We Need to Talk About Games Leadership

[Music] thanks so much for coming along hello uh this is my first ever GDC so I'm really excited to be here thank you um but I am going to try and keep all that excitement bottled up for just a little bit to talk you through games leadership and today's talk is titled we need to talk about games leadership which sounds quite Stern because it is we really do need to talk about it and never when launching a company called games leadership back in 2022 could I have predicted how much we were going to be talking about this and how much more needs to be said and done in regards to long-term sustainability for the games industry and let's face it it has been one hell of a year

and when we talk about leadership there are so many different places that I could go just the word leadership itself might conjure up some very strong feelings or images for you and a lot of the beliefs that we have around leadership can be connected to the different experiences good and bad that we've had not just from our interactions within the games industry but all the way back throughout our own lifetimes we are constantly changing Ing and growing and shaping who we are as people and alongside that comes learnings and mistakes that change how we approach and see things so our ideas around leadership can also change and what I thought I was doing right previously might now not feel so good when I was a kid there was a big Trend in something called Magic Step Shoes and maybe you remember these not

all of you might remember these but I definitely did um these were shoes for kids that came with a key that unlocked the soul of the shoe to reveal a secret Hidden Gem and as you can imagine as kids we went wild for these but it very much created this ingroup outgroup situation at my school where you were only cool if you had a pair so of course from a mixture of peer pressure and some very clever daytime TV advertising I started to pester my mom because I too wanted to be cool because cool meant power and Power in the playground was key I wanted not just to fit in but to have that level of I have something you don't have that status was going to validate both my selfworth but also allow me to feel a sense of belonging amongst my peers

because these were important shoes for important people and I wanted that and my mom seeing this also wanted me to feel confident and Powerful so of course she relented and finally I got my own pair of magic step shoes and two learnings hit me at that moment in my life the first was that I was not surprisingly instantly cooler to my peers it didn't fix anything of what was going on there that was a whole other problem but my second learning was a lot deeper and it changed it started to create this change in my younger self and how I viewed the world because the shoes came with a hidden booklet that I hadn't anticipated and the booklet said something along the lines of you have been entrusted with a great secret and these are magic shoes but you must

protect the secret and so because I was a very rule bound child I did just that I took the responsibility of the shoes so seriously that when I went to school wearing them I never told another child nobody ever knew and of course I very quickly lost the key that opened the Magic Gem because children and keys are not a great mix and so then I was just walking around with shoes on knowing that there was a secret inside of them but now they were just shoes and this moment had a profound effect on me because I learned that getting what I wanted hadn't solved the problem and instead it had opened up a whole load more choices and in my opinion ethical decisions that I hadn't been aware of before and instead of power and belonging I'd felt responsibility

the shoes came with this hidden agreement that to wear them meant to hide and protect the secret and this went against the image in my head that I had of flaunting them around the playground and yet I'd also watched some kids that had done just that and used it to create these in-group outgroup spaces which has wielded them even more power and that suddenly felt really uncomfortable to me so I felt like power had been misused and some of us been misusing power and some of us now were just wearing shoes and obviously I didn't reason it exactly like this I was only seven or eight at the time but even then I was able to formulate that something was happening in this situation something felt off about getting power in this way I'd had an understanding a learning in that moment about how the world works and the biggest learning was that there were choices that you had to make in order to interact with it

and there's a lot to be said about these moments in our lives that have impact on us in this way and I'll touch back on this later I promise that my talk isn't all about shoes and my childhood uh but perhaps you've got similar examples of relatively small moments in your life that have unlocked a deeper meaning and understanding for yourselves uh but before we begin let's just have a quick look at today's plan I'm going to give you an intro into who I am and what I do and then we're to talk about power and why it's so important for us to begin to talk more about it which will then lead into why it's so important for us to talk about power in context of the games industry and then I'm going to give some insight into how we move forward with some of the challenges that are going to come out of this and I'll bring in some of the findings that we're seeing within the work that I'm doing within games leadership and finally I'll try and wrap all of that together in regards to what it means for you whether you're in a leadership role or

not and do please stick around to the end um I'm going to be giving you some access to free resources so that if you are interested in learning more about games leadership then you can do so and here are a few takeaways that I promis GDC that I would deliver over the next 30 or 40 minutes lots of things to get you thinking more about leadership in the games industry so what is power and how does it show itself in games what power and choices do you have what's the challenge for leadership in regards to senior Talent how do we grow leaders and retain them and then how are we going to move forwards with healthier practices and not all of these takeaways for today are created equal there are some promises here that I'm trying to cram into this talk um but if I was to ask you to focus and prioritize on just one of those then it would be what is your power and what choices are available to you in 2024 so forget what the world is doing right now cuz it's

pretty grim and forget whether you have something stopping you or you feel like you're being stopped or restricted from doing something and whether you're in a leadership role or not whether you're in employment or not don't worry about those details at the very least I just want you to focus on who you are and what impact you can have perhaps on this industry perhaps on something else it doesn't matter and by the end of the talk I'd love for you to take away something from that starting to form ideas even if it's just baby steps as to what you might be doing differently following this what might you get more curious about in regards to your own power and where you are right now so before we jump into that good time to tell you who I am and why I might be talking to you about these things so my name is Melissa Phillips and I'm the director of both the games leadership Network which is a nonprofit organization and the games Leadership Academy which is a leadership training coaching and course provider dedicated

to the games industry and I'm a psychologist and a certified coach who has been working in games now for over 10 years mainly in operations uh but I'm still making games today so even though my business is about leadership training I'm still very much in the trenches and working with Studios to help set up processes creating strategies for more future focused sustainability and of course helping support with people management and development and back in 22 I founded the games leadership Network cic which is a nonprofit organization that looks to offer free coaching and support for game developers in regards to leadership and we currently have two main programs running uh the change makers so this is for those already in a leadership position who have the potential to be able to make changes instantly within their organization and then we also have the emerging leaders for those who are

interested in or hoping to move into or very new to a leadership role and this also tends to cover more marginalized groups those that not yet had the opportunity to take in a leadership role and as a company we spent 2023 engaging with leaders from all over the world we're a UK company but we're not limited to where we offer this support and I'm super proud of what we achieved so in the last year we supported over 90 Developers from over 75 different Studios all over the world and whilst there are obvious cultural differences and every studio is unique we unsurprisingly found that a lot of games industry leaders and the challenges that they're facing from are coming from the same space so there are definite themes and patterns emerging in this area and so we're exploring all of that both within our Academy courses but also continuing to work with the games

leadership Network to really start to deeper dive into what best practice actually looks like and I'll come back to this again with some sign posting for anyone that wants to get more involved and ways to help out at the end I'm going to keep moving us forward so let's talk about power and I thought a lot about how I wanted to position this talk today because it's super easy for me or anyone else to take a side when it comes to power I could come in and be very angry everything that we're experiencing right now in terms of survive till 2025 can easily be written as being the fault of rotten leadership but that also ignores those that I do see fighting and doing good work in this space and as a coach as a psychologist I'm curious about leadership and I believe that people are

interesting so I choose to work with people on a very individual level and what I notice when I'm asked to speak about leadership is that often people just want to hear the bad stuff which is normal right like we gravitate towards more shocking stories it's more exciting but once that's died down we tend to move on to the next one so we have this endless cycle of getting angry about bad leadership and as a result not talking about games leadership any further than that we're not trying to understand what's happening why how and more importantly whether we can change it we're just getting mad and sometimes the big feelings that I have about power force me to take aside we can't always have the luxury to sit on the fence but that in itself I think is confusing so sometimes I'm really angry

about the injustices that exist because of power I'll hear stories from my friends about their experiences in the misuse of power and I am ready to take up arms but at the same time I can feel sad about why a person might actually be acting that way I can feel frustrated with a person who makes the wrong choice and ultimately misuses their own power and I'm also not perfect we often like to think of ourselves as is operating outside of this right or wrong measure but have I made mistakes or decisions that have affected people around me sure so what I'm trying to get at is that we often view this idea of power or leadership in terms of bad or good and we bring our own set of values and judgments when deciding what we think are best practices and we're very quick to blame or criticize when we view bad leadership and often less practiced that applying those criticisms to ourselves

or the people that we like and so all of this can complicate a discussion around leadership because that means when we talk about bad leadership in the games industry we can be referring to everything from this person did an illegal thing and belongs in jail to this person made me feel a little bit weird and both of those feelings are valid in discussion around leadership but we often don't acknowledge the sliding scale and the complexities involved two people can also commit the same bad leadership decision and one can remain in the industry without any recourse and the other is cancelled so it's complicated and as I hinted at early earlier we can also tend to overlook good leadership um I'm in operations so one of the measures for success in my role is often that everything just works

how it's meant to and you might not notice how good it's been until something goes horribly wrong so shout out to operations production QA code and any of those who are desperately sticking things together in the background so we know power is complicated but what does this mean for the games industry how are these structures affecting how we make games and I'm going to get a bit controversial and challenged the idea that we've spent a lot of time investing in just trying to sustain the games industry and its leadership at its current level keeping the status quo we know we have a leadership problem and we struggle to upskill people into leadership roles we struggle to retain senior talent in our Studios and often in the industry in general we know a large number of our Workforce tend to leave games altogether the longer they've stayed and I'm going to challenge that

this has created a want to sustain and just keep things running as they are and because of that we've created structures that are in fact damaging to us and have locked us in place so this repetition of churning through Studios and more importantly people hasn't really been benefiting us or at least not most of us and we've used excuses that we are a young industry to explain why we yet to find solid Studio models and practices and sustaining the industry as it is has led us into what is happening now we haven't questioned enough we haven't learned from the mistakes that have been made and we haven't shared the practices that did work out and what we did get right so that others have the opportunity to learn from that we've allowed power to remain small and we've passed it around as though it was a currency allowing success only for those in the chosen in group or wearing the magic

shoes so my challenge is that instead of focusing on sustainability what we should be looking at more are areas of regeneration and traditionally sustainability is about reducing harm regeneration is about finding Innovative practices that can help restore systems in healthier ways finding new ways of leading and working trying out new structures and ultimately not being afraid to address the mistakes we are making and I don't think we can get sustainability in the industry until we've allowed for regeneration some of the beliefs that we are carrying have to die off first so how do we focus more on regeneration for our leadership practices and I want to draw attention to some of the results within our program at the games leadership Network that focus on the changes that our participants have made so we ask participants right at the start of the

program what they think they need the most help with um within leadership and unsurprisingly most report I just need leadership skills just give me leadership skills and I'm good I'll be a better leader and then we ask them again at the end of the course where they feel the biggest changes have taken place and what's important to them going forwards and what is interesting from this is that we can see that what they report Chang ever so slightly so we still see the importance of leadership skills in our top five categories however we start to see this emergence of self-confidence uh being able to deal with anxiety better and also the need to make changes within their own lives that are improving them at their work experience um and they're reporting that all of these things together are actually making them a better leader overall and I think that's really interesting that's the only the start

really of our areas of research around this and we're still looking at it as a nonprofit um and what I have to ask when faced with these results is what changed during this process what are these participants experiencing that caused them to then start to prioritize other things and make changes in their approach to their leadership and we can't be sure because we need to test this further uh but as a psychologist I reckon it's highly likely that we've allowed for more awareness and curiosity and self-reflection to come through and all of these things that we are know are important in creating the right environment for change to happen and as a result we're seeing individual leaders start to make choices and Challenge and change their previous leadership behaviors and a phrase that I hear a lot and often thrown around within the leadership space is impostor syndrome and I want to explore this a little with

you just as an example as to how our beliefs can change and affect our leadership practices so firstly this isn't a term that I like to use very often but it's one that people are most familiar with and instantly understand when you say these words so impostor syndrome is the idea that we're not enough that we must hold ourselves back from exploring new opportunities in case people laugh at us and I use this as an example as it's often the thing that people really want to change when they come to see me for leadership coaching it's uh really getting in the way of their progress and they put a lot of emphasis on how much this is holding them back and I think I see imposter syndrome slightly different to most people um because my understanding when people use this phrase what I hear is that they're generally referring to finding themselves in a high value situation but with a low sense of self-worth so there's a mismatch of energy of I understand how important it is for me to do this and perform well

but I'm constantly doubting if I can and we've all been there right we all know this feeling and if I bring this into the context of the games industry it makes so much sense as to why a lot of us are feeling this way high value situation low sense of self-worth there are so many things in the game making process that we as a collective group could just link to the potential to cause imposter syndrome I think about the lack of senior Talent Pathways uh sometimes the lack of any senior Talent on a project at all I think of the spaces where I see people leading with fear uh this often comes with high value situations and and then that opens up more specific examples and these are all nuanced and not every leader will obviously fit into these categories but again if we think of high value situations low sense of self-worth when where do we tend to see examples of this and I've given you three so we've got new leaders makes total sense trying something new for the first time not knowing if it's going to work or if it's right thing to do that makes us

massively anxious and then we've got what I like to call reluctant leaders who didn't ever want to be in a leadership position but have agreed to try because nobody else wanted to or that they were the most senior on the project and by proxy someone had to do it and these people can often be scared to annoy the team that they've grown with and that they love uh they don't want to be seen as too authoritative or might be rejective of any leadership responsibilities because they're not even used to that and then we have have ego leaders who perhaps have something to prove maybe highly unconscious low empathy but also low self-awareness and this often comes with high levels of paranoia or maybe secret anxiety terrified that they might be exposed for not having all the answers and again of course I'm generalizing there are a huge number of different examples that I could give you here where the term impostor syndrome might present itself in games I'm just starting to connect the dots so it's not surprising that we have people who are for the first time

finding themselves needing to take on more leadership responsibilities but as an industry we don't have a great history of recording and sharing that knowledge for them so we find ourselves in these high value situations with low sense of self-worth doubting ourselves as to whether we can do this because likely we've not seen anyone else do this before or we haven't seen it modeled brilliantly in our peers and we're only really just starting to get like our first retirees in the industry how many retirees do you know from games very few um and again making games and building teams was super different for them when they started it's changed so much so passing this baton of games leadership knowledge becomes even more complex and this isn't to shame anybody by the way um if you do recognize yourself in any of those examples then know that it is perfectly normal and again I just ask you to think of those

