Chapter 19
Coaching Teams for Greatness
One of the main lessons I’ve learned from decades of game development is that you don’t remember the games you shipped so much as the people you worked with making them. The teams I most fondly remember are the ones that enjoyed the work and the camaraderie. Coincidentally (or not), these teams made the most successful games.
In 2012, Google launched project “Aristotle” in a quest to identify what made its greatest teams great. For Google, a great team, as Aristotle famously said, is one in which “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” The study eventually found that, other than intelligence or skill, what differentiated high-performing teams from dysfunctional ones was the level of emotional intelligence: how team members treated one another and responded to problems.
What Is a “Great Team”?
Almost every game development veteran I’ve asked has been on at least one great team in his or her career. A great team is often described as being:
Productive: Able to accomplish an exceptional amount of useful work almost every day
Engaging: Very interested in where the work was headed, and members felt they were valuable contributors
Successful: Able to provide the result of what was usually a good game
Enjoyable: Able to take pleasure in the work and the people they worked with
Game development teams are fortunate to work in a field where the best work comes from teams that enjoy doing that work.
I’ve been on a few such teams in my career and when I learned about Scrum, I felt that the framework supported the creation and nurturing of great teams by separating the typical role of project management into the Product Owner role and the Scrum Master role. These roles are in place to balance the pressures of “building the right game” and “building it the right way.”
Why Coaching?
In sports, coaching is often the most critical factor of a team’s success, despite the fact that a coach isn’t the best at any position. Coaches create team cohesiveness and build a sense of teamwork. They keep the team focused on the big goal and reflect what they are seeing back to the team.
It’s the same for game teams. A coach isn’t the best artist or programmer. He or she helps the team be better by helping it grow and focus on its goals.
The Solutions in This Chapter
This chapter explores coaching, facilitation, and tools that can be used to help teams grow their maturity and reach higher levels of productivity and engagement with their work.
Coaching Skills
A good parent focuses not on solving every problem for their children but on helping them grow to be self-sufficient adults who can solve their own problems. It’s the same for coaching, and it’s the biggest challenge a coach can face: not taking the easy path to solve someone’s problems but to help them grow as problem solvers.
This section describes the “stance” that coaches take with those they are coaching, techniques for how to facilitate conversation and agreement among groups, and some fundamental tools a coach can use along the way.
My Path to Coaching
After decades of making games as a hobby, I finally landed my dream job at Angel Studios in the early nineties. Shifting careers from defense work to video game development was a shock. The work environment was less formal, and the level of technology and innovation involved with making games far exceeded that in the defense industry.
Given my experience managing small defense projects, I found myself leading game teams within a year. I wasn’t promoted for my leadership ability, however. I wasn’t a good leader. I didn’t inspire people. I led by anger and intimidation, which was driven by my well-founded insecurity as someone thrown into a position he had no experience or training for.
As any such leader soon learns, the stress and burden of micromanagement became overwhelming. People didn’t take initiative in solving problems when there was little upside but lots of downside. A mistake means an angry leader. I ended up attempting to solve hundreds of problems per week that an engaged team should solve on its own.
As a result, the burnout of the role almost led me to leave the industry. Instead I disengaged and started letting people solve problems and even make mistakes. I worked on unlearning how to micromanage and how to coach. This eventually led me to my current role as a professional coach and trainer.
Scrum Master as Coach
Scrum created the role of the Scrum Master specifically to be a team coach. So, if you are using Scrum, when I talk about a “coach” in this chapter, I’m referring to the Scrum Master.
The Coaching Stance
A coaching stance is the mental or emotional disposition coaches adopt when assisting others. It helps them position themselves in relation to what a person or team truly needs, and will most benefit from, to foster growth.
“It’s like Coaching Soccer”
“I’ve actually been teaching Scrum here to our IT department and adapting it for their needs. The approach I have been taking is the same one they taught us at the national coaching school for soccer: Start simple and work toward complex. When coaching kids’ soccer, you start with the basics and the individual, then progress to 1 versus 1, then 2 versus 2, then 6 versus 6 etc., until
you work your way up to a very complex, full-sided game. I took the same approach with the IT guys, starting with the basics and just worrying about the Fibonacci sequence or goal language in a vacuum. Eventually we did relative sizing and goal language together and worked our way up to full-fledged Scrum with Stand Ups in our first Sprint. We had good success with it.”
—Erik Theisz, Certified Scrum Professional and Scrum Master
Definition
Client refers to the person you are coaching (I prefer client to “coachee”).
The following sections cover specific ways in which successful coaches can be most effective in supporting their teams and helping them grow.
Maintain Neutrality
When helping a client with a problem, you usually have a solution in mind. Trying to force your solution creates barriers and gets you emotionally invested in seeing your suggestion adopted.
Maintaining neutrality means keeping that opinion to ourselves and helping those we’re coaching create their own solution—and then helping them implement it, even if we believe it might fail. Owning a solution, even a failed one, helps clients grow. We also have to have the humility to acknowledge the possibility that the client will see solutions we do not. Note that asking powerful questions (described later in this chapter) along the way can help others make better decisions and avoid failure while learning.
Serve the Client’s Agenda
As a new Agile coach, my initial goal was to “help” people “be Agile,” even if it wasn’t what they were ready for or even wanted. I was doing them a disservice.
A coach needs to discover the true agenda from the developer to the studio executives who invite your coaching. Sometimes it’s just the need to open up communication between layers of the studio. Whatever that true agenda is, you need to serve it and not your own. Trust your clients. They know what they need better than you.
Maintain Your Principles
One time, I visited a studio that excelled at its effective micromanagement of developers. The developers were miserable and their productivity reflected that. The studio’s agenda was to find ways to increase that micromanagement. I wasn’t about to coach that agenda.
This sounds like it violates the two stances previously described, but a coach has to have principles and the integrity to follow them. You don’t simply want to assist in building dysfunction. You also don’t want to shame clients into behaving differently. You want to treat them with compassion and be clear about how the principles can help them, but also be honest with what you observe happening, without judgment.
Have Compassion
You have to truly care for your clients and their journey. You have to assume they have the best intentions. When you start to think you know better and that they are in some way lacking for not seeing what you do, you have lost.
Treat them like family members who are on a journey they are leading themselves along. They will make their own decisions that will lead beyond their current job or role in the future. You only want the best for them along that journey.
That attitude will clearly come through to them.
Facilitation
The most basic skill for a coach is group facilitation, which is the skill of helping groups of people reach consensus. This section explores a pattern of doing that and reviews tools to help you facilitate, rather than direct, your team.
The Diamond of Participatory Decision-Making
A useful pattern to help in group facilitation is called the Diamond of Participatory Decision-Making (Kaner, 2014). The diamond is a guide for facilitating collaborative group decisions through the following three stages:
Divergent zone: In the divergent zone, people are exploring ideas and sharing possibilities. Here the facilitator helps participants explore more options and avoid stopping at familiar ideas or opinions. Also called ideation, this is where all ideas are brought forward without judgment or evaluation.
Groan zone: This is the period in the middle where those with different frames of reference attempt to understand others’ ideas. A facilitator’s role here is help build the shared context and strengthen relationships.
Convergent zone: Having created a shared understanding or frame of reference, the group narrows down ideas/opinions to converge on a decision.
The diamond pattern, shown in Figure 19.1, applies to almost any group collaboration you can imagine.
Figure 19.1 The Diamond of Participatory Decision-Making
Here’s an example of how the diamond pattern can be used to guide Retrospectives:
Divergent zone: Each member of the team records specific events or situations that occurred since the last Retrospective that helped or hindered his or her progress. Each of these is recorded on self-stick notes that are randomly placed on a whiteboard or flip chart.
