to you i'm going to take away the good ones so you don't associate with them the question to you is to think about some of these adjectives and think about where your team might lie on this chart in terms of cognitive diversity and psychological safety if you're using the handout you can feel free to just put an x there and think about that later otherwise you can just kind of mentally note down some of these adjectives and think of maybe a time when your team performed as as one of these adjectives describes in a negative way

so the truth of the matter is that you already have some degree of cognitive diversity on your team but are you making the most of the cognitive diversity you have you also likely have some psychological safety and you might be well on your way to becoming a team that exists in that top right quadrant that we just saw by encouraging people to solve problems in different ways by welcoming new approaches to how we take in and process information and by being open to responding in new ways to problems we can encourage this cognitive diversity and create a psychologically safe environment now a large part of this responsibility lies on you the leader to think critically about these issues and to promote a culture an environment in which this diversity and the safety can thrive and in fact we've already thought of some ways we can do that in the interactive talk that we did so we're about halfway through and where have we gotten so far so far today we've admitted our flaws as we saw with the standing and sitting exercise we've talked to others in our situation as we

saw with the little group discussions and we thought critically about our practices as we saw with the cognitive diversity and psychological safety so now i'm going to throw more questions at you and the rest of the talk is made up of these questions that can be approached with these three tools in mind admitting our flaws discussion with others and critical thought these questions are about you but your organization and about how you can help improve your organization um i opted not to categorize them because they're all interrelated and they involve all sorts of things ego confidence trust social awareness blame all sorts of things and there's no right answer to any of these questions but hopefully i can inspire you to think about the answers yourself so the first question are you the rock not dwayne johnson although that would be awesome um but are you that static immovable force that doesn't sway in the face of opposition so imagine the ceo that comes into the meeting with a big smile and the day after the game launched with crappy reviews and speaks calmly and says you

know we're going to bounce back from this and even though we didn't get funding for our next project it's okay and even though money's tight everything's gonna be okay um and now on the opposite side imagine the ceo who comes in big bags under their eyes they've just been up all night answering angry reviews or bad reviews and they've been preparing a pitch for the next project because they need to have it ready for 8 a.m tomorrow and they slump down in their chair and they say all right let's talk about the game um so maybe there's something in between these two things though so the great professor of social work and researcher brene brown if you haven't heard of her please check her out she's fantastic talks about vulnerability as being a key factor in being a good leader so according to her vulnerability is uncertainty risk and emotional exposure and a good leader walks into these with confidence so imagine that same that same ceo walking into the room and saying look folks we know that the game got bad reviews and it stresses me out too but let's look at why that was let's see

what we can do better on our next project and money is going to be tight because our next game wasn't funded yet but if we can be more communicative when we're when our deadlines are starting to slip we can make it we can get through this together there's nothing shameful about coming into a meeting and admitting that you don't know the answer to a problem so maybe being vulnerable doesn't mean being an emotional mess and maybe you don't need to be the rock maybe you do i'll leave that to you to ponder do you fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy so the sunk cost fallacy is the idea that people continue with a behavior or project because of an emotional or a financial investment they've made in it and this is related to the loss of version the idea that people are less likely to are more likely to avoid loss than they are to seek gain and to me this is one of the most dangerous things in game development and it's one of the things i see absolutely all over the place people will work eight months on a project and it's not quite where it needs to be

and then they'll say well you know it's only another eight months of development and we're already halfway through so we might as well might as well stick it out and continue this and then it's game development so 16 24 months later the game comes out and it fails and nobody's even surprised the the team that made it is like well it was doomed to fail eight months through um and they should have killed it earlier but because of the sunk cost fallacy they thought they had already put so much into it that they couldn't do that next question do you do things based on your role and not your knowledge or expertise so a personal example here i've made calls about project management about scheduling and when our game actually launched i kind of decided when the game was going to launch without having the right information about the fact that there were features that were behind where they needed to be and i caused a ton of stress on the team now i did this because i thought it was my role and that was my job but i didn't have the information that i needed do you ignore statistics because you think you're different

so david dunning of the dunning-kruger effect you might know has shown in studies that and i'm going to paraphrase a little bit but basically everyone thinks they're better than they are always um now especially in the case of project planning this is something that is that is a serious um serious flaw so i'm going to give you a fake example because i don't know anything about making mmos but most mmos let's say would take four years to make um but our team is going to be able to do it in two because those other teams had to switch game engines halfway through development and you know we're happy with our game engine and they had two senior programmers leave six months before launch but you know our team's happy we do one-on-ones everybody seems happy right so this is dangerous as you might be able to tell here's another question do you reward extroversion over introversion so raise your hand if you consider yourself an extrovert okay now raise your hand keep your hand

up please raise your hand if you think that you're more extroverted than the average person on your team all right looks like we have a lot of introverts so um and most of you lead teams and you realize that even as a team leader who one might think would typically be extroverted there are a ton of introverts and the the power of introversion or the power of creativity interversion is something that should not be um squashed down in favor of extroversion now there's a great talk ted talk by susan kane about the power of introversion in creativity to give some examples that some of the some introverts that are some of the most creative minds in in history and i want to give you an example of a case in game development where maybe we'll reward extroversion over introversion not even consciously so brainstorm meetings are a great example of this they're an easy time for an extrovert and a terrible time for an introvert according to kane groups famously follow the opinions of the most dominant or charismatic person

in the room even though there's zero correlation between the best talker and having the best ideas this is something you probably know but this is also something that you might not realize in a meeting setting that maybe the louder voice is being heard more so at clever endeavor one of the things we try to do is we try to come up with solutions separately before we come come to a design discussion or a meeting about something so we'll a problem will come up and then we will go off on our own write things down and then we'll bring up that list when we have when we actually come to talk about it it's not a perfect solution but it's we try to counteract that that somewhat natural tendency so what works for companies around you take project management for example what are other teams doing successfully now i was actually going to ask you to swap sheets with a person next to you i realize not everybody has a sheet so give your sheet to someone who who is not you and write down i'm going to ask you to write down a one sentence idea of something in project management

that your team does that you find useful so it can be anything a tip a trick or quirk or anything just something that you find interesting so if you guys can do that right on someone else's paper something and then they will be able to bring that home i'll give you about 50 seconds go or you can just tell it to the person next to you that works too [Applause] [Applause] oh

[Applause] so should really get an actual bell next time everybody please pay attention hello this is not working there you go thank you appreciate that alrighty so um next question do you feel the space in meetings and if you didn't who would so i'm not great at this i will often ask a question and there's this awkward silence and

and i feel that silence and i sometimes often will answer the the question that i've asked with my own opinion the goal is not to try to convince everybody to think like me it's simply just to fill the space but what i noticed is that when i stopped doing that when i actively stopped doing that someone else fills the space obviously and it might be someone who doesn't often speak up in in meetings or in discussions this can be a very powerful thing to try especially if you like myself have found yourself filling the space when there's some empty space lastly where do you want to be in two years or five years or 10 years does everybody on the team know where you want to be personally do you know where everybody else on the team wants to be in their professional development personally either with your studio or not so i'm going to ask you if you're using the handout to write down the name of three people that you work with it doesn't have to be the closest people to you just any three people if you're not using the handout just try to think mentally of three people that you that

you work with get those in your head i know the three they're right there so think about one of those names pick one of those names at random and think about where that person wants to be in two years do you know where they want to be what they want to be doing what their ideal job or job title is this is something that can be quite important because it can help to steer where you're where your company's going and how you interact with that person how you treat them the kind of tasks you might assign to them if you're assigning tasks or the kind of work you might share with them now i can tell you where i'd like to be in that time i'd like to be doing creative and fun work in a studio that has a great culture that i've helped to nourish and to cultivate by being aware that that i can improve and from critical analysis and from talking to the people around me i like everybody else in this room can become a better leader and hey if there's any place in the world to do that it's right here and now at gdc surrounded by all these creative minds so i'm going to leave you with a call to

action please take some time to consider what was talked about today and keep striving to be more than just the status quo be the best at your craft and be the best leader that you can possibly be your organization can and will be cognitively diverse psychologically safe creative innovative and successful it's just up to you to make that happen thank you