feelings and bring you back to like being aware of your own power and the choices that are available to you right now so why aren't we talking about games leadership well uh we absolutely are it's just that often we're focused on how to sustain rather than regenerate we've become used to accepting things like impostor syndrome as being part of our daily lives these that are expected and sometimes shameful so we don't talk about them publicly and Leadership is often in a hidden space where often they think they need to show strength we rarely hear from our peers about how they're feeling or messing up and we only tend to show our wins and not our losses and as a result we're not changing our Power Systems we're going to keep the status quo we're not rewarding learning or exploring in this space and it's become

about survival more recently those that can tough it out the longest and that comes back to a space of fear creating scarcity unsustainability and in my opinion more unimaginative Studios and ways of working so how do we start to change this what does regeneration look like in the games industry it's about creating balance we've seen a huge amount of toxicity in games especially in the last year and everyone in this room will have a story and I will guarantee you about how not to make games of that person who did it wrong and if we lined all of these stories up to compare we'd likely see that sliding scale again of generally weird Behavior to Absolute criminal toxicity and we're going to spend a lot of time being mad about this and rightly so but my work in games leader ship is teaching me that we have to start to

become more curious about these moments and that's not going to be easy we're going to have to start to explore and understand which structures we've been allowing for these bad behaviors to appear and fester and cause harm we'll need to be able to identify them and be loud about proposing alternative Solutions and some of us might be uncomfortable with that and that said there are things that can be done instantly embracing change in our organizations that we all know is needed and well overdue and you'll know what I'm talking about here it's the practices that make you feel uncomfortable right now but you've done nothing or feel like there's nothing that can be done about it or that might feel like a lot of work to solve and the irony is that a lot of these things that we put off and procrastinate on can actually be fixed relatively easily so I'm thinking of things like exploring flexible working equal pay opportunity ities providing clear roles and responsibilities for

your employees budgeting for your next game to include more holiday time support maybe maternity paternity leave and these are things that I see creative leaders sometimes ignore purely because they don't think they know enough about it and it's one of those things that if we admit we aren't experts in that area then we might realize that we're not doing enough but it's surprising how some of these things are so easy to fix and then there's some changes that are going to be more nuanced and it's going to come down to the individual needs of people making games so this really requires more input and a deeper more empathetic understanding so for example I can tell you we need to fix crunch culture in your studio and you know that that's bad and we can all get your team together and agree not to do it anymore and yet 6 months later your team is still crunching and when this happens we're like oh yeah

that's bad but we don't know how to solve it and often sometimes for leadership purposes it's not always a bad thing people pouring their whole life into making the product for us there are worse things that we should be dealing with so this is what I'm talking about this is where I'm saying we're starting to have to take responsibility and thinking about people the power dynamics that we've created and why and how they should change and it's complicated it's more than just writing a policy this is where regeneration has to happen so that we can create more sustainable processes it's not just creating change it's creating and maintaining long-lasting change that becomes routine that becomes practice bear with me a moment I'm just going to take a sip

so finding this balance for our studio feels intimidating and a lot which is why leaders will have to start to implement something but they often give up when they don't see that it's lasting so I want to share this attitude that I take when I'm trying to allow for something new to come in and I do a talk that's just titled people are weird and then in Brackets and that's okay and this is the idea that sometimes just being part of an existing team whether that's games or any other industry you have to get comfy with working with others and other people are freaking weird and I include myself in that by the way I'm weird you're weird we are all super weird and at some point are going to do some weird stuff and that's just part of Being Human we're going to have bad days we have triggers we carry baggage probably more than some of us need to and we're also not always in

control about how we're going to react to things or what those things are that we're going to react to and mostly that's okay that's just part of humans living and working together and part of leadership is accepting that I'm going to set a team a task and sometimes they're going to go about those tasks in a way that was different to what I was expecting and it's at that moment that I'm faced with a choice and you'll notice that I'm all about choices because often we forget that we have a choice in those moments and the choice is how I'm going to respond to that and how I will respond will depend on many different factors it might be that my experience tells me hey we're doing it this way okay but I know that that's not going to work because I've tried it a million times before and I promise you this way is better I might respond being more Curious oh we're doing it this way why this way why might happen if we do it this way or if maybe I'm not feeling so

confident in my leadership skills I might get nervous I might start looking to someone else to lead and I might not challenge that we're doing it in a different way that's expected and I might get defensive or start getting angry that we're not doing it in the way that I said and how I respond is usually about me how secure I'm feeling both in my job but also in myself and you can see from just those simple examples how quickly that issue of the team doing something I wasn't expecting can either be rectified or become super sour good leadership is also hard to maintain if we go back to that idea of balance and that people are weird and flawed and that's okay that also applies to our leaders they're not going to get it right every time but depending on who they are will dictate as to both how their studio and they respond to those things and results from our first year

of games leadership Network suggested that people found it hard to express what leadership skills actually look like and when we talk about wanting to improve our leadership skills that often what we need is help with our selfworth our confidence our own anxieties so what does all of this mean for you it cannot be a coincidence that in every industry I work in whether that be Psych ology coaching HR or game operations then they all have this idea of the master or the expert in the field and for each of those the expert or Master practitioner isn't considered to be the person who is just best at a certain thing but instead a person who can wield Knowledge from many different areas of their craft in order to kind of create a best chance approach for those around them to succeed so number one one stop putting so much pressure on

yourself we need to start to be open to the fact that leadership isn't about perfection it's about taking pieces of information about ourselves our team the game we are making and applying that knowledge to create something that is flawed but at worst good enough to build upon it's easy to view power as something that is constantly accumulating within our care careers but I also just want to draw attention to darker keltner's the power Paradox now the power Paradox states that power is not constantly growing it can actually be lost more easily than it is gained and the power Paradox also states that as one grows in power we also naturally seem to lose empathy so unless we're consciously aware and taking steps to hold power responsibly then almost everyone who is consistently rising in power is likely to fall and have it removed

from them and we sometimes call this Karma but it's important to note that it's a genuine phenomenon that people are studying so there's this balance to be had and sought if we want to have good use of power and also maintain our positions within leadership lots of people think it's just about getting there once I own my own studio it'll be fine because I'll make the rules nope that just starts another fun cycle of learning and noticing and trying to figure out what the new possibilities are that are unfolding around you so I think back to my magic step princess shoes and I wanted them to feel powerful and fit in but once I learned the magic was a secret how I wanted to wield those shoes changed and nobody taught me that my 8-year-old self made a choice with the new knowledge that had become available to her and that's kind of how we learn

and I think that's how we grow as Leaders as well we start to accept that leadership is more about discovering what we didn't know before and then making choices around that new information that has arrived so we've come full circle and I just want to bring us back to this question which is what is your power and what choices are available to you now in 2024 and when I'm coaching I often challenge people to think of the laziest response to these questions we often set ourselves massive sometimes impossible goals so I want you to do the opposite here I want you to think of the smallest laziest step that you can take right now in terms of actioning some of the choices available to you this year what do you want what do you need and then what will you do and before I leave you I just want to sign post how you can get more involved with some of the different spaces that

I'm working with in games leadership so and also where you can pick up our free resources so first up uh you can purchase courses coaching and Leadership training directly from games Leadership Academy and I run regular Discovery sessions around the different topics available so please do sign up to the newsletter and we'll keep you updated on those there will also be an executive leadership course and a more General framework for games leadership coming later this year so we cover groups but also individual learning so everyone is welcome and then we also have a heavily subsidized and free options via the nonprofit organization which is the games leadership Network and this is designed really to help support those who need us when they really need us uh we're currently looking for sponsorship and Partnerships as we're really Keen to make sure that that remains accessible to the industry as possible and you can donate to us directly but also please do get in touch if you're an organ ganization that might be able to do more with us and then these two companies have

come together to offer a completely free CPD course around an introduction to games leadership this is an open resource available to everyone to come and just learn more about leadership in general and start to get ideas about how we can better recognize power structures and create healthier change so you can sign up and take the first part of that course now which is titled a history of leadership and it comes with a free certification and work workbook um we've just launched the course actually this week for GDC so please do use the QR code and check out the website to sign up for that uh I would very much welcome your thoughts and feedback on how else we might be better to support this community very keen so this is brand new please send us your feedback uh so that brings us to the very end so please do keep in touch myself and my colleague Dan will be around after this venue um for if people want to stay in chat and find out a bit more about what we do but I'm also happy

to answer any questions if they have anyone now and uh thank you for coming along and I hope to see you [Applause] soon so if you have a question please let me know I'll be out the front um or we can do it on a a have we got a floating mic hi yeah got a floating mic going around any questions can't see I did have a question hi over here hi is there a mic I'll just talk at you it's all right you're probably blinded by the lights um I was curious if you had tracked any metrics to um so you're you're saying the the leaders you're training have these positive reports are you try are you tracking any metrics with like um improved employee morale

imp improved employee productivity improved employee retention um right not yet is the answer so we ran our first cohort uh last year we would love to work with uh an individual Studio that would like to test those things and and allow us kind of access to to measure because those things are difficult to measure right um if I'm a leader am I very good at spotting whether or not I am a good lead leader or not uh that relies on the rest of the team to actually feedback and as we know from sort of 360 reporting that needs to have a good sense of psychological safety in order to do that so it is difficult but I'd be very up for the challenge of working with a specific Studio to find out more about it okay thanks hello okay I have about 50 questions right now but I'll just narrow it down to one for right now so I'm assuming a lot of us in here have

