The following is part one of a summation of what I’ve taught in the most comprehensive of my manager training classes for game devs, a version of which was recently held at a client’s office over the course of two days. This is not all of the things you need to know as a people leader. It’s not even all of the subjects I offer for training. But it’s the most information I’ve ever accumulated in one place and it’s been used in a real world setting to teach game dev managers, so I thought somebody might find it useful.

I typically present this material in a classroom setting using Google Slides, thus much of the value comes from my witty repartee and scintillating monologue as opposed to the written word. That’s my way of apologizing in advance for sentence fragments, colloquialisms, and Twitter-inspired verbiage. This wasn’t written for a book. It was, however, written to further my goal of putting myself out of a job by removing dysfunctionality from our industry’s people operations. When that happens I can finally move on to my much more lucrative second career in residential landscaping.

And now (minus any client-specific, proprietary information), here’s the training material.

Intro

For the uninitiated, you can read more about my background on my website. TL;DR I have a pretty good basis for teaching about quality leadership for game developers.

First up, let’s clarify some terms.

Leader = Anyone responsible for the performance, behavior, or emotional or physical well-being of one or more employees. Other people use different definitions, this is mine. Dr. John Maxwell, for instance, states leadership is simply influence, and that there’s an important distinction between “leader” and “manager”. Fair enough. I’m happy to go down the path of semantics, but not here. In this material, a manager is a leader...essentially interchangeable.

Also, I’ll say “developer” a lot. A developer is anyone working at a company involved in the development of video games. HR? Accounting? Front desk? Developers.

As for the links and other sources I refer to in this documentation, it’s all material I’ve read. That’s not the same as an endorsement -- for instance, I’m not the biggest Maxwell fan -- but I think it’s important for you to know I didn’t just randomly Google this stuff.

When I begin a class I want to get people thinking about what makes a leader good or bad in their mind. Rarely does anyone need much prompting to think of such an example. I ask everyone, “Take a post-it and think of a manager you’ve had that you’d consider Good or Bad. Write something on the post-it to explain why you’d categorize them that way.” Common positive characteristics people write down are “good listener” and “mentor”. Probably the single most popular negative trait is “micro-manager”.

Often the bad outweighs the good by about two to one. I’ll read aloud some of the common or noteworthy post-its and then start talking about some data from Google.

Courtesy of Google's Project Oxygen:

This exercise serves a couple of important purposes. First, it gets people thinking about quality leadership and the impact it’s had on them and others. Second, it serves as a decent icebreaker to encourage participation. My classes are never “just sit there quietly and listen to me”. I think that’s a crummy way to impart knowledge.

Next we move on to…

Emotional Intelligence

Much of this material comes from Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry, which I’ve found to be an easy read that uses realistic workplace and social situations as examples.

Not everyone's heard of Emotional Intelligence (often abbreviated EQ) so I lead in with "What are 'soft skills'?" because most people *have* heard of those.

The first exercise: What are soft skills and who doesn't need them? Write your thoughts on post-its and put them on a nearby wall.

Reading a few of the best responses tends to be pretty fun. So far, I’ve learned that the demographic of “doesn’t need soft skills” includes zombies, shepherds, and some guy who spends six months at a stretch alone in a fire tower. Notwithstanding those exceptions, people quickly agree everyone needs soft skills. And what they’re really saying -- although they may not realize it yet -- is that everyone needs to develop their emotional intelligence.

For a digestible definition of EQ I turn to the godfather of this field of study, Daniel Goleman:

Most simply put, EQ breaks down into personal competence (self-awareness and self-management) and social competence (social awareness and relationship management).

From Working with Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman: