So I've wrapped up my trimester conducting ethnographic research and interviews with games industry leadership, and I wanted to share a little of what I found. I've got a gigantic 125 page report on the whole thing so there's plenty to discuss. But I wanted to share some of the main findings and quotes from the research.
These interviews started with a 200 hour limit across the course of the 12 week trimester, so turn-around here had to be rapid. In this period of time I reached out to and onboarded 10 individuals who agreed to participate in the research. Another 17 expressed interest but for a variety of reasons they ended out either being unable to participate within the limited window or ended up just ghosting me. But overall this was a vastly larger expression of interest than I anticipated - I'd originally established a minimum of 5 interviewees doing 3 interviews each for this reason. But once I got 10 interviewees locked in, this dropped back to 2 interviews each.
The idea here was to go in, be naive, and ask questions about generally accepted and widely discussed industry subjects. Crunch, training, scheduling, leading others, dealing with vastly different disciplines - the stuff that generally makes up the day to day experience of a leader in the industry. I won't bore with the specific methods involved (it was the delphi method and thematic analysis, if you care), but the broad and simple questions proved to build a genuinely fascinating and sometimes surprising image of the industry.
A word cloud of the concepts based on how often they were raised in the interviews
It's important to consider when evaluating the results that the people that were interviewed donated their time to the cause. These were people who had invested their time in becoming better leaders, who cared about the subject - and so it could be expected that there was going to be bias. That the findings would be about what people who care about leadership think leadership should look like. As this was the intent of this research in the first place, this was a bias I was just fine with -I was more interested in what 'good' looked like than what the 'big picture' looked like.
The most interesting information to arise out of the interviews (for me) was about process. There's no real uniting methodology that informs the industry. I'm not talking about agile or scrum or whatever, but the way that a leader acts when around others. The people interviewed weren't career leaders, they'd started out their games leadership journey in other roles - programming, film, narrative - and all of them tied their leadership style back to where they started. Despite this, there was overlap. Leaders all discussed flexibility, the need to help the team get wins, having a vision of how things would run or how projects would end up, communicating and having emotional empathy. But the way they got there was vastly different.
For example: one of the people interviewed who had a background in film discussed at length about managing developers, quoting concepts from film. "An actor that gets overwhelmed with feedback from the director was likely the result of poor casting." This quote largely reflected their leadership and hiring strategies - hire people you trust, who are smarter than you, who you can rely on to do the job with minimal oversight. But this was exactly the way the other leaders were choosing to operate. Another leader with a background in narrative discussed how great it was to have somebody they could rely on doing the design and narrative work, so they could focus on management responsibilities. So good leaders hire for people they can trust to need minimal oversight.
A venn diagram of leadership concepts and their overlapping themes
Another one of the interesting findings was about transparency. Transparency got broken down into three key categories: transparency of circumstance, transparency of person (or authenticity), and transparency of assessment (or feedback). On the one hand, all leads expressed a need to be providing valuable feedback to the team. "Feedback needs to be given during the good times, that it's easier to accept during the bad times, and so that hte good feedback feels even better." But on the other hand, leaders were also concerned with how much information they shared with the team and when. To quote one interviewee, "everybody wants transparency until they don't." I'd heard an anecdote from an industry professional once about a studio that practiced ongoing transparency to the point of having a ticker in the studio showing the current remaining funds for the project. Even with 12 months of runway, it caused undue stress on the team as they began to panic that they had only 12 months of runway.
And this ties back well into the other commonly accepted leadership trait of emotional intelligence. Knowing when to share, when to push, when to pull back - the most effective leaders understand how their teams are feeling and respond appropriately. Emotional intelligence seemed to be tied rather closely to ideas of flexibility and expectations often discussed by the leaders interviewed. That meeting a target or a set vision would never be done to the level of perfection that was imagined, and so there needed to be an opportunity for people to understand how close was close enough. Emotional intelligence drove the need for flexibility, and expectations needed to be communicated to team members to understand that they had that flexibility available to them.
The situational leadership model
Two leadership styles were discussed at length that seem to resonate with games industry leadership: servant leadership, and situational leadership. While neither one of these things was something that anybody felt should be followed with any sort of specific rigor, the ways in which leaders were acting seemed to echo the key intent of these styles. Situational leadership is (in my opinion) almost over-developed for working with people, messy and changing as people are. But it highlights at the very least the key ways in which leaders agreed they typically approached conversations: directing, coaching, supporting, and delegating. However the other aspect of this toolset used by the games industry was servant leadership which - rather than being a style unto itself - is more of an intent. That whatever outcome there is of your leadership should be that your team wins.
The ideal games industry leader guides and assists people that are much smarter than them, so that they are unburdened in the act of making great things.