Can you lead a team of 7 other people to show up at 4 AM and not pay them?
I’ve only been able to do this in a video game called Guild Wars.
Players make their own decision to wake up in the middle of the night to come play with me. I could call them endlessly, beg and cry but that doesn’t work. They could join another team. Play another game. Ignore me.
What could I offer other teams didn’t?
I understood my team wanted to win. We wanted to win with class. We picked builds suited for our style because we had limits on coordination given limited time to train together. Most of us had day jobs. We encouraged experimentation. We didn’t judge or criticize sub-optimal builds – we would try them out in low-risk situations before playing them in a tournament. We didn’t name-call others to keep drama at a minimum. This defined our culture.
We spent thousands of hours playing, strategizing, and debating tactics with my teammates on Ventrilo. I learned to resolve people problems without being in the same room as them. I can’t read their facial expressions so I’d have to infer emotions through tone of voice. These are people I would never see or meet in person. Yet I still remember all their names. All they could hear was my voice and read my chat messages. They couldn’t see my body language either.
These people skills I picked up surprisingly transferred to a work setting when I became a manager.
Your engineers could always switch to another company. Join another company. What makes your company special? I encouraged my team to research new technologies and try a few open source projects out. You want to keep the environment challenging and fun.
Here’s a few questions to think about which also map to a work environment
- How do you get this entire group of people to work with you for months or years?
- How do you coordinate with them?
- How do you change tactics on the fly?
- Let’s say several teammates don’t agree. How do you resolve conflict?
During a match loss, watching the replay helps improve teamwork because we see mistakes we’ve made and we document how we can correct them in our forums. Similar to handling fires at work and getting together for a post-mortem/retrospective.
If you’ve never managed people before and you play video games with other people – I highly encourage you to try leading a team online.
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