leadership at our Studios um how would we go about maybe exposing the bad leadership that is happening at our companies and how would we approach that with the leads that we work with directly every single day and then maybe leads in other departments how would we approach that will we like send them your link and hope that they don't get a or how do we go about that I mean yes I'm more than happy to talk to anybody that has uh any questions about that about their specific workplace environment um my answer is always for those not in leadership positions to proceed with caution and you know again that comes down to psychological safety um I'm a big advocate for you know sometimes we have to know when we can or can't change something um and if we have the power to change something we absolutely should go about that but it's also not a failing if you realize that you want to change something and you can't um sometimes we have to walk away from those spaces as well so um I advocate for making change in a safe way uh I think the safest ways to

make change within a studio is to have leadership on board with that uh and take a topown approach i' I've very rarely seen something come into a studio that creates change that doesn't have the backing of of its leadership um and often when change is wanted within a studio it starts from the ground up uh so kind of games leadership is about how do we get everybody in that space and try and talk about awareness um in terms of bringing bad leadership up um again it's it's so personal and so unique depending on the studio that you're in so um in terms of good practice I would have that conversation if you feel like you are able to sit in a room and have that conversation with leadership of like hey I've noticed these things how do we feel about that um there are ways in which we can have better conversations um if I talk about things like man we we do workshops for example on managing managers or manag in upwards um and it very much depends on the

awareness and consciousness of of those in those leadership roles um it's difficult is the answer but I'm more than happy to talk to you outside of this about it gotcha all right thank you um hi so I guess my question is a little bit similar to um his but maybe you'll have a more specific answer who knows um how would you go if you're a simple employee dealing with feeling that your manager is on the type that you described that was um lacking self-confident basically you you see they're making decisions based on fear of the unknown rather than and is there a way as an employee not to call them out but to work in a way that would be more productive with them and try and push them in the right direction maybe absolutely so I use the analogy of a cooking pot for the studios that we work in um there's a big cooking pot in the middle and we're all bringing ingredients to this cooking pot um I'm

bringing cheese and maybe you're bringing chocolate um I'm also bringing coal and dirt and we're putting it all in this pot and we're going M it's going to taste delicious and then we're tasting it it's like I don't know why it doesn't taste delicious um but none of us is saying it doesn't taste delicious we're just kind of eating this shitty soup going great um and actually some of the biggest ways to create change is actually to have a conversation about that like hey guys I'm bringing dirt uh how do I I was going to put it around the pot but I put it in the pot so it's how do we get that conversation um and what I'm actually talking about here is not ingredients I'm talking about values um and every time that I see a situation in which there is friction within a studio often it's about more minor things it's less about doing wrong or being bad at leading and more about noticing what that person is valuing so for example Le uh I am rule bound I like

I value keeping time I value turning up when you said you would do something and actioning the action list and creating process um if I'm going to be paired with a creative that like enjoys creativity in chaos uh and thinks that creativity should come from just having lots of um you know unpracticed un unscheduled time uh we are going to butt heads on a number of different things and that's okay right that's totally fine um so when I'm having those difficult conversations often I'm trying to put myself into the position of the other person and be like hey I see that you value say this creative chaos time cool how but I I don't value that I'm prioritizing structure and meeting this deadline so how are we going to work together in order to create something cuz my way might not also be right you know like my way might interfere with that person and and stop them from being creative so it's about understanding

that human element of like it's not necessarily bad leadership maybe they're just prioritizing something else um and so that's that's kind of how I would start to mediate um the real toxic stuff and sometimes it's not worth your time I'm going to bring it back to that if it's dangerous step away but if it's a conversation about priorities that's a really healthy conversation to have thank you sorry can we question from yeah absolutely hello hi um some of my question is already been answered with your responses to earlier questions but uh to the point of like sometimes you can't fix something so you should walk away or like don't engage with trying to change management if doing so would be dangerous I I think that we've all had instances where we can tell where it would be dangerous but I think we've all had instances we where we were like I'm not sure if it's safe to talk to this

person about this any guidance on like building a barometer for that looking at a situation and being like I got about a 30% chance of this going really badly for me and then I can make a a weighted decision on whether or not I want to go in on that or avoid it absolutely so this is where women and marginalized groups come in because we make these uh judgments on Earth daily basis as to whether it's safe to speak and and talk about this um I would advise you to look at change management process so change management kind of starts with the belief that basically you can't change anything but yourself um and so often we become obsessed with how do we change somebody else and change management teaches us we can't we can't change another human being it's not my responsibility to change another human being even as a CO as a psychologist someone comes to me and goes I want to change brilliant I