Groan zone: The group arranges the self-stick notes using affinity mapping (described later in the section, “Affinity Mapping”) to find common patterns.
Convergent zone: Using root cause analysis (described below), the team finds the root cause of what went right or wrong and some practices to try that will improve teamwork.
The reason to separate these zones is that most often group efforts dive into problem solving too quickly. As a result, only the loudest voices or “HiPPOs”1 get the attention.
1. Highest Paid Person’s Opinion
Other Facilitation Tools
The following are other facilitation tools that I find most useful.
Planning Poker
As described in Chapter 9, “Agile Release Planning,” planning poker is a useful facilitation tool for estimating story points. It can also be used for estimating tasks and evaluating value, priority, or anything else you can assign a number to.
Rank Ordering
As described in Chapter 7, “The Product Backlog,” rank ordering is a collaborative tool that allows groups to create a linear rank of things relative to one another. We’ve used this practice to even rank local restaurants!
Affinity Mapping
One of my favorite tools, affinity mapping groups sets of items into categories to elicit patterns. The most common use is to ask a group to create a list independently with one item per self-stick note and to place these notes on a flip chart. Team members then move the notes around to place items that are related to one another close together. Following this, we can discuss those patterns.
Example
Our family would occasionally create affinity maps about things we like to do in our spare time. When we grouped them and explored the patterns, we came up with a set of things we could plan our vacation around that we all could enjoy.
Coaching Tools
This section describes a number of coaching tools that I’ve found most useful for team coaching in the past. Many other tools can be found in the coaching books listed at the end of this chapter.
Count Silently
A good practice for coaches and leaders is to ask questions and wait for the answer, even if they think they might know the answer. The practice is to silently count to 10 after you have asked the question. Don’t be surprised if it takes six to seven seconds before someone responds. Long silences can be uncomfortable for a developer who may know the answer but is just a bit shy to speak up.
Listen Actively
The practice of active listening is merely a set of techniques that you can practice to achieve higher levels of comprehension when communicating with others. Actively listening means doing the following:
Stay focused on what they are saying: Avoid distractions like coming up with the quickest possible answer and waiting to tell them about it. Also, do your best to avoid judgment.
Ask relevant questions: Ask powerful questions (see the following section) that are relevant to what they are saying to elicit more potential solutions they will own.
Allow for silence: Don’t jump in when there is a pause. Practice a silent count, and then ask them a prompting question such as, “What else might you be able to do?”
Paraphrase or mirror key phrases you hear verbatim: Occasionally paraphrase what is being said in your own words to ensure you understand what is being said.
Practice the SOFTEN method2 to show your engagement: The acronym stands for Smile, Open posture, Forward lean, Taking notes, Eye contact, Nodding.
2. https://tinyurl.com/y2vod8vo
You can try these techniques out of the studio as well or merely listen to others having conversations to hear where these techniques might help them.
Ask Powerful Questions
Powerful questions are impactful and drive thought and conversation. They also avoid evasive or short responses.
Asking powerful questions takes practice, and the following basic rules can help you get the results you are looking for:
Keep questions short.
Avoid questions that have a yes-or-no answer.
Don’t ask rhetorical questions.
Use the silent count practice waiting for answers. They require thought.
Here are some examples of powerful questions:
What is hindering us from reaching the Sprint Goal?
What are you enjoying about the game right now?
What do you feel about the game we are making?
If you could fix one thing about the way we work, what would it be?
How else could you have solved that problem?
It’s all about Communication
“The most important thing is your communication skills. You have to be able to communicate with people at their level and in their language. I recommend that everyone learn a bit about what their teams do; you don’t have to be an expert, but have an understanding of how they work and how they communicate is vital.”
—Grant Shonkwiler, Commander & Shonk, Shonkventures
Coaching Teams to Higher Performance
Opposed to the traditional approach of pressuring teams to higher performance through metrics-driven goals, coaches pursue improved team performance by exploring personal and team motivational factors in the areas described in the following sections.
Psychological Safety
According to Amy Edmondson, Harvard Business School professor and author of The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth (Edmondson, 2018), psychological safety is a “shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.”3 She defines psychological safety as having “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,” and that it “describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.”
3. https://hbr.org/ideacast/2019/01/creating-psychological-safety-in-the-workplace
Observation
The Daily Scrum and Retrospectives are common times to observe and improve psychological safety. If team members can’t speak their mind during these events, they won’t serve their purpose.
Common Goals
High-performance teams have common goals they focus on that integrate all disciplines. For example, a goal of a boss character and its behaviors requires modelling, animation, AI, audio, and state machines. Lacking a common goal (for example, a goal that has separate tasks for each discipline) can lead a team to have divergent interests and behavior.
Shared Accountability
In Scrum, teams have a shared accountability for their Sprint Goal (which should be a common goal). For example, if a Sprint Goal describes a “class of enemy character that can walk on walls,” shared accountability means all team members accept responsibility for achieving the goal, regardless of their role or position. It doesn’t matter if the code is working, but the animations aren’t done. The entire team is accountable for the goal.
Shared accountability drives higher team collaboration. For example, if the animators are unable to get their animations in the game, shared accountability will motivate a programmer to help them.
Working Agreement
A working agreement is a set of protocols that the team defines to establish how members work together. These are not rules established by management, but defined by the teams themselves and refined over time (usually in Retrospectives).
A Team is Greater than the Sum of its Parts
Focusing on team membership and performance gives you great insight into the value of a team’s chemistry and the variation of performance that comes from that chemistry.
On one occasion, as an experiment, we gathered eight of the most talented people in the studio together in hopes of creating a “super team” that would demonstrate the highest possible performance.
What we got instead was the most dysfunctional team imaginable. The members argued constantly and produced less value than most other teams. After a few Sprints, the Product Owner disbanded them.
Great teams need skill and leadership, but they also need members willing to be followers.
Root Cause Analysis
Most problems don’t manifest themselves immediately. Often there are two or more layers of cause and effect before you or your team are impacted. For example, if texture artists keep applying unnecessarily large textures to their models because an exporter doesn’t prevent them from doing so, it may take months before the accumulated impact of those textures slows the game down considerably.
Root cause analysis is a method of backtracking through these layers of cause and effect to get to the root cause of a problem. This allows one to address the true cause (in our example, the exporter) rather than the cause we’d see on the surface (blaming the texture artists instead).
My favorite practice for root cause analysis is the “Five Whys.”
The Five Whys
This practice, usually held during a Retrospective, helps teams focus on actionable solutions. A retrospective starts with an ideation phase where the issues and impediments encountered over the previous iteration are collected. Following this, the teams generate insights into why these problems occurred. Often, the root cause of a problem is several layers deep and must be dug out.
The Five Whys practice starts by dividing the team into small groups of two to four people. For each problem, one person asks the other(s) “Why did this problem occur?” For each answer, they ask “why” again. After no more than five answers, the group arrives at the root cause of the problem, which lends itself to a solution. The root cause is recorded and the group moves on to the next question. When the groups reconvene, the root causes are discussed and solutions are generated in the next phase of the retrospective.
Example of a Five Whys Discussion
“We waste a lot of time every morning.”
“Why?”
“The build is always broken in the morning.”
“Why?”
“Commits are made late during the previous day that are not sufficiently tested.”
“Why”
“There are no target machines to test on at the end of the day.”
“Why”
“QA does all their regression testing at the end of the day.”
Team Maturity Models
As Project Aristotle confirmed, team maturity and chemistry are major factors in team performance. Many team maturity models exist that can help guide a leader or coach in growing teams. This section briefly describes a few that have proven useful.
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Lencioni, 2005) describes a hierarchy of dysfunctions that need to be addressed for teams to mature. That hierarchy, from the most basic on, is:
Absence of trust: Having an unwillingness to be vulnerable to each other or management
Fear of conflict: Avoiding constructive debate out of fear that it might lead to disagreement
Lack of commitment: Having an unwillingness to commit to a shared goal
Avoidance of accountability: Evading responsibility on quality issues
Inattention to results: Putting personal goals ahead of team goals
Addressing these dysfunctions in order is often necessary for new Agile teams. Trust is usually the first to address among team members and between the team and the studio. With trust established, teams can move on to eliminating fear of conflict and so on.
The Tuckman Model
The Tuckman model,4 illustrated in Figure 19.2, describes the typical phases that are all necessary for the team to mature:
4. https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newLDR_86.htm
Forming: The team first forms and establishes its initial goals. Members operate independently and are on their “best behavior.” Often little trust is established.
Storming: Teams struggle to establish trust and norms as they get used to working with one another. Conflict often arises as power relationships are established and personalities clash. Teams sometimes get stuck in this phase
Norming: Personality and power conflicts are ironed out and teammates establish closer ties allowing more honest debate.
Figure 19.2 The Tuckman model
Performing: Teams start to focus on shared goals and commitments and work across boundaries to achieve them. Team accountability becomes paramount, and self-organization emerges.
Adjourning: Unfortunately, teams cannot stay together forever and eventually disband. Teams should still take the time to celebrate their success and capture the practices and behaviors that helped in their success to hopefully carry to new teams.
The Tuckman model and the five dysfunctions are complementary. A lack of trust and a fear of conflict will keep teams from moving into the norming and performing stages. Also, due to the division of specialties on game teams, there is always a danger when losing one or two teammates between Sprints, of slipping back into storming. This is also a reason behind the “Scrum Master as sheepdog” metaphor. A Scrum Master always protects the team from the “predators” outside the team that can disrupt it back into storming.
Situational Leadership
Developed in the late 1970s by Paul Hershey and Ken Blanchard, situational leadership is a set of principles that help guide how leadership is applied to teams of differing maturity levels. They defined four leadership categories, as shown in Figure 19.3.
Directing: A leader defines roles and tasks for developers and the team.
Coaching: A leader still sets the direction for the team but coaches it in how roles and tasks are determined. Leaders allow the team more freedom identifying and tracking its work.
Supporting: A leader allows the team to make decisions about roles and tasks, but still shares in decision-making and progress monitoring.
Delegating: A leader is involved in decision making and progress monitoring, but the team is fully self-organizing in its roles, practices, and work.
Figure 19.3 Situational leadership
Scrum teams usually start in the “high supportive behavior” side (top half of Figure 19.3). Often a studio’s culture will be more directive going in, and you’ll find teams reporting to the Scrum Master. Over time, a good Scrum Master will improve his or her facilitation skills and support (upper-left quadrant) the team as an equal member, standing as a part of the team’s circle.
As a Scrum Team matures and becomes more self-organizing, the Scrum Master will delegate more of the team’s day-to-day duties, but always observe and support the team (lower-left quadrant).
Coaching Tools and Practices
The section describes a few tools and practices a coach can use to help transition teams to higher levels of maturity. For a larger set of practices, see the book Gear Up!: 100+ Ways to Grow Your Studio Culture, 2nd Edition (Keith C., Shonkwiler G., 2018).
Lighten the Mood
Some cultures don’t tolerate mistakes very well, and someone who makes a mistake can become a target for blame. This results in fear that can stifle learning and innovation. People end up “playing it safe” and only do what they are told to, and if they make a mistake, they try to hide it.
The Practice
Communicating that making mistakes is part of the process when developing games (as well as being a human), is important. Studios and teams have done a number of things to “lighten the mood” when someone makes a mistake. In fact, one studio gave a small trophy to the developer who made the biggest mistake over the past month. This “Biggest goof-up award” was handed out, with honorable mentions to runners-up, to thunderous applause.
Experience
One studio had a life-sized cutout of Justin Bieber. When someone broke the build for the first time, Justin stood beside that person’s desk; the second time, he was on his desk, and the third time Justin went with him wherever he went. It was a silly gesture, but one that kept the mood light and in that way managed to inspire.
Tip
These “awards” or celebrations are never meant to be humiliating. I’ve seen some of them used with teams that were not getting along very well and the humor was lost, so use this practice with care.
Love Card Wall
Build team culture by sharing moments of respect and appreciation visually.
The Practice
Team members identify moments of appreciation, goodwill, and respect throughout the Sprint by writing a brief note of what happened on a self-stick note. The notes are posted in a team open space (possibly the war room) for all to see.
Tips
Here are some tips for using a love card wall:
You can find heart-shaped sticky notes for sale online.
Anyone can write a love card for any instance encountered, even if it’s between two co-workers.
The coach (or Scrum Master) encourages these notes to be written throughout the Sprint.
Notes of Encouragement
When someone does something great it’s valuable to bring attention to what they have done, but sometimes it is more meaningful (and depending on the person’s personality type, more desirable) to be thanked quietly with a note.
The Practice
Writing an encouraging note is a simple process:
Get some simple (but colorful) 3x5 cards and a pen or marker.
Identify the person you want to thank or encourage and write a personal heartfelt message.
Leave it on his desk when he isn’t around so he can come back to it.
Tips
Here are some tips for using notes of encouragement:
Don’t limit these notes to just the people doing big great things: include notes for people doing simple but necessary work.
Aim to write at least one note a week.
Get creative and decorate the notes.
PechaKucha Introductions
When forming a new team there are many ways to assist people in bonding quickly. One of the quickest ways is by gaining a shared understanding of each other and focusing on commonalities through personal PechaKucha introductions. A PechaKucha introduction is a timed slide presentation where the presenter shows ten slides describing themselves, with each slide being shown for only ten seconds each. This results in a 100-second introduction of the presenter.
The Practice
As a fun exercise have everyone create a slideshow about themselves that consists of
10 slides per person
10 seconds per slide (auto advance)
Nothing about their professional life (except schooling) and what inspired them to make games
Have a fun event with food and drinks where everyone has a chance to go through their slideshow. The goal is to encourage cohesion by getting people to learn about similarities they share or interesting facts about each other.
Tips
Here are some tips for using PechaKucha introductions:
If your team is larger than 10 people, consider having multiple meetings.
Create a slide deck/template with the auto advancing rules in Google Slides, PowerPoint, or Keynote and have people contribute to them.
You can also do this informally using index cards.
Set aside a time for people to work on their slideshow during work.
It’s important to show only pictures: no text.
Socialize the Team
Building a new team can be challenging and adding team members can also be a challenge. One of the easiest ways to improve how teams work together is by helping them to get to know each other better. One easy way to accomplish this without making it feel like a “trust fall” exercise is to encourage the team to socialize both at work and outside the office.
The Practice
This practice is simple: Come up with fun things that the team can do that will allow them to socialize often. Ideas for in the office include (for big companies, do once a month) birthday celebrations, holiday celebrations, team happy hour, playing board games together, and team dinners.
Ideas for outside of the office include laser tag, go karts, Whirlyball, arcade rental, picnics, museum outings, sports outings, dinners, mini Olympics, and bowling.
Tips
Here are some tips for socializing teams:
Schedule these events during office hours.
Ensure these events are company sponsored.
If you offer alcohol at any event, make sure team members have a safe option to get home.
Make sure your leadership team is present and participates in these events.
To discourage cliques, find ways for the team to mix with new people at these events.
Select events that encourage collaboration and competition.
Measure Team Health
The best way to determine the health of your project is by knowing the health of the working teams. When discussing your team’s health and progress at a high level, having a common language and quick visual way to review all the teams is best.
The Practice
Create a spreadsheet or board with each team listed by name with a space to include a color-coded cell or card. Each time your Scrum Masters meet, have them update each of their team’s health indicators, such as the following:
Red: Something is wrong and it should be addressed immediately (examples the team is impeded, a team member is sick, internal dysfunction exists).
Yellow: The team is getting work done but might be running into some small problems. These should be monitored and addressed when possible (for example, excessive off-team communication is occurring or requests are being missed).
Green: The team is progressing well on its Sprint and is in good overall health.
Tip
Have the Scrum Master regularly ask team members questions to assess how the team members feel things are.
Group Confession
Allowing a safe place for people to learn from each other’s mistakes and how to handle them when they arise is important. This practice is for helping create that place.
The Practice
Once a month, have the team meet in an informal space and allow everyone to “confess” some mistakes that they have made in the last month. Have them explain what they did wrong and how they either fixed it or tried to fix it. This isn’t supposed to be a place to judge but to discuss and learn. This helps a lot with openness, trust, and creating that “safe to fail” culture.
Tips
Here are some tips for using group confessions:
Keep the mood light and fun.
Make sure everyone has at least one story to share.
The story doesn’t have to be from the last month, but it helps if it is from the same project.
Try to meet in a less formal space than a meeting room.
Try the “failure bow,” which is a deep bow, after a confession. When done spontaneously, it can lighten the mood.
360 Reviews
Have teams review themselves on a regular basis. One way to do this is through 360 reviews. These reviews are dramatically more impactful than yearly performance reviews. They provide direct feedback from peers and happen often enough to engender improvements.
The Practice
At least once every three months, have each member of a team (less than 10 people) review the other team members. The typical review format is to rate others on a simple scale of one (needs improvement) to five (is a strength) on characteristics such as collaboration, technical skills, leadership, initiative, and so on. The results are gathered, averaged, and handed out. Often, the results are reviewed with a discipline lead to discuss and compare with previous results.
Tips
Here are some tips for doing360 reviews:
Avoid doing these reviews by hand as they are time consuming. Great software packages are available for conducting 360 reviews through a web page.
Having a field for gathering comments can be useful, but comments often have to be reviewed and filtered manually, and therefore take up valuable time.
Avoid collecting and sharing comments for newly formed teams until they’ve had time to settle in and work with one another for at least a month.
What Good Looks Like
Great teams encompass the attributes described in the previous chapter, but don’t imagine that they’ll always be singing Kumbaya while holding hands in the moonlight. Great teams can be like any big family. Individuals can argue, compete, endlessly debate, and have mood swings. Passion does that. But like any family, the bonds created on a great team overcome the occasional chaos.
Imagine not being able to wait to go to work on a game with a group of people you trust and enjoy working with. Imagine being excited about the game you are working on, with new ideas flowing constantly that build the game towards success. This does happen, and it can happen to your team.
Summary
Becoming a coach is a major challenge if you have spent your career managing tasks. Your transformation is as challenging as that of any team’s. You learn more about yourself during the journey than you would imagine.
The career of a coach is one of human psychology and life-long learning. A coach must be a student of people and relationships. Coaching individuals and teams is only the start. The coach’s role expands to the entire studio and beyond.
Additional Reading
Edmondson, Amy. 2018. The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley.
Kaner, Sam. 2014. Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making, Third Edition. Jossey-Bass.
Keith, C., and G. Shonkwiler. 2018. Gear Up!: 100+ ways to grow your studio culture, Second Edition. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
Kimsey-House H, Kimsey-House K, Sandahl P, et al. 2018. Co-active coaching: the proven framework for transformative conversations at work and in life. Boston, MA: Nicholas Brealey Publishing.
Lencioni, Patrick. 2015. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: a Leadership Fable. Jossey-Bass A Wiley Imprint.
Stanier MB. 2016. The Coaching Habit. Toronto: Box of Crayons Press.
Tabaka J. 2006. Collaboration explained: facilitation skills for software project leaders. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley.