Category: Leadership

Team Culture

I had an absolutely marvelous conversation with Kim Nordstrom yesterday about team culture, re: a book he’s been writing for a while. I’m SUPER jazzed about it, and I’m really glad someone’s doing what he’s doing.

In the course of the conversation yesterday, he mentioned that in the interviews he’s done, he’s found that for team culture, it’s often better to have values that are “brutal”. And I thought “that’s a strange word to use,” but as the conversation went on, it was clear that part of the meaning was that the stated values were specific, black and white, and controversial.

And I think he’s totally right. But if you know me, that’s obvious, right? Because I often state things hyperbolically, and sometimes it bites me in the ass, but I’ve found in general, that more extreme way of framing things pays more than it costs.

Not in everything – but in what a team should be, and the kind of culture that you need. You want to exclude people who don’t believe what you believe. You want people to question whether they believe it or not. You want people to stop and say, “Wait, what?”

And I think one of the reasons is that in the “middle”, once you come away from some extremes, there’s a huge grey area that can be read in so many different ways that it can be anything to anyone. If your team cares about “honesty” and “quality” and other generic pablum, then people can interpret that in a dozen different ways. And if you have a dozen different interpretations, then you have… nothing.

If, on the other hand, you say, “No crunch, ever,” then you need to really think about what that means. What happens when you’re butting up against a deadline? What happens when your team has more work than they can handle? All your experience says, “work more, work harder.” But if your team’s culture says, “No crunch, ever,” what do you do?

Plenty of people *say* that they believe in sustainability. But you only *actually* believe in sustainability when you push the date, or start hiring early enough and with enough advance prep that the new folks will make a positive difference. Or you build an infrastructure that can push at any time. Or you commit to never promising release dates, no matter what a publisher wants.

All those things *cost* something. Culture, to me, is how you spend money and time. Until you pay the price, your beliefs are just words.

But it makes me feel better on reflection a bit – sometimes I worry that my way of phrasing things is a negative, and my perceptions of its benefits are illusory. I fluctuate between seeing it as a superpower and a fatal flaw. And you know what? It’s both. Which, if you know me, you’ve seen both sides of that equation echoing through the last 20 years again and again.

It’s great, it sucks, and you know what? I’ve come to peace with it.

Balancing Exploitation & Aggro

I am firmly in favor of workers not being exploited or treated poorly. As a leader, I’ve made it one of my primary focuses. Am I perfect? Of course not. But it’s not just that I do my best at it. It’s that I consider it one of my primary responsibilities, and that it’s as important as literally anything else I do.

I believe that if you are an employee, you should not settle for a place that treats you badly. Places that call you “family” when they need you, but lay you off when you need them. Places that “work hard play hard” and expect you there 60-80 hours a week by default. Places that ask you to miss important life events, or come in on the weekends because the boss needs butts-in-seats (even though I’d finished every task I had) so that he looks good for the C-level folks who are gonna be walking around on Saturday (yes, that has literally happened to me at EA/Maxis. You know who you are.)

BUT…

I struggle with this a lot, because a lot of the best memories of my career are from those torture chamber moments. The 46th day straight of working 11 hour days, the 3am trying-to-get-this-thing-to-build before a huge demo the next day… those things are memories. And a lot of the people I made those memories with became friends that lasted beyond any single job.

Those moments were also where I smashed peoples’ expectations, and built the reputation that was the foundation for the whole rest of my career.

So the advice I have for young people is twofold. Don’t settle for a place that treats you badly. But also, kill it. Overdeliver. Do insane things, sometimes at the cost of other parts of your life. But do it because *you* choose to do it, not because it’s the baseline expectation of an exploitative company.

But if you’ve *got* to choose between the two, and you have the ability and privilege to do it, choose yourself. Choose sanity. Choose life. You’ll eventually be able to get another job, and no matter how good or rare this one seems, you’ll always always always be able to find something better in time.

You’ve only got one life.

Do Less

If you want to maximize your team’s ability to be creative and innovate, the most important thing you can do is less.

This is something I think people understand easily. Take an example:

You’re on fire, and being chased by a bear.
Now learn this new concept OR DIE.

You can’t. It’s impossible. When your brain is in survival mode, it’s not taking in information & synthesizing it into new things. All you can do is survive.

When you’re working at maximum capacity on a tight deadline, you’re constantly in survival mode. And in pursuit of what folks believe is “resource efficiency”, they want every individual working at max capacity all the time.

Literally every single revelatory creative moment for me has come from walking the dog, lying in the bathtub, sitting on the beach. The critical thing is that during that time, I am not doing anything. I’m not *trying* to solve problems. If anything, I’m trying to do nothing (and failing).

I’ve solved challenges under the gun. I’ve made things work at 3am, scrambling to get a build done before a big demo the next day. These things are satisfying, sure, but they’re not the places where I’ve been able to make step-function changes to the success of a product. All of those – every single one – has appeared spontaneously in my head while I was doing nothing.

And when I say that, what I mean is, “These ideas have been set in motion through hard work and conscious analysis. They’ve baked for wildly unpredictable times in my unconscious mind, and a bit of downtime allowed them to pop back from my unconscious mind to my conscious one.”

If you want your team to be maximally creative, you need to do less. You need to be inefficient. You need to have space where employees do not have pressing tasks. You need to have time when they are at work, but are not cranking out widgets, or code, or anything visible. You need to have time where their mind can wander, where they can experiment, and where they wield the entire depth of their knowledge, conscious and unconscious.

It will look like nothing is happening, and make you feel uncomfortable.

You will want to give them tasks and fill their time with stuff.
That would be a mistake.

If you’ve hired smart, creative, hard-working, well-intentioned folks who want to make awesome things… sometimes a bit of nothing may be the best thing you can do.

MAKE NOISE

You know how in school, you’re often told to be quiet, to raise your hand, to wait your turn, that the teacher will notice you?

That doesn’t work at work.

Even when you have excellent managers, there will almost always be times when your accomplishments are invisible, your desires and goals are overlooked, and you feel like you’re getting screwed or left behind because the teacher didn’t notice you, sitting in the back with your hand up. You’re doing everything right, and getting passed over.

There are a lot of reasons for this. Sometimes, it’s because some kinds of work are totally invisible. Make a systemic change that improves everyone’s efficiency by 5%, but adds no new features? Likely to get overlooked. Sometimes being really great at your job means that your manager feels no “pain” coming from you or your area of responsibility, and so they start ignoring you because other things are painful and on fire, and those things need attention. And they begin to take your accomplishments and efficiency for granted.

That sounds like a “bad boss”, but honestly, it’s just “most bosses”.

Sometimes, you need to be more proactive and vocal about telling people what you want. I wanted a game design position, and busted my ass working toward it. Then got passed over. Why? Because when I talked to my boss, they *didn’t know I wanted the job*. I thought it was obvious – I was doing the work. But I didn’t *tell* them, and it took me years to realize that was my failing and not theirs. Once I told them, I got the next opening that came up.

Squeak, sometimes.

We’re told the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Then we see unqualified self-promoting hucksters squeak all the time and get rewarded, and feel resentful and bitter about it. That sucks. But sometimes, you need to make some noise.

It’s not that you need to inflate your accomplishments, or steal other peoples’ credit. That’ll all get back to you in a bad way in the end. But you need to be upfront and often more aggressive about letting people know about the work you’ve done, and what your goals are. It feels bad if you’re an introvert or used to “being recognized for your accomplishments”.

But think of it from the manager’s perspective. They need to try to understand what their employees are doing, and what kind of impact they’re having. A great manager does the work and takes the time to understand these things, and they’ll still overlook a bunch of stuff. All you want to do is help them form that understanding easily, and make sure that you can’t get overlooked. Done well, that makes their lives easier, not harder.

So yeah – make some noise.

One Word

There’s one toxic word that I find more than any other derails collaboration – particularly cross-disciplinary collaboration. This word is dismissive, demeaning, inconsiderate, and when you use it, the other people in the meeting will immediately turn off, and it will be incredibly hard to get them back on board, because this word makes it clear that you don’t understand what they’re doing, you don’t understand why they’re doing it, you believe their expertise is trivial, and you think you know better than they do.

Any guesses?

Stop here. If you have an idea what that word is, write it in the comments below. I’m super curious what people think.

For me, whenever I find myself using this word, I have to stop. I’ve made it a habit, and it took *years* to start being able to catch myself before using it (most of the time these days) or even after using it (still happens). But whenever it does happen, it’s worth stopping the conversation immediately, rewinding, and taking the time to clarify that I didn’t mean to use the word, and let’s dive deeper into the discussion because there’s clearly something I’m not understanding.

That word is “just”.

Why didn’t you just do it this way? What if we just did X? Just do Y.

It seems so simple. It’s something people say *all the time*, and I guarantee you that every time you say it, the people listening to you hear, “Why aren’t you seeing the obvious thing?” because that’s what “just” means in this case. Shortcut all the possible considerations for anything else, “just” do it the simple way which is obvious to me because I’m smart and you’re not.

Whenever you have an urge to say “just”, the better approach is, “Would it be possible to do X?” “I was thinking we could do X, but is there something I’m missing?”

There’s a chance that sometimes people have missed something simple. Maybe they were worried about things that aren’t as important as they seem. Maybe they wanted to write “good” code instead of something quick & dirty. But *the vast majority of the time*, if you’re a decent manager/leader, the reason people haven’t “just” done something isn’t because they missed a trick. It’s because *you* did.

Assume that your employees know what they’re doing. I know it doesn’t necessarily feel like it, but when people hear, “Why don’t we just…” the implication is almost always, “Why don’t you know what you’re doing?”

Excise the word from your work vocabulary entirely, and I promise you, your conversations will get more interesting and go over better instantly.

Tango

I’ve been talking to a lot of product people recently, and something has come up again and again. I think a lot of people think about product development as a kind of puzzle. I need to figure out what people want, and then figure out the puzzle, and then when I have a solution, I’ll show people and they’ll love it, buy it, and step 3: profit.

My advice always seems to trend in the same direction, though. You need to get feedback early. You need to be able to change direction quickly, and make those changes not painful for your team. You need to discard ideas that aren’t working without a second thought, and know high-level what you’re doing so that you can keep your balance.

I’ve been thinking about how to describe this – at one point I thought the phrase “inertialess” was a good descriptor of what I was looking for. Because it’s about being able to change direction quickly and painlessly, and “subtracting weight” made a lot of sense. The less work you can do before you test, the faster you move. The less painful it is to throw it out when needed. The fewer plans you have, the fewer minds you need to change. But keeping a strong “north star” of what you’re doing allows everyone to understand where you’re all headed.

And it occurred to me this morning there’s a better metaphor for it. You and your audience?

It’s a dance.

You’re working with them, trying to develop a shared understanding of this thing you’re doing. You’re leading them, but you’re responsive to their movements and their needs. You don’t dance in heavy shoes, because you need to be able to change directions fluidly. You need to be able to take in information from everywhere, and your hands, feet, head, body all need to be paying attention and in sync with your partner. The more you understand what you’re doing, the more your body is able to “do the work” and the less you have to think about it.

It also frames some of what I think of as the inevitable “herky-jerky” changing of direction during the early stages of the process as a bit more elegant, and fluid. Yeah, at the start you lurch around as you learn the song and the moves. But as you get more skilled, you’re changing a lot, but you’re doing it in concert with your audience, not *against* them. The more fluid and harmonious you can be, and the less you think of it as an antagonistic process, the faster you’ll learn, and the more graceful you’ll be.

I’ve been trying to think of a reason to write my experience with this process down – and it’s been hard to come up with a framing that makes sense to others. Inertialess made sense to me, I have a mechanical engineering background. But I don’t think it made sense to others – at least not in an intuitive, friendly way.

Does this make sense to you? I know that’s a leading question at the end of this post, but I’m curious what you think.

Two Types of Leaders

I’ve generally found when people come into some level of power, they fall into one of two distinct camps.

I think to some degree, everyone has a bad manager at some point in their career. Someone who yells at them, doesn’t support them, makes them to things they should be doing, takes credit for their work, whatever.

Camp 1 are the people who decide, “When I get power, I’m never going to let the people who work for me go through the kind of crap I went through.”

Camp 2 are the people who think, “Now it’s my turn.”

I’ve worked with a *surprising* number of Camp 2 folks, and it’s universally an awful experience. The crazy thing is how *easy* it is to be a Camp 2 person. These are folks who hear about voice actors arguing for royalties and saying, “Well none of US get royalties so fuck them,” instead of “Yeah, it would be great if we all benefited from the hard work we put in, we should fight alongside them!”

They’re folks who say, “I paid my dues.” They’re folks who say, “It’s always been like this.” The cycle of abuse, I believe, perpetuates by *default*.

It takes a lot of thought, a lot of effort, and a lot of conscious dismantling of ingrained expectations and reactions to create something better for others that you *didn’t get to experience for yourself*. But the result is that you make things *better* for people. You can take a terrible industry and make it *good*. Maybe even great.

Don’t be someone who takes the easy way out. Don’t be someone who perpetuates abuse and unfairness because you were lucky enough to cross over the other side of the equation.

One Question That Works

A lot of times, when I’m mentoring folks, they’ll approach me with some binary choice that they’re struggling with. Should I do X or Y?

I’ll ask them to talk about each choice – what are the upsides, the downsides, etc. and there are obvious good and bad things about each choice, and it’s clear why they’re struggling.

But I’ll ask them a question, and it’s a surprisingly simple one, and the answer will often become instantly clear.

Here’s the thing – yes, there are good and bad elements in each choice. But “good” isn’t enough reason to do something. It has to be good AND aligned with your goals. While both choices often have equally good things, one choice is often significantly more aligned with the person’s goals. So the question is this:

“What do you want?”

Not just in the choice, but in general. What is it that you’re trying to do? What’s important to you? What do you need right now? What are your goals? Some people will spend a lot of time considering a job because it pays well, but if you ask them if they care about the money… they quite *suddenly* realize they don’t. They make enough. But they’re trained to chase the money, because there was a point where it *was* critical, and they haven’t stopped to think about whether that’s still the case or not.

But if you ask them what they want, and they say, “I want to fight for our climate future,” or “I want a job where I’ll be challenged and grow,” their choices become a lot clearer.

Take a moment and ask yourself what *you* want.

Good isn’t context-independent. Bad isn’t either. When you try to make a choice based on “good” too many things are good in too many ways, and paralysis occurs. If you think about what you want, you know *which* good to pursue, and *which* bad you need to avoid. Sounds simple, and it is. But it takes a second to step off the treadmill and think about your goals. It’s worth it. If all you do is focus on the treadmill, you’ll run in the same place the rest of your life.

Give it a shot.

How to Handle Bad News

One of the things I found most challenging about being in a position of leadership was fighting instinctive reactions when responding to bad news or crises.

My instinctive reaction to responding to an engineer who pushed a change that broke a critical element of the game? “What the fuck? How did this change get through? Why did you push something like this? How come it wasn’t tested? Who fucked up?!”

And every time I was told some sort of terrible news, that *is* how I responded.

Inside.

On the outside, my goal was to respond positively. “Okay, how do we fix this?” To take any idea of frustration or anger, any desire to point fingers, assign blame, yell at folks – push that all aside. “How do we fix this?” and get moving.

The person who’s bringing you bad news? They feel as bad as they possibly can. (Even if they don’t, don’t worry about it for now – but chances are if you’ve hired well, this person already feels like shit.) By telling you something bad happened, they’re *absolutely doing the right thing*. This is the thing you want to encourage almost more than anything. That you can be trusted to receive bad news well. Because when you’ve managed to gain that level of trust, people won’t hesitate to tell you everything.

If, on the other hand, you yell at the person, get frustrated that something’s gone wrong, you know what happens next time? That person hesitates. They try to cover things up. Because they correctly *don’t* trust you, and know that they’re going to be hurt, humiliated, may lose their job, etc. And that means that problems will *fester*. That’s much worse, and that particular response? That’s your fault.

Yes, you will need to hold people accountable. You will need to figure out what caused the problem and how to address it. And most likely, you’ll find something systemic went wrong, and not some individual doing something genuinely stupid. So fix the systemic thing. That’s also your fault, and in this situation the one who gets held accountable is you.

Or maybe someone is being careless and sloppy. Have the discussion with them, privately, *after* the crisis is resolved. When your emotions are calm, and you can assess the situation without being riled up in the moment.

How you respond in times of crisis – those first moments define how the situation gets resolved. It defines how people will trust you (or not) in the future. That response is the foundation of the culture that you’re building, and one of the biggest elements of the psychological safety that is critical to proper creative collaboration.

Stay calm. Push those initial feelings aside. And get to fixing things.

A Strange Thing About Product Development

Sometimes worse is better.

When you’re developing something new, remaining flexible is one of the most important things you can do. You need to always be able to respond to new information, and to let go of your preconceptions of how things should be.

This means you need to test ideas early, and discard them easily. But that’s not what most people do, because it’s not what most companies or managers incentivize.

You’re often told that your ideas need to be bulletproof. Or that if challenged, they need to hold up. You need to account for every possibility or circumstance. Your ideas must be robust, and well-thought-out.

I disagree.

That’s not to say that you should throw out every garbage idea under the sun. You need to make sure your ideas are worthwhile. But as a team, you need to be able to hear ideas *before* they get polished. This has myriad positive results – it lets rough gems grow better, faster, and it lets interesting failures get discarded early. With good ideas, it lets people “get in on it” early, contribute, and buy-in much, much faster. And it lets you throw out ideas that won’t work without building up a huge emotional investment/attachment to the concept.

Your team needs to understand that this is how it should work, and as a leader, you need to foster a culture that can hear things “rough” without being critical or dismissive because of that roughness.

But if you can swing it, and get your team on board, your work will improve much faster.