Three Leadership Lies That Are Killing Your Games

Read Time: 6 Minutes

It should come as no surprise that around here, we’re advocates not just for a couple of frameworks that walk you through solving problems as a leader but also for a fundamental shift in our industry's attitude toward leadership.

We can explain all day that “value” is more important than “making stuff,” but many of us are still seeking truth on how to get the most talented developers to move as many tasks over the line as possible. Our bosses reinforce that every day. Even worse, intuitively, it makes sense.

Strangely enough, much of this comes down to the “belief” layer. We still believe many things as leaders that simply aren’t true. Today, I will point out three examples of things you’ve probably been told before (we certainly were) and explain why they’re damaging misconceptions.

It’s like we’re still using an outdated currency. We’re investing in areas that don’t provide the proper returns. We’re still fundamentally treating game development like factory work, where every problem comes down to a matter of throughput for raw material.

In the process, we obsess over things that don’t result in great products or the natural bottom line and instead miss an opportunity to address real problems and see real change.

By the end of this newsletter, I’d like you to walk away with three things to focus less on so that you can slot in some other, more valuable things to give you a leadership edge at your studio.

The most talented developers make the best games

If I can gather the best engineers, artists, VFX artists, audio people, and designers, I can make one of the greatest games in the world.

This one blows my mind because it’s been attempted many times with poor bottom-line results, yet it’s still fundamentally the pitch for many new studios and game projects.

It makes the following false assumptions.

1. High amounts of raw craft talent lead to higher-quality products.

2. High amounts of raw craft talent lead to higher throughput, which leads to shorter dev cycles.

3. High amounts of experience solve the most critical problems before they happen.

Legendary projects like Project Titan at Blizzard, The quality revamp of League of Legends in 2013, the recent Destiny II expansions, and many more notoriously struggled to reach their goals.

Nobody would argue that these studios weren’t oozing with talent - or that their developers weren’t notch. That indicates strongly that our obsession with talent correlates less with results than we often think.

The core false belief embedded in the games industry mentality is that efficiency and effectiveness are borne from technical depth. In other words, the more everyone on our team understands their job and how to do high-quality work, the fewer problems we will have.

But what about problems like.

1. Bad management throughout the studio creates unnecessary bureaucracy, poor career growth, and hiring the wrong people.

2. There are no clear vision holders or direction for the team. What are the goals, and where are we trying to go?

3. Are people in decision-making roles not being held accountable, ignoring problems, or playing politics instead of solving organizational problems?

I don’t know about you, but when I think about the issues that kill games & studios, those last 3 seem much more on the money.

Maybe, just maybe, studios with high collaboration, clear vision & goals, and strong leadership make the best games.

The best leaders have deep technical knowledge

We apply a similar rationale to our leaders. When someone does a great job getting work done in their discipline, we promote them. It makes sense, right?

Eventually, we promote people far enough away from the tactical work they were doing that their jobs no longer resemble anything from the past.

Now, they manage people, create strategies, and solve organizational problems. The problem is they don’t know how to do any of those things necessarily because their entire career up to that point has been about getting work done.

Then, we wonder why many of them become micro-managers…

So, while the currency at the senior leadership level is understood to be a completely different set of things, our framework is all about who’s getting the most work done. Hence, the incentives end up wholly messed up.

Often, teams don’t want a leader or producer who “doesn’t understand” what they do, pushing us further into this camp. It’s not about who can help us collaborate, clarify goals, or build effective systems to move the team forward; it’s about who can “talk the talk,” understand the lingo, and not get lost in whiteboard discussions about the store controller module or the nuances of our animation toolchain.

I see many producers out there trying to learn how to write code.  I was told many times in the early days of my career that I needed to spend more time in LUA or read 3 books on animation pipelines, etc, to improve my craft in production. Or maybe if I increased my spreadsheet skillz I’d be ready to be a senior producer.

It’s all bullshit.

The leaders I’ve seen with the highest impact on the bottom line were flexible, adaptable, critical thinkers who solved systemic problems that impacted the “fabric” between developers and teams. They realized the truth: You’re 100 times more likely to run into a relationship problem creating three weeks of delay between 2 critical teams than you are to run into a problem because “our Javascript developers aren’t that great.”

Don’t get me wrong. I spent a lot of time in my career getting to know the tools, pipelines, architecture, etc, from my developers and teams. But I did so through the lens of building more collaboration, solving systemic problems/risks, and setting clear goals.

Being able to “hack it” in an engineering discussion is not valuable and not what leaders do.

“Soft Skills” are more accessible than “hard skills.”

You’re probably seeing a pattern here. You’re right.

While I hate the terminology, we’re discussing “soft skills” and “hard skills” here.

The term “soft skills” has done much damage in our industry. Baked into these terms are nasty lies that do an incredible disservice to our studios & products and, by extension, our players. 

For example:

1. Soft skills are easier to learn than hard skills.

2. There are more people out there with soft skills than with hard skills.

3. Hard skills are the most valuable skills to have on your team.

4. Hard skills have more of an impact on the quality of your products than soft skills.

It’s intuitive (and repeatedly proven in real studios) that when you bring many people together from 12 different disciplines, building effective systems between them and focusing them on singular objectives is critical. Our organizations are incredibly complex.

We’re not building chairs on an assembly line anymore.

We’re building highly complex products that are packed with uncertainty. To make matters even trickier, we need 15 different skill sets to accomplish it.

Why do we view the skills that build thriving, aligned, fast organizations as the “soft”?

We prioritize hard skills everywhere in this industry. Don’t get me wrong. It’s really hard to find excellent engineers. The skillset is in incredible demand, and if you want the best, you’re competing against a relatively small pool of talent.

But why don’t we put at LEAST as much premium on a person’s attitude? Their ability to work with other disciplines on the team? Their ability to design solutions based on their understanding of the goal through collaboration instead of hiding in a corner and cranking out (amazing) code for 12 hours straight?

After all, soft skills are so much “easier,” right? Anyone can learn them.

If I interview 100 game developers and ask them about their last failed project, I guarantee the answers I’ll get will be 90% organizational. Is it possible we’re putting a premium on the wrong things?

Talent is great, but our obsession with technical skills may kill our products and our ability to improve. 

Closing

Over the last 15 years, we’ve worked with dozens of studios and hundreds of developers. The industry is in a tough period, and it's no secret.

Many of us are struggling, our teams are struggling, and our products often don’t hit the mark we want to see.

Yet we’re flush with resources compared to almost any industry. We have an unbelievably deep pool of talent, a high-growth sector, and customers who are deeply passionate about our products.

This all comes back to our stance as leaders. We must be extremely careful not to fall into traditional traps that focus us on the wrong things.

Too many young leaders are going out and trying to take programming courses to become better game developers and leaders instead of building the skills that enable success on their teams.

1. When you’re building or running teams, ensure there’s just as much accountability and focus around attitude, collaboration, and risk management as there is on the technical skills of the team members.

2. As a leader, you should be focused on removing system risk, building your influence to get other leaders on board, building better systems/processes for collaboration on your teams, and making sure the goals are crystal clear. Your technical knowledge is NOT your primary currency!

3. Knock it off with the soft skills vs. hard skills BS. Nowadays, your studio will fail if you don’t put more effort into people and collaboration skills than technical skills.

Together, we can steer our industry in a better direction that’s more fulfilling for us, our teams, and our players.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways we can help you…

—>Courses built by game devs for game devs - check out “Succeeding in Game Production” HERE.

—>Regular deep dives on critical game development topics on the BBG podcast

—>If you’re stuck with leadership problems or complex development issues at your studio, we can coach you 1:1 to solve those problems and get clear results.  Email [email protected], and we’ll set you up with a discovery call.