can work with that um but there's a a space within say mainly in therapy for example where someone turn turns up and says um what do we call them like non-conform sort of thing they they come up and and they'll turn up to therapy and they go well I'm only here because my wife told me that she would leave me if I didn't come but I'm here to do the therapy um that person isn't ready to change uh so everything that we've taught as therapists in that moment goes out the window uh because we can't change that person if they don't want to so everything instead of trying to change that person we switch our tactics to try and raise awareness to try and bring more examples into that person's life to get them to understand what is happening more around them um but ultimately it comes back to you can't teach empathy in in that way they have to learn it themselves um so firstly you can rid yourself of any like I need to change this person it's not not your not your responsibility

don't have to just just for just as an example like if you're doing that thing where you're like I'm not going to change this person but I'm going to bring new data to them sometimes that can also still get you in trouble where you're like so I noticed in this meeting on daada day that daada happened and that made so and so feel such and such and you know you can tell from the way that their face changes that you're like kind of on their list now how do you avoid that from happening again you can't um is the is the the unsatisfactory answer um but it is about like you say creating a barometer of how do I create safer spaces and safer structures if that safe structure is not present within that studio you can either try and create it but that comes with the risk like you say of of creating a problem for yourself or you can accept that that studio isn't ready for that change and you can move on um

and this isn't I'm being brutal with this um but it's it's just in terms of like protecting ourselves as well at the same time none of us um well I don't think most of us aren't sort of trained psychologists and it's not your job to psychoanalyze and and be the therapist for those in power um what I would like to see is that we start to recognize what is healthy and what doesn't feel healthy and most of the time we know that right that little bit inside your stomach that goes I'm not happy here I don't like it and you'll know whether you can provide a change for that or not if you can't maybe it's it's you got to pick your Hills hi um I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about um how we put so much pressure on ourselves to succeed in this industry and how that can create uh more ego leadership problems in the sense of people faking

it till they make it and trying to present themselves as a leader when maybe they don't have that skill set yet and how that can lead to conflict yeah so success is a funny thing isn't it um and it's only recently kind of in the last 10 20 years that like with the rise of social media again we're only really putting out our wins not our losses um so it becomes difficult you know this this whole Instagram generation of instant Fame as well uh if we again I think back to S of my early teens where we started to see the talent shows come out and it brought out this belief of overnight Fame uh that anybody if they just wish hard enough can just make it and it's really easy and the reality is is obviously that you know making games is is hard we do it because we love it but it's hard it's hard work um and we don't tend to talk about that bit uh there is a book I think Kim Nordstrom has done a book uh on success in the games industry and what that looks like and they looked at um they went around and interviewed

successful Studios uh and they found I think the overwhelming uh response for that was the studios that invested in like good coaching practices and actually improving on these empathy levels uh and investing in things like emotional intelligence uh and and their and upskilling their talent and supporting them had better success than those that didn't so we know that these sort of practices are starting to come through it's just super early um in terms of kind of your own success as an individual I go back to things like the power Paradox you know we are um when I worked at baa we uh saw young Talent come into the industry and looks like overnight success um and at that time I worked a long time in Learning and Development and uh we realized that there was a real need to support that Talent as it as it became successful and I think that's kind of what we're talking about here with games leadership is that we don't have those structures

in place as an industry uh we are seeing overnight success with huge amounts of money coming through uh with very little awareness in that space um I don't know I think again I go back to Regeneration and how do we change these structures it needs the person at the helm to be self-aware enough in order to make those changes if you are suffering from something like imposter syndrome again it it needs the self-awareness in order to get help and support that um I always advocate for therapy and everyone goes therapy but it's great like if you're in a leadership position it is hard uh and it's going to bring up things that you never thought about before you were put in that leadership position so any of those little negative things that you haven't dealt with that you've been pushing off like it's time to deal with that so that you can help others um there's a lot of things like wounded healer I don't know if that's a term you're familiar with um often we see a

wounded healer is the idea that those that want to help most are those that are most damaged um so often we have this kind of repetitive thing of like those that are most damaged trying to help and creating more damage at the same time I think of some of the um people make games documentaries uh I don't know if you've seen these on YouTube fantastic documentaries um about things that have gone wrong with toxic leadership in studios um and again it spans from those that have have done wrong to those that have kind of just made some weird choices and a lot of those weird choices I think come from where people haven't have unfinished business in themselves so the biggest thing we can do if we want to sort of deal with our own feelings about success is get that help for ourselves first so that making sense I'm rambling on it's great thank you it was a good speech thank you hello hi um so um this might be a bit of a long-winded question I'll try and go as uh concise as I can um so I'm uh just a

student um you know studying game design uh trying to move into the industry soon and I've met a lot of other students uh here in the same exact boat um and this is an extremely uh trepidacious uh year to try and move into the industry super like weirdly negative stuff coming um talking to I was talking to like some senior level like CEO or or or something like that and she said in five years you're not going to be here and I was like well that's so annoying now I'm definitely going to be here uh and so um I guess my question is do you have any practical advice for people coming in uh to not get swept up in sort of these repetitions these cultures uh that plague the industry how to yeah that's it yeah I so so I think there's two sides to this there's those that are going to come in to an industry

that is very scared right now um there's a lot of fear uh everybody is scared even those in leadership positions um and then the other side of those that are going to start to make their own Studios and do their own path as a result of I will show them and do um and both have potential for harm um firstly I'm sorry it's it's a shitty time to come into the industry um in terms of what's Happening um it's not your fault thank you uh but I think it's a good time to kind of talk about that and decide on what you want um in terms of those that are starting Studios uh themselves and want to sort of just create their own space um one of the main challenges that they have is that Publishers aren't allowing for things like budgeting for HR um support lawyers accountants all of those things that actually will make you a better leader and give you more time to be creative and and focus on your leadership abilities um so those are when I talk

about regeneration those are the things that we can change as an industry that we should be changing for and that's making sure that we are budgeting the right amount for the games that we're making um so my advice would be to make sure that you have those things we're starting to see Coos appear now in startups which we we just didn't see so much beforehand so I would align yourself with a business person um and so that you're going in with those practices wide open and that good practice um in terms of how how do you survive as a a newcomer to the industry um I think it goes back to your beliefs and values and I think we've seen this conatiner effect happen before I know it feels bad but we have seen it I think 2015 was pretty awful uh if we remember that far back and about 10 years ago was pretty awful as well um but it does concertina it comes in it comes out uh so it will come around again um so I would focus on you and maintaining you um and figuring

out what it is that you want and and sticking to that thank you I'm seeing waving hands at the back do we have to be kicked out we got a couple more minutes couple more minutes okay I think we've only got one one more question h Hello uh I've been thinking about this for a while so hopefully I do a good job with this question but um I'm in a leadership position and I wasn't the best leader when I started um I was kind of expected I I thought I was going to be a shadow leader not really a true leader but that changed over time and I've think I've been doing a very good job of becoming a leader but I know there's still room to grow so I was wondering as a leader how do you can how do you convince your employees to be able to speak up more and give them that freedom but still be rigid and still be dedicated to to getting your goal across because I still have to get my goal across but I still want to be open and adaptable to as much as I can so how do

you find that balance how do you communicate that balance and how do you get people to feel safe to communicate to you right I mean again it depends on the studio but um I always have this conversation with leaders um who really want me to give them the answer of something that they can do that will I don't know remove all bias from the situation um and I think part of leadership is just understanding that we can't um that you know when you are in a leadership position um the reports that you get back can you ever be sure that what is being said to you directly he who controls the the power and the jobs and the bonuses um how do we trust that that is is true so my advice is always to either look outside of your your organization and bring somebody in for that um or to try and create structures in which um uh people are reporting to other people and not you within that

organization and trying to create a filter um to often I see leaders that really want to be there in the trenches and part of the team and sometimes that's difficult to do um and creates an uncomfortable situation um so I'd always ask you to look at things like 360 reviews for example where everybody gives feedback but but you do a 360 review for you um and if you want to create uh kind of psychological safety within that space sometimes that has to start anonymously and I warn you now the moment you open that Floodgate you have to also then be prepared for what they're going to bring to you um and that's the toughest part right is the moment that we start to say well I want to hear what you think and then they tell you what they think what are you going to do with that how are you going to structure a response that feels adequate both for them but and for you um so you have to be you have to do some work before you start to open those

doors as yourself because you're going to have to think about how am I going to respond how am I going to action it what if they ask me to action something that I don't like are we going to have that talk about values and motivations have I set clear goals does everybody in this studio understand what we're working towards and the motivations and what we're trying to make um and if not why not because often that falls back onto the leadership have I been clear with this um and again I would encourage you to go back to that that lazy question what's the least you could be doing in this space that you're not doing right now um because again we come back with this I want radical change um you know I'm going to come in tomorrow I we saw it in covid I saw a lot of leaders kind of lose their minds about um you know how do I know that they're working well it's pretty obvious I promise you you'll find out sooner or later um but but we heard report of you know everybody into the Discord and turn their cameras on so I can see you working um and of course

that lasted maybe a day or two because it turns out that watching people do their work is not very interesting or very helpful um so yeah so I I would come back to you and and and ask you kind of like what is it that you want to get out of it what do you think um when I come in and work with a studio I interview everybody and I get all the results back separately and I come to leadership and my first question to leaders leadership is always what do you think they told me and that's really interesting what does leadership think they were going to say versus what did they actually say um so yeah be prepared for all of that thank you so much you're welcome I think that's it thank you very so much [Music]