Career Development In a Box: the presentation

I introduced The THUD at GDC Online this year, using the slides below. It was great to expose The THUD to such a diverse and interested audience.

This presentation was intended to introduce the toolkit, whether the audience had any experience with this kind of resource or not. This presentation is a good overview of what Competencies are, how to use the Competency Indicators, as well as an overview of the Job Role Framework and of Job Roles. At the actual presentation at GDC Online I offered a handout as well, included in this slide deck as the last set of slides.

Here are the slides.

Leadership Transitions talk from IGDA Leadership Forum 2011

I presented at the IGDA’s Leadership Forum 2011 this year, having spoken last year as well. This year I focused on how different levels of management roles require differing skill sets, as one moves from a manager, to a manager of managers, and then to multi-discipline management. The talk went very well, and I am grateful to the IGDA for the chance to speak again, and to the wonderful audience for the appreciation of the content.

Here are the slides.

If you are interested in understanding the seven stages of management, whereas this talk only focused on three of them, I highly recommend “The Leadership Pipeline”, by Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter, and James Noel (check out their site at http://www.ram-charan.com/leadership_pipeline.htm).

GDC Online Talk: “Career Development in a Box”

I’ll be presenting at GDC Online, in Austin,Tx, again this year. The presentation is called “Career Development in a Box: Introducing a Freely Available Toolkit”. Whether you are a manager wanting to help your team get better, or an IC looking for tools to help you grow professionally, this talk is for you. Register for GDC Online at www.gdconline.com by October 7th 2011 and get 10% off when using this code: ONL11SPK.

The talk will be an introduction to The THUD (the name for the toolkit). Find more information about the toolkit, and download, at http://thethud.wordpress.com.

Three Guidelines That Will Make Your Team Better

Every people manager or leader is concerned with helping their team members be more successful. Regardless of what kind of work you are in, or how experienced your team is, there are thee simple guidelines that when used together can help every employee be more successful. Adopting what the guidelines proscribe, for yourself and your team, will improve your overall productivity and your team’s happiness.

On a regular basis (weekly/monthly):

1. Say what you are going to do.
2. Do it.
3. Hold yourself accountable to everyone (whether you got it done or not).

Lets explore each of these a bit to understand them better. Then we will dive deeper into them, and show how the guidelines are effective on multiple levels.

Say what you are going to do.

Being asked to articulate what you plan to do is a pretty fair request. Generally speaking most people have a good handle on what they are doing, so formally communicating it has very little cost. For the few folks that might not already have a plan about what they are going to do this first guideline makes it explicitly clear that its their responsibility to own this, and not something that is going to be done for them.

How much freedom someone has to determine what they do are going to is up to the organization. This guideline works even if the tasks are very tactical in nature, because the larger issues of direction are dictated to the team.

Do it.

Having communicated what you are going to do the next obvious thing is to actually do it, or at least make a responsible effort to do it. Sometimes we don’t get as much done as we hoped, or we didn’t account for some dependency. This part of the guideline is about taking appropriate and reasonable actions towards getting it done.

Hold yourself accountable to everyone (whether you got it done or not).

Sometimes we actually do what we say we are going to do, in which case this part of the guideline is about making sure the right people know about it. We cannot assume the right people will know, somehow, if we don’t tell them. Good work that gets done without the right people knowing is not very productive work.

Sometimes, for whatever reason, we can’t get done the thing we said we would do. In this case the guideline tells us its best for folks to hear it from us first, then later some other way. Inevitably people will find out, and I believe it’s better to own the message (when its good and when its bad) then to hope no one notices. Being known as someone who owns their victories and their shortcomings goes a long way towards ensuring you are respected and valued.

Taking a Closer Look

For these reasons alone this set of guidelines makes sense. But, these guidelines are effective on more than just the surface level. Buried in them are the fundamental principles that I, and others, believe are the primary motivators for why people excel in their jobs. Lets look at them again.

Say what you are going to do.

Having the responsibility of communicating what you are going to do implies that you have a say in what you are going to do. The guideline doesn’t say ‘tell people what your boss told you to do’. Having a say in what you are doing in you job, even a little bit, turns out to be a strong motivator (having more say being more motivating, but some say is better than no say). This Autonomy, to decide what you do in your job, or how you do it, is one of the three motivators of success that Daniel Pink describes in his book “Drive” (check out http://www.danpink.com/drive for more information).

Do it.

More than just staying busy, humans like to do things well. The satisfaction of a job well done is a real thing; there is something about how our brain is wired that rewards us when we do a good job. Pink labels this motivator as Mastery, and his book describes a number of good arguments about how humans seek opportunities for mastery. Owning the responsibility to do what you say you are going to do brings it to a very personal level, and just happens to set up numerous opportunities for Mastery.

Hold yourself accountable to everyone (whether you got it done or not).

Telling people what you did, or didn’t do, presumes that the work you are doing actually matters. And in cases where the work actually doesn’t matter (busy work), the feedback from telling everyone about it goes a long way towards correcting the process used to choose the work, resulting in the work ‘mattering’ in the future. As you may have guessed by now, this part of the guideline delivers Pink’s third primary motivator, Purpose. Purpose is doing work that matters, or doing work for a reason bigger than ourselves. Holding yourself accountable, whether successful or not, goes a long way towards ensuring that the work you do has Purpose.

This set of guidelines turns out to serve multiple purposes, all of them beneficial. Individuals following the guidelines will benefit, and the organizations they are in will benefit. Doing these three things well, across your enterprise, will improve your organizations success, and your team’s morale.

Side note: long before I had read Pink’s book I believed in these guidelines. But I don’t think I really understood why these guidelines were so effective until Pink beautifully articulated the three primary motivators of Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. That the motivators he discusses happen to be ‘inside’ these guidelines is something I find fascinating to this day.

Introducing The THUD

I’ve just released the first public version of what I am calling The THUD. The THUD is a toolkit for managers and employees, intended to assist in discussions of career development. The THUD includes job role level descriptions covering many different disciplines (software programmers, project managers, producers, QA, artists, designers, etc.), as well as core set of Competencies and Competency Indicators. Some larger companies have toolkits like this, but many smaller companies do not. By making this toolkit freely available I hope to help as many managers and employees as possible.

I’ve set up a separate site for The THUD. Check out the new site, and The THUD, at http://thethud.wordpress.com

Slides from “Leadership Styles Your Team Needs”

The IGDA Leadership Forum was a fantastic conference. Not only did my presentation go well, but the overall quality of the content and the discourse was very high. I heartily reccomend aspiring leaders or seasoned leaders alike to participate in future years.

Below are the slides I used (with very minor modifications) for the lecture I gave at the event, entitled “Leadership Styles Your Team Needs”.

Self Inflicted Wounds: the slide deck

GDC Online is now behind us, and soon I will up posting a summary of the presentation. Until then, I wanted to share the slide deck for the many folks who have already asked for it.

The deck is not a complete summary of the presentation – it does not stand alone as well as it complements the rest of the presentation.

(For some folks the deck below has something covering it, which appears to be a problem with Slideshare. Select ‘view on Slideshare’ in the lower right to see the deck without issue.)

Self Inflicted Wounds: When We Are Our Own Worst Enemy

Each of us learns as a child that there are some things we should not do because the outcome is almost certainly going to be bad. We got told these things, and yet some of us have to learn the hard way, as if we didn’t really believe our parents when they said the oven was hot…

Building games, or delivering software of any kind, is no longer something we are inventing from the ground up. What we are building may be brand new, but the act of leading a complex software development process, even for games, is well understood. What we do is hard enough, and yet often we make it even harder by choosing to intentionally do things which are well understood to be ‘bad’.

Recently I was working on a post mortem for a large project I had been a part of shipping (I hate the term post mortem, but in this case its actually appropriate). In reviewing all of what we did that turned out to not work out as planned, I realized that most of these were things that we should have known to avoid – that instead of tripping up on the really hard parts we were a victim of the same common mistakes that are made over and over again in this industry.

I will be presenting at GDC Online this year, speaking on this very topic. After the show, which is early October, I will summarize the main points on There Is No Them.  I will be discussing the dozen or so most common Self Inflicted Wounds as I have experienced them, describing what they are, how we talk ourselves into accepting them, and what do to about it if you are struggling with them on your project. If you are headed to GDC Online stop by and say hello.

Kicking Ass and Taking Names

When you hear the phrase ‘kicking ass and taking names’ do you have generally positive thoughts? Does the idea that having a strong personality that can get down to business and get stuff done, not letting anyone get in your way, sound like an admirable thing?

Or, does this phrase make you shake your head, bringing back the memories of the jerks you have worked with in the past that seemed to live by this credo, seemingly unaware of the tumult and emotional abuse the create?

Goals Should be Useful (even if not SMART)

Having clear goals and expectations is part of setting any effort up for success. If you can’t articulate what you are out to accomplish how are you supposed to succeed? And yet, the act of creating goals at a team or individual level often gets either overlooked or watered down so much that the benefits of even having goals are hardly felt. To help people in setting good goals a variety of tools are available, but perhaps none is more well-known than SMART. A SMART goal is one that is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Results oriented, and Time based (see this Wikipedia article for a summary).

SMART goals can be valid, but too often result in a set of goals that sound good but in fact have little utility. When it comes to goals, one can judge the success or failure of a goal by how much it is used to direct day-to-day behaviour. A goal that gets written and ignored has almost no utility, and therefore of little value, no matter how SMART it is. A goal that gets used every day to help drive effort, even if it does not all of the elements of a SMART goal, has much more utility and is therefore a more successful goal.

A modern work environment bombards employees with many distractions and many competing efforts that each need attention. Telling employees to do everything right now is not helpful. Relying on leadership to make every one of these little decisions for employees is not believable (and even if possible, isn’t good for the organization). Leadership, by providing clear goals, can help employees decide for themselves which efforts to invest in vs those that can wait. Even if these goals are not always SMART, if the have utility they are serving your business.

Consider your current goals, both from your management and those you have provided to your teams. If you find yourself considering your goals at least once a day then you likely have a set of goals that is actually useful for you. But if you find that you can’t recall the last time the ‘official goals’ were thought about then you likely have a set of goals that is not serving your business. Having goals no one uses is like investing in features no one wants; consider having less-SMART goals if thats what it takes to make them useful.