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