Managers Enable their Employees to Achieve their Goals (Criticism)

by Kahzgul, Wednesday, January 17, 2018, 14:41 (2290 days ago)

I know what I'm talking about when it comes to management because, back when I designed test teams for all 300 of Activision's testers, I sucked balls at managing them. I was horrible and my team hated me. I was a slave-driver and a stickler for the rules to the point where I would walk down the aisles of computers and just turn off people's stations if they weren't taking their mandatory breaks. This is because I had no training, no education, and - frankly - no business at being a manager. And yet there I was, promoted to the level of my own incompetence.

Which is not to say that we weren't successful. I delivered the only game in the 6 years that I worked for ATVI that passed 1st party approval on all three major consoles on our 1st submission. I saved the company a shitload of money and I made all of my testers better at their jobs. I wasn't trying to be a dick, I just thought being a dick was the only way to manage people and no one corrected me.

Since then I have learned otherwise. I've read a dozen management books, taken a class or two, and had several more years of experience in better structured management environments (read: Television).

The basics of management are very, very easy:

- A manager needs to know what the goals of his or her team are (I'm going to say "his" from here on out because I'm a dude and this is being relayed from my personal perspective).
- A manager needs to know about how capable each member of his team is.
- A manager needs to know what his team members need in order to achieve their goals.

As Cody mentioned in another thread today, Bungie is not communicating well within the company and, as we all know, they are not communicating well outside of their company either.

So let's start there: Communication.

- The goal is to let the outside world know what you're doing with your game.
- Your team is basically only 2 guys: Deej and Cosmo, who are both nice but neither is particularly proactive when it comes to communicating - they appear to always seek approval for their words from higher ups before they post. This is either their fault for being too cautious, or your fault as their manager for holding too tight of a leash. As a manager, it's important to let go of the reins and give your team the opportunity to surprise you. Hold the reins too tightly as I did at ATVI, and you're dooming your team to a stressful life and an uninspired level of achievement. Ultimately, they will lose their zest for the work.
- And what they need to succeed is they need to actually know what the hell you're doing with your game.

So there's a secondary goal which is required in order to achieve the primary objective:
- The goal is to find out what you're doing with your game.
- Your team is still just those same 2 guys who already have a job talking to the entire world.
- And what they need to succeed is unrestricted access to everyone at your company.

This seems to be how Bungie works right now. Deej and Cosmo spend forever talking to like 700 people in order to find out what's going on, which takes so long that the outside world feels like Deej and Cosmo are doing literally nothing. Furthermore, what some of those 700 people are doing is the opposite of what the others are doing, and the overall plans change quickly enough that Deej and Cosmo have to stop and start over partway through. Which is when you get Luke just posting manifestos online in order to appease the world, but this sort of thing also undercuts the work D and C are supposedly doing.

Don't forget that any communications department also has a second important role at your company: They need to let the people within the company know what the community is saying about the game. Not like reporters, just stating the facts, but like advocates, bringing the community's concerns to the devs with passion and understanding.

So I think what D & C need is not unrestricted access to everyone. I think they need more team members. Members who understand the community and its concerns, and members who simply can take some of the work off of the shoulders of D & C in order to free them up to communicate far, FAR more than they are right now.

Remember, managers, if your team has more work on their plate than they are capable of doing, that is not their fault or responsibility; that is management's fault and responsibility. It means you need to hire more team members, either to add to the team or replace members who aren't pulling their weight. In my experience, it is usually the former.

I don't know what the inner workings of Bungie are like, other than "terrible at communicating what the inner workings of bungie are like to the outside world." Frankly, that shouldn't even be a thing we care about, but it is, because bungie is also "terrible at communicating anything to the outside world" and that failure makes us all wonder what on god's green earth is going on behind those doors. We should not be wondering what is going on in there. We should be hearing, firsthand, on a daily basis, that the gears of progress are turning. And the people who work at Bungie should be hearing, firsthand, on a daily basis, what the community is talking about.

Someone in power at Bungie needs to figure out what needs to be done to make the game fun. Then they need to ask everyone else what they need to make that happen, and then that powerful person needs to use their power to give their employees whatever they need to make the game fun. Or this struggle is not going to go away, and the demoralizing nature of interacting with an angry public is going to become worse and worse.

Or bungie could just say "the game is what the game is, deal with it." But if Bungie is serious about wanting to make the game fun and have it be a daily hobby like D1 was, they need to double down on communication, inside and outside of their company. If they want me to throw my hard earned money at the screen, then they need to throw a shitload of hard money at their communications department.