Art Leadership Channel is LIVE on Discord

Greetings, everyone!

I wanted to send a special THANK YOU to those who attended any of the six sessions we had at GDC 2019.  As you may recall, each participant was asked to fill out a survey for each session.  As a direct result of your presence and participation, three of the roundtables this year earned the #1, #2, and #3 highest rated sessions at GDC (out of 410 sessions that week).

Wow!

The big announcement however is that the Art Leadership Channel on Discord is finally LIVE. 

Many of you have encouraged me to launch this for several years, and I'm happy to say that I finally took the first step in creating an online community for us.  We're going to start small with a single #general channel, but we'll grow as the community grows.  Anyway, please join the channel and introduce yourselves.

https://discord.gg/gEEc7J

Feel free to share the link with others.  The roundtables are proof that there is a large community interested in Art Leadership and no reason for us to only interact one week every year.

Thanks again and hope to chat soon.

GDC 2019 - Art Leadership Roundtable: Early Career Day 1 & Day 3

This final set of notes comes from the Great and Powerful Ozz -- Matt Oztalay, to be more precise.  Thanks, Matt, for taking notes and for sharing them with everyone!

Day 1

Demographics: Roughly even split between students, juniors, mid, lead and art directors with a noticeable dip in “Seniors”

How do you manage non-native speakers if you’re having communication issues?

• Ask for feedback early & often
• Communicate w/ images
• Whiteboards are your friends
• Patience
• Give a pile of feedback all at once so no one gets stuck on any one piece of actionable info.
• Show them specifically what they’re doing wrong
• Draw overs with both good and bad examples

New person needs guidance, but has gotten codependent. How do you encourage independence even though you’re mentoring someone?

• Be up-front about it/Toss the baby out of the nest
• Start using “How can you explore this?”
• What have you do so far to explore this problem?
• Assurances that they can explore
• “You can do it”/positive feedback
• “Who else can you ask?”
• Could be a fear of failure, make sure they realize that that’s okay.
• Framework & limitations for asking for help
• Timebox yourself and answer
• Remove the fear of failure
• Ask questions, don’t provide answers. Teach them to fish
• What I would do if I didn’t know is ____
• Ask someone
• Check documentation
• This can backfire, though. Keep communication open. Check in if you haven’t heard from them in a bit.
• Rubber duck for them
• Establish goals w/ periodic & predictable check-ins

How do you context switch?

• Split your day/week explicitly
• Pick the right music. Shift you energy levels w/ different genres.
• Reach out to your producers to take up some of your weight w/ tasking and planning.
• Switch during breaks (bathroom, snack, lunch, meetings.)
• Don’t lose the forest for the trees. Look at your roadmap every so often.
• Post-its. If someone comes to you with a problem, start writing it on a post it and add it to your existing wall of post-its. People maybe need a visual representation of how busy you are.
• Mix up your day based on the energy needs of your tasks
• Change your space depending on your task at hand

Growing your art team?

• Hiring up?
• Do it slowly. Make sure you’re bringing on people who are comfortable working at the size you’re growing to not the size you’re coming from (eg. If you’re growing to 50 people, hire people who are comfortable working at a 50 person company)
• Make sure you can still give feedback Narrated videos, record what you did that day & your intent
• Get to know these people before you bring them on
• Start making tutorials from your studio to your studio
• Keep in connection w/ the people you already have
• As you grow, people will specialize & make sure the people you have get to specialize how they want to. Don’t hire people into the specialities that your existing staff want to move into
• Document your tribal knowledge
• Think about capabilities and attributes (what they can do, and who they are)
• Start building a talent pipeline now, start working w/ local educational institutions.
• Build up your company as a place people will want to work
• Train up on hiring biases
• Ask your direct reports their opinions first. Start asking opinions of the most junior person first.
• Get your people out in the community b/c we all want to work w/ people that we know and admire.
• At what scale do you need to hire the support staff? Tech artists? HR? Production?
• Write job descriptions for the people you already have and want to replicate
• Internships

How do you know when you want to lead?

• If you want to be a lead & aren’t yet start small w/ mentorship of interns & juniors
• Show interest in bigger problems
• Passion to help other people
• Approach you rAD/AM to shadow. Get to see what it actually takes to be a lead/manager
• How are you at receiving critique/feedback?
• If you have a professional disconnect then you’re in a good place to advance
• Leaders are chosen by the team, managers are appointed by someone else
• Do you want to serve & help people? Do they want you in that position? Do your coworkers come to you w/ problems?
• Ask your leads about process & questions
• “If you were in my position, what would you do?”

Day 3

How do you pivot when you know you’ve messed up?

• catch=up talks
• Go for coffee, get out of the office
• Recognize that you messed up
• Communicate that to the people you affected
• Have a plan for how you’ll rectify it
• It’s important to fail & evaluate those failures
• Mediator or lead to help you talk it out
• Fail safely
• Sometimes we don’t know we failed
• We project ourselves onto others & we get myopic of their needs
• It should be safe for them to call you out & for you to improve
• Reflect in a journal. Mentor yourself. Not every personality responds well to the same thing
• Trust in your mentees, leaders, and yourself that you won’t lose your job
• What were your mentees’’ worries and fears. What were they expecting in that situation? Find out what problems they’re facing and have to figure out where they are
• Your bosses also need to mentor you on leading others

How do you deal with imposter syndrome for yourself and your team?

• Improv and public speaking, comfort in the spotlight
• listening , give yourself time to listen and digest
• Power stances, assume the character of a leader
• Someone put you in that position because they trusted you. Someone saw your skills and abilities and thought you were capable of the role.
• It’s easy to lose sight of what you’ve been through to get where you are. You have VALUE
• The role models we have don’t show their failures and weaknesses, so it can lead us to believe they don’t fail
• Mentoring students, because you definitely have something to offer them
• It’s very taxing on everyone else around you to constantly have to reassure you
• Treasure yourself. Would you treat yourself the same way you’d treat a friend going through the same thing?
• Rewire and retrain your brain.
• Eliminate self-deprecating language
• Change how you react to your own failures
• Turn a bad outcome into a good outcome
• Write down your achievements
• “ I can always go back to what I was doing before the imposter syndrome set in”
• Step into it and like it. Everything is new all the time, there’s so much to learn and you should embrace it
• Short time to failure. Make crap and we’ll fix it.
• Artists fall into it more b/c our skills and abilities are manifest, but leadership has no portfolio
• Be careful w/ yourself. Recognize your accomplishments.
• Teach what you know to other people.

Toxic Coworkers/Employees

• Vacate the brilliant jackass.
• Japan has trouble w/ this due to permanent employees (tenure)
• How and when do you escalate a problem?
• Positivity is hard to spread
• Toxicity spreads quickly
• Hard to break momentum of toxic
• How can you change a skills-focused company?
• Make it a Business thing. Toxic people cost money
• Trust each other when someone turns toxic
• Have to be clear w/ people about changes and if they don’t want to change it’s their problem to deal with it
• Change themselves or leave
• When hiring, be clear about culture.
• You just can’t change truly toxic people
• They want to change their environment to match their life
• Charismatically toxic -> Cut ‘em
• Conversely if your organization won’t change then it’s time to leave
• How do you communicate why a toxic person was fired?
• Reiterate company values.
• How do you communicate why you’re leaving a toxic workplace?
• Be clear and candid. Give them an opportunity to change
• Sometimes people will dish in their exit interviews the things they never said
• If you’ve already said something, they probably already know why you’re leaving
• Depends on who you’re talking to

How do you build your team?

• Beer friday
• Show & tell
• Team lunches
• Field trips
• Board games
• Potlucks
• It’s easier to work with friends

GDC 2019 - Art Leadership Roundtable Notes: Early Career Day 3

This set of notes come courtesy of Jessica da Silva.  Special thanks to Jess for taking these notes and also allowing me to share them with all of you!

Managing skill growth in the team

• Heartbeats instead of sprints which are 6 weeks long but with a last 7th week dedicated to training and leadership lunches
• Work outside of work to skill up (extracurricular) and give the opportunity for people to prove themselves in a new role.  But they have to prove themselves first as it can be too dangerous to train them in the production pipeline
• Classes between projects instead of sprints
• 1st Wednesday of each month as a training day where people can work on an area unrelated to their job and projects if they like.  If unavailable in a certain month, days in lieu but the expectation and time block is set.

Managing Passion and Emotions

• If working remotely, talk face-to-face or in a call if things start to get heated
• Keep the team grounded in the project’s needs, goals, and scope; “That’s great, but…”
• Start with and agree on (come back to) facts, “what’s the goal here?”

Managing Toxicity or things becoming personal

• Soft skills
• Sit aside and talk together about how talking like that is not productive
• If it continues - HR
• Letting go of toxic or un-self-aware or hero people can be a net gain for the team
• Give everyone a chance to voice their opinions, quiet people can be accidentally pushed out of the conversation
• “Why are you frustrated?” “Why do you think the other person is frustrated?” Reframe perspective
• “Are you serving yourself or the project?
• Catch ups once every 2 weeks 1-on-1
• Let people have their emotions away from the team and then when they give feedback, reframe it always to the pillars/goals

Managing Introverts

• Take the introverts aside and hear their views first to warm team up and then in the meeting “I was talking to X about this and they have a really good idea about this” - put them on the spot a little, but give them a chance to warm up 
• Remind people they can come to you after the meeting and it’ll be taken into account, leave that door open
• Try to uncover why they’re shy.  Are they uncomfortable around someone or just socially anxious
• Company team building / getting coffee
• It takes time, proper culture, they need to see it’s safe to come out of their shell

Managing mixed directions from management

• Broadcast to people (about the thrash) who can affect change
• It takes time to change
• CEOs are kept in the ivory tower for a reason
• Try to communicate upwards that this confuses, causes anxiety and thrash and that it can throw spanners in the works (make things worse, reduce productivity)
• Don’t waste teams production time in unnecessary meetings (clear agendas and broadcast “Who do I need to tell?”)

Managing Leads

• Once a week leads discuss problems / research ideas / team management to be a team and help each other develop their management skills
• Shadow another lead to grow organically
• 1-on-1 to discuss strengths and weaknesses early and to discuss direction
• Iterate that failure at the role is okay and that we’ll find something that works for them together
• Specialist vs. Leadership track to help eliminate want to be leads and still have a path for growth without having to become a lead (if unsuitable for it)
• Provide job description (expectations developed with HR) to provide clear expectations of what being a lead is

 Managing Retention

• Do they want advancement or more money?  Decouple advancement from compensation because titles come with new expectations and tasks.

 Hiring Diversity

• Diverse interviewers
• Wording the ad to encourage other people to apply 

Managing Meetings

• Blocking in time blocks for meetings to take place in; Tuesday/Thursday afternoons
• One dedicated meeting free day per week (Wednesday)
• Block out areas on your own calendar for producers to respect and schedule around
• “What kind of meeting is it?  Who are the key stakeholders? Agenda?  Desired outcomes?”
• Shared with producers and directors, clear meeting plans will aid “who do I need to tell” and having the right attendees and goals
• Block off time for leads and directors where the teams know they won’t be in meetings and can be around to help the team.
• Book - Death by Meeting
• Color coding meetings
• Green - In depth, detailed
• Yellow - More high level, etc.
• Using DiSC and having team post up type of communication on desk so people know how to best talk to them
• What kind of decisions does the director have to be in on?  Which can be trusted to the artist / people in the field?
• More on personality color coding using lego bricks on desk in order of communication method
• MBTI personality test
• Basecamp - Art management tool
• Delegating, having shadows and leads to stop spreading too thin “Who is the best person to be solving this problem” and build that relationship with them
• Frequently asked or sought advice to question if you need a cheat sheet or your style guide is missing something.  Is this a reaction or something I can do to support my team’s independence - tutorial videos + wiki
• Losing credibility as an artist?  Swap one project as a lead and the next as a senior/principal

 

Managing time investment in the work

• A scale of quality.  A brick wall: “We need this to be a 3” (out of 10)
• Not every asset has to be awesome and giving a metric can help know how much detail needs to go into each asset
• Not everything needs to be a hero piece, and in fact needs to be generic

Managing critique

• Positive reinforcement, no shame, no blame
• Team effort to work through productivity and goal behind critiquing work

Managing toxicity

• Official warning
• Toxicity is very quick and easy to spread, but positivity is hard to cultivate
• Re enforce and solidify company values and ideal culture
• Emphasize and spend a lot of time in hiring to find fits who aren’t just hard-skilled
• Quantify it money-wise, a toxic person affecting 10 people’s productivity will cost more money
• Two types of toxic people
• Openly toxic and Charismatic toxic
• Charismatic toxic is bad for the company, but bring people into the team
• More actively separate yourself, refuse to work with them and cut them out of your team
• “You can want to manage and put up with them, but I do not.”
• When firing charismatic toxic people and to not look like you’re firing them for speaking their mind:  “I can’t go into why we’re firing them, because we have to respect their privacy, but here are our company values and so long as you are in line with these, you are welcome and safe to keep working here.”
• Do reviews with your team about new members during probation

GDC 2019 - Art Leadership Roundtable: Veteran Day 2

This set of notes come courtesy of Elizabeth Blythe.  Endless thanks to Elizabeth for taking these notes and permitting me to share them with all of you.  On a personal level, I especially wanted to thank all of the attendees/participants in this session.  The conversation about diversity and inclusivity was one of the most earnest and heartfelt discussions we've had at GDC.

 How to develop your leads?

• Responder: We faced team problems, run once per week without the Art Director directing. The team would pick topics. Extreme ownership was a book they'd read and had discussions. Treated management as a craft and something that can be learned. One person good at time management would help one another out.

• Responder - Try to have the convo earlier in the career to identify what a person wants to do, identify strengths and where they want to go, then train on that organically. Provide some guidelines with a little bit of structure. Assign another art director as a mentor, then have them meet twice per month. Also, if they fail at a role, have convos about how that failed.

• Responder - working as an art group to define what the leadership structure looks like. When leveling, we defined 2 second tracks - leadership and specialist.

• Responder- large teams with co-dev. Leads and directors for a single project across studios - having a job description is part of what we start with. It sets expectations, an check it monthly with the person. There's a three tier approach, and get feedback from the lead, asking them what they think they need to start-stop-continue. The expectations gives clarity.

• Responder - I'm interested in retention and titling. Prevent people from leaving when there is no chance for advancement? The current structure is an entry - associate - chair - self.  - people leaving due to a feeling of lack of advancement. Meaningful one-on-ones to discern what they want… more money versus wanting to "advance". Try to decouple compensation with costs.

Anyone have experience with tactical ideas and strategies to improve diversity on their staff?

• Responder - Mention that they prefer apps from under-represented groups. A lot of emphasis on showing off their studio culture as being very considerate and diverse. We also get work experience students in that are often under-represented. Send women developers to conferences and cons, help them with costs, and make an effort to make them the face of the organization. Talk to under-represented team members and make an effort to make certain they're heard.

• Responder- spent a lot of time getting the word out to get a super diverse group. Made certain to promote in places that had reach to the applicant pool, like websites that support diversity.

• Responder - make sure the target audience sees the adverts is a key issue. Also, get away from the idea that some implicit biases are bullshit - hire for skill, not assumptions about how that skill can be applied. For example, hiring women to make a [shooter] game was nervous, because the team wasn't sure how they'd go with guns, etc, but it turned out fine

• Responder: flexible work hours has really helped us get people of various backgrounds, like people with kids and other stages of life. yes, rethinking about people being able to work remotely is a huge advantage.

• Responder - thinking about changing which schools we recruit from because when you hire from a specific school, you inherit the school's biases. We have implemented diversity rules because we need our team to mirror our clients.

• Responder - There are recruitment agencies like Bain and Amethyst can help you change the wording of your job advertisements to get feedback on how to make the ad more broadly appealing.

• Responder - Presenting at school, but also getting senior positions to be filled with diverse groups, like having a woman senior manager who goes and does presentations at schools. It makes us seem more friendly to diverse groups and got us a bigger pool of applicants.

• Responder - established a group to promote gender equality at schools and events. Another thing, there are services where we allow everyone to attend, but we market to women (for example) solely because women seemed turned off by things they think are targeted towards men.

• Responder: be cautious when asking someone to advocate or present for you because when being asked to go do this, it often feels like "I was used to tick a box instead of being treated like a person." I became the 'demographic' instead of a person.

• Responder - the ads get people interested, sure, but the culture is what keeps them. Also, the games you make. Or the culture, like dude bro culture with people making sexist comments on Slack but you feel powerless to respond or stop it. Stop treating women like unicorns and fairys, and encourage women to come and speak even if they don't want to or feel patronized. Women want to be treated like anyone else, seriously, respectfully, and as critically as anyone else.

• Responder - I want to add another word of caution around having female employees speak at very public events and forums. Be considerate of the online harassment experience they are likely to encounter online. We heavily moderate chats and are supporting those employees we send out there, moderating their media streams or supporting them is huge. Also, general stuff to make a studio more attractive to women:

• Flexible work hours

• Ability to work remote

• Showing children are welcome in the studio (Ex. holds trick and treat events and other family/kid events)

• Once was told an interviewee that we had tampons and other things in the bathroom that showed her we thought about people with different bodies' different experiences

• Responder: We hosted a group called DIY girls to give girls the opportunity as a kid to explore what opportunities there are to expose them. We also did this at high schools.

• Responder: I've seen it happen to people around me - it's important that people are not hired as a 'diversity hire' - they want to be hired because they're a great fit. So you need a great pool of applicants, but if someone around says something like 'you only got that job because you were a woman', it's very harmful because it makes her doubt she's there for any reason other than her skill. Always reinforce this and give them a space to speak about it when this sort of thing happens otherwise the women will begin to doubt themselves and cut themselves off socially, harming their connection to the team, even though they weren't the one who caused the problem by undermining a coworker. It's bad for everyone.

•  Responder: Yes, you need strong leadership and culture to tamp that down and reinforce the culture of diversity and respect.

• Responder: One of the most powerful thing is to consciously strive to have a diverse network - consciously strive to make the people you hang out with diverse. People naturally want to hire people they know, so make sure you know diverse people. Consciously make an effort to diverse and connect as much as you can.

• Responder: Also, hire from your community, as communities tend to be quite diverse.

• Responder: Don't hire 'mini-me's. It really hit home with me, we want to hire people who think like us. Also, diversify the people interviewing - bring in people who will be working with them. Sometimes Art Leads and Directors think they need to do it all, but I often get the best hiring feedback from people who are working as peers. It gets different eyes on skills.

• Responder: We should, if all possible, do NOT have all male interviewers. Women may suss out creeps while male interviewers may not notice anything untoward aimed towards them.

• Responder: Create a mechanism to allow people to safely express their concerns about diversity, the content they're making, etc.

• Responder: have a studio in a location that is SAFE to walk to or crunch in late at night or walk to during the day. For example, a woman won't want to go to work in a place that has a dark parking lot they have to navigate at night.

• Responder: Yes, take the time to install lights, security measures, etc.

GDC 2019 - Art Leadership Roundtables

Greetings, everyone!  First of all, I wanted to thank everyone who attended the roundtable sessions this year.  For those who couldn't make it, we decided to try something a bit different this time.

This year, we had six (6!) roundtable sessions.  In response to feedback, I decided to moderate three roundtables each for both "Early Career" and "Veteran" to ensure that attendees had a reasonable expectation of what types of topics might be discussed in each session.

While survey feedback has not yet been received, in-person responses seemed to be largely positive.  However, this change to the roundtables did not come without a cost.  Past readers have come to expect a pretty robust write-up on these sessions.  Increasing the number of roundtables to six (6!) meant that I simply don't have the wherewithal to provide a lengthy write-up for each.

Thankfully, a small number of people offered to share their notes with me (and thus all of you), which I will post in the days to come.  For those who might be interested, here are the topics that were discussed this year:

Early Career - Day 1:

• Student Question - Working with peers who have English as a second language, resolving conflict while preserving trust, working towards clarity
• Mentorship - How to encourage others to become more independent, learning how to pull away with creating the sense of "abandonment"
• Switching Gears - how to manage the mental shift from one type of work to another type of work
• Growing your Team - small studio concerns about growing from very small (2) to a functional team (5)
• Path to a "Lead" role - expectations, skills, qualities

Early Career - Day 2:

• Generalist Artists to Specialists (3D) - growing your art skills
• Managing heated discussions / conflict - reframing questions, establishing goals, clear metrics for success
• Introversion for Artists and Leads - understanding and growing your energy levels, clarifying what the team needs, making time to prepare
• Conflict between Directors - hashing it out away from the team, avoiding office politics, strategies to achieve resolution
• Balancing Time between Communication and Content Creation - clarity of purpose, reducing iteration, shared objectives and timelines

Early Career - Day 3:

• Mentorship failure - "cutting the cord," communicating problems upward, finding different opportunities
• Impostor syndrome - managing anxiety, confidence through teaching
• Toxic Coworkers - communicating with management, separating work
• Team Building exercises - leadership training, art jams, game jams
• Coworkers Dating - perils to communication, clarifying expectations, establishing boundaries

Veteran - Day 1:

• Outsourcing - strategies, art tests, communication, delivery systems
• Unifying Team Cultures - multi-team challenges, aligning expectations, department social events
• Growing Directors - clarifying motivations, expectations, early leadership opportunities
• Retention / Promotion - Titling systems other than "lead" and "director," differentiating paths

Veteran - Day 2:

• Mentoring Leads - directors investing proper time, leadership struggles, leaning away from content creation
• Titling and Retention - developing different career paths, understanding employee goals, unique challenges
• Diversity / Inclusivity - developing studio strategies, recognizing blind spots, demonstrating respect while avoiding "unicorn treatment"

Veteran Day 3:

• Meetings - controlling your schedule, blocking out "desk time" to do work, respecting Focus
• Project Needs vs. Team Needs - unifying goals where possible, compromise solutions, recognizing shifts during the development cycle
• Obsessive working - avoiding burnout, effectiveness vs. hours
• Critique Culture - art nor artist, clarifying metrics of success, improving "safety"

Once again, you expect some more robust write-ups in the weeks to come.  These notes were collected from attendees and full credit will be given to each individual when I post.  If you attended the roundtables and would like to share your notes, please contact me.

Thanks for reading!

GDC2019 - Presentation Slides

Hey, everyone

I just wanted to say thank you to the large group of people who attended my presentations this year.  Thanks also to those of you who came up afterwards and asked questions or simply expressed appreciation.  And also thanks to the person who came up and asked if they could have their picture taken with me after my talk ... I'm still curious WHY someone would want a picture with me but I'm going to take it as a compliment.

If you're looking for the slides for those presentations, here they are:

Art Direction Bootcamp:  Don't Forget the Team: Directing Careers

Producer Bootcamp:  Fix Your Broken Meetings