6/19/15 Episode 236: Leading Teams

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

I’m pulling out of the parking spot! We all know what that means! It’s time for another Drive to Work.

Okay. I dropped my kids off at school today. Okay. So today, I thought I was going to talk about something that I have done a lot of, which is leading teams. This came up in a previous podcast and I said, “You know what? This would make a good podcast.” So today’s all about “How do you lead a team?”

So let me talk in context, be aware I’m leading a creative team. I’m doing design work, but I believe a lot of the things I’m saying are probably (???) for leading most teams. Some of the stuff I’m talking about is specific to leading a creative team, but anyway, I believe there’s a lot of takeaway even just for general teams.

So starting in two weeks, or it will have already happened by the time you hear this, I will have begun leading my 23^rd design, I believe. So anyway—and I’ve also led stuff other than just design teams. I’ve done a lot of mini-teams and sub-teams and other projects. I have led a lot of teams in my day.

And so one of the things I want to talk about today is, what makes for good team leading? What do you need to do to lead a team?  So I have a bunch of different things that I want to talk about. Hopefully we’ll get those in before I get to work.

Okay, number one. And these aren’t necessarily in any particular order other than the order I came up with them in. So be aware there. Okay, number one, you need to provide focus and direction for your team. The role of the team lead is to make sure the team knows where they’re going. What are they doing? And a big responsibility of being a team lead is making sure that your team understands where you’re going. It doesn’t mean that they have to understand every nuance, but it does mean you want your team on board. You want your team to know what you’re doing, what you’re aiming for.

So like when I lead a design, one of the things I want to very early on establish is, what is the design trying to do? What’s our goal? When we sat down to design Innistrad, I was very clear, we were doing a top-down design. We were going to match our design to get the flavor and feel of the horror genre. When I sat down to do Ravnica, I was like, we are making the guilds come to life. We are going to build something that brings to life each of the ten two-color pairs. Or four of them were in Ravnica.

Each set that I sit down with my team, I have to say to them, what are we trying to do? What is the emotion we’re trying to get out of the audience? What kind of—what is the essence of what we want. Because he team, together, as a team, we’re going to discover that and find it out. And so, first and foremost, I think when you lead a team, you want to make sure that you are providing direction for your team.

Now, another big part of it is that your team has to trust in you. Believe in you. You have to have an air of confidence. You have to make your team believe like you know what you’re doing. Now, you don’t always know what you’re doing, (???) thing. You don’t always know what you’re doing.

But you want to make sure that your team feels confident that you have a good sense of where you’re going. And a lot of giving focus and direction is saying to the team, “Here’s what we’re working toward, and I have confidence that this is what we need to do.”  Because the role of the team is to help you, the lead, solve your problems. But it is your job as the lead to figure out what problems you need to solve.   Now, your team is a resource, and you can use your team to help solve all sorts of problems. But as a leader, what you need to do is make sure that your team is all on board and going in the same direction.

And the way I try to explain this is, let’s say your team was all holding an object. If you’re all going the same direction, you’ll move that object in that direction. But if one of you’s going west and one’s going east and one’s going north, you’ll not go anywhere. And a lot of that is just providing that direction, of getting the whole team going in the same place at the same time.

Okay. Another thing is, you want to make sure that your goals are clear. That when you’re leading a team, it’s not just you want the overall project to be clear, but you want to make sure that you break up your thing into small bite-sizeable chunks, and that each chunk, the team knows what it’s trying to accomplish.

So what it means to me is, when I have a meeting, every meeting, I start the meeting by making sure the team understands, that day, what are we going to accomplish? What are we going to do? And I think it’s very important that you are able to break things down, because even though you’re giving your team the long-view picture, it’s important to also break down like, okay. Long-term we’re trying to do this thing. What are we doing today? Short-term, what are we doing? And meetings work a lot better if you have a direction to them that sort of says, here’s what I’m doing, here’s what the team is doing, here’s the direction we’re going, here’s what we’re trying to accomplish today.

A lot of producing a good meeting—so one of the things I talk about all the time is how design is a microcosm of the macro. That the micro is the macro. That is true in meetings as much as it is in the design itself.

Which means that every meeting is its own little micro version of what you’re trying to do with the design. You want to start, you want to give focus to your team, you want to say what you want to accomplish, you want to tell them what we’re trying to do and what the goal is for the day, and then give them the tools to then during the meeting do that.

So that’s the next thing that’s important. You need to provide the tools for your team. Whatever your team needs, you need to make sure you have the tools. In design, a lot of that is card files or if you need to have a certain structure, something figured out, you need to make sure what the team needs is there.

Now, once again, like I these days have what we call a strong second. I don’t actually produce the files. But I have to tell my strong second what he or she needs to bring to the meeting. That every day, what are we doing today? What’s the meeting today? Okay, we’re doing…

Meetings in design break into two things. Either you are sitting in a room talking and designing and figuring things out, or you’re playtesting, usually in the pit. So I—like I said, it’s all the iterative process. You’re making changes or you’re playing what you’ve done to experience what you’ve done to see what you need to do next.

And so, you really want to make sure in your meeting that each little meeting unto itself is its own little tiny design experience. You come in, you say what you want, you let the team know it, you give them the tools you need, and then you let the team do it.

So next thing which is really important is, the goal of the team lead is to make the team feel as a cohesive whole. It’s not—you don’t want your team to feel like a bunch of individuals, you want your team to feel like a group that’s come together that is working together. And a lot of that is making sure that you give your team what they need so that they can work together, and you need to set the tone as the lead that you are a group. And you want to make sure that you do plenty of things where the team gets to interact with each other.

One of the things for example that I like to do a lot of is I like doing a lot of design in meetings. And the reason for that is, the design process is a very collaborative process. When one person comes up with an idea, somebody else will riff off that idea. And what happens is, like for example, Innistrad’s a good thing, where I talk about this all the time, where we came in with some names, and we designed—what does a black cat do? What does an evil twin do? What does a jar of eyeballs do? What is that?

And we had these neat names that, Jenna was the creative lead, she had brought to the thing, and then we were making cards. But the funny thing is, who made Evil Twin? PICTURE The whole team made Evil Twin. No one person made it. The team made it. And there’s a really nice quality of when you make cards, that there’s just, it’s so collaborative in nature that it makes the team feel like the team has accomplished something. And that’s really, really important. You want to make sure that the team itself feels like it can see itself doing work.

Now, there’s a couple different ways we do work. One way is we do in-meeting stuff, like design stuff in-meeting. The other is we’ll do homework where I’ll ask them to do something and I give them parameters. One of the big things about homework is, you want to have a lot of detail for what you’re looking for.

There’s a (???) belief that the more open-ended you make it, the better it is for people, and I believe that’s incorrect. I believe in general you—I mean, you want to give your, in creative endeavors, your people enough information so they know what you’re looking for. You want to give them some latitude to be able to make things, you don’t want to be too (???), but in the same sense, being too open-ended also is a problem. “Make me a card.” It’s hard. “Make me a wacky blue rare enchantment,” it’s a little easier. I have a little more focus.

So one of the things I like to do when you’re giving a homework assignment is, is make sure that there is plenty of focus and then a little bit of room for people to play around and do some stuff of their own that might not be exactly what you’re looking for. But you want a lot of your homework to be very, very focused.

Okay. So in the meeting, you set your tone. You try to make sure that everybody feels welcome and able to speak. That’s another really important thing of running a meeting is, you want to make sure that everybody feels empowered in the meeting, and that everybody can contribute and it feels like they are contributing. And that’s very important.

One of the things, so there’s this thing, while I was at GDC I saw a talk by Jesse Schell. So one of the things he talked about is this research that’s been done on the intelligence of groups. So this was very fascinating. I don’t know her name, he had her name [NLH—Anita Woolley], but there’s a woman who was doing a lot of research of looking at groups and trying to figure out what exactly makes a group smarter.

And the cool thing about it is, it’s not—you would think, “Oh, is it just the individual intelligence of all the people kind of added together or averaged or something?” No. That the intelligence of a group has very little to do with the intelligence of the people individually. What it has to do is with three things.

Number one is I think they call the emotional intelligence, or they call it the eye test. Can you look at someone’s eyes and tell what they’re feeling? So emotional intelligence means can you read other people and get a sense of how they’re feeling? That’s number one.

Number two is not interrupting. [NLH—This is a slight misinterpretation, the actual finding is that everyone needs equal time to speak.] This is an important one, which is letting people say what they have to say without interrupting them. R&D, interrupting is kind of a bad habit, we’re working on getting better at that. But I try to make sure that meetings, like if someone has the floor and they’re talking, you let them talk. Not that people can’t have interplay back and forth, but make sure people feel like there’s an opportunity for them to talk, and that they’re not being cut off.

Okay. Number three is a mix of genders. That when you have all men or all women, communication gets a little bit skewed and the overall intelligence drops. Of the group.   

So what you want is, those are the three things. Emotional intelligence, meaning being aware of how other people are feeling, it’s kind of what that’s saying. Be conscious—when other people are talking, get a sense of what’s going on with them and how are they feeling. Don’t interrupt, let other people have the floor and have them talk, and try to get a mix of genders into your meeting. Those are the three biggies. Anyway.

Okay. So, you want to make sure that everybody in your meetings feels empowered and feels like—like, one of the things that I want to do is, everybody in our meetings has a role. They’re there for some reason.

For example in design meetings we’ll have a representative from the creative team. Their job is to oversee it and make sure we’re matching what the creative is for the world. We have a representative from the development team, they’re making sure that what we’re doing is developable and can be done. Can be something we can do. We always have somebody from the design team just to make sure we have enough sort of design muscle to get the job done.

So it’s important, one of the things we do before every design starts, we have a one-on-one with each person on the design team, and the role of that meeting, a short meeting, it’s like half an hour, to just say, here’s what I expect from you in the meeting. Here’s the role that I expect you to play, and here’s what you are contributing.

And that’s really—we didn’t always used to do this, but that’s really important, because what it does is, it makes sure each person understands what’s expected of them, and what they’re supposed to do there in the meeting. And one of the things that’s important is, not just to let them know what you expect them to do, but what you also don’t expect them to do.

For example, a lot of times, when I’m talking to my creative rep or my development rep, I want them to design cards, I want them to do as much design work as they can, but they’re not there to do the brunt of the design work. They’re there to fulfill their role, and do as much design as they want to do, it’s not that I in any way (???) doing design, but the expectation of them is not to be doing the brunt of the design so the pressure’s off. If they have homework and they can’t quite get it all done, that there’s a little less expectation on them to be doing all of the design work. We have a lot of our designers that are going to do more of the heavy lifting.

But as much as they can do, and like I love when members of the representatives are able to do a lot of cool stuff, and a lot of the great designs come from development representatives and creative representatives. But it’s nice early on to explain to them, “Look, the main role you have here is just you’re a representative to represent the thing.” That’s the most important thing. Now, secondarily, hey, you’re on a design team, I want you to design things. But you want to make sure you understand where the pressures are on or off. So once you set expectations, then, when you start the meetings, you want to make sure that people know their individual roles and the team knows its overall role.

Now, another thing that’s really important is, you want to make sure that your design meetings, or your meetings, I put down fun here, what I mean by that is you want to make sure that it’s enjoyable. You want people to have fun with one another. And one of the things that I make sure to do in my design meeting is we definitely goof around a little bit. We have some fun, we make jokes, there’s a lot of laughing. It’s important to me that when we do design, that the people are having a good time.

Now, design is fun, luckily we’re doing a meeting where what we’re doing is inherently a fun thing. But it is a lot of work. I think sometimes people think about, “Oh, it would be awesome to have a job working in R&D, that would be so much fun,” and it is fun. But it’s also a lot of work. And no matter how much fun something is, work can get daunting. It’s a lot of work. Having a blank piece of paper and ending up with a card file, and mechanics and a mood and a tone and everything that requires of a handoff, that’s a lot of work. And your team has to produce that.

So one of the things you want to make sure that you’re able to do is create a tone for the meetings that makes it enjoyable and fun. And another thing that’s really important is, sometimes when you’re goofing around, so like my favorite book, I’m sure I’ve mentioned this many times, my favorite book, a book called A Whack on the Side of the Head, by a man named Roger van Oech, and he, one of the hypotheses of the book is anybody can be creative, the reason you’re not creative is because there’s ten mental locks, that you keep yourself—that you inhibit your own creativity.

And the idea is, if you recognize when you do this, you can be creative. You’ve just got to stop yourself from not being creative. And one of the big points he makes in the book, and multiple times is, that a lot of being creative is not stopping yourself. Is not saying, “Oh, I can’t do that for reason X, Y or Z.”

And so a big part of trying to set up a team is making sure that everybody feels comfortable enough to try things. Because one of the things is, a lot of good ideas start as bad ideas. A lot of really good ideas, like a bad idea can be a stepping stone to a brilliant idea.

And not even necessarily it’s a bad idea. Just an unworkable idea. A lot of times—for example, like in Innistrad, I said to my team, I want to make werewolves work. Here’s what I need. Here’s the demand I need. They are humans, something happens, the humans become werewolves, something else happens, the werewolves become humans. That I wanted them to change states. That’s what a werewolf was. And I said, let’s figure out how to do that. How do we make cards that go between two states?

And Tom LaPille came to me and said, hey, in Duel Masters, we do these cards that are double-faced. Two-sided. There’s a front and a back. Cards on both sides. And I’ve talked about this. I was skeptical. But I knew that we would learn from it.

Now it turns out, it was practical. The thing that seemed impractical was practical. Sometimes that happens. But sometimes you go, “Oh, well you learned something.” Maybe you should try something that doesn’t into itself work, it leads you down the path to something that will. And so one of the things is, you want to make sure as a leader for your team, that your team is open to exploring things.

Now another really important thing, I talked about this in my podcast on the different stages of design, the different parts of design, is you want to make sure you understand where you are in your process. Meaning, as I explained before, iteration speeds up as design goes along. That early on, you might spend three weeks talking through things before you have a playtest. Where by the end of design, you have a meeting or so and then you’re going to playtest again. You’re playtesting every week. Your iterations get sped up.

And so you want to make sure you understand where you are in the overall picture, because you are marking for your team what you are doing. It is not your team’s job to understand the bigger picture or how things are coming together in a meeting-to-meeting case. I mean, you want to make sure they understand what’s going on, you want them aware, but it’s not their job to monitor exactly how things are happening. That is your job as the team lead. And what you need to do is you need to make sure that you are constantly letting your team know what is being accomplished and what you’re doing.

Like I said. I think it’s very, very important. I think, like when you write. One of the things that they have you write is a thesis statement. And the point of a thesis statement is to introduce to your reader what it is you’re going to talk about. It’s very important. “Hey, hello reader,” in fact look at my column. I always start by saying, “It’s whatever! We’re going to talk about this. This is what we’re going to do today.” And the first paragraph’s just telling you what I’m going to do.

Meetings are a lot like that. You need your thesis statement of the meeting where you walk in and say, “Here’s                 what we’re going to do today, here’s what’s going to happen.” Another very common technique I use is what I call the “to-do list,” which is we will have a meeting where we talk through a playtest, or we figure out how something went. Then we write up on the board everything we have to do that comes out of that talk. Every time we come up with an agenda item I just write it on the board.

I’m a big believer, by the way, that having something in the room you can write on is pretty important. Every single room or pretty much every single room in Wizards has like a whiteboard. Pretty important. Visually—I’m a big fan of visualization of stuff, being able to write things up, have people see things, I think that’s really important.

Sometimes, even when we bring papers to meetings I still want to write things on the board. I want everybody looking at the same things at the same time. And it also allows you to organize things in the way you want to organize them. I think as you’re brainstorming, just—anyway, I’m a big fan of having something you can write on right in front of you. But anyway, the idea of a to-do list is as we come up with ideas, as we talk about what we’re doing, I really, really enjoy generating lists and then we literally—I mean, we jump around the list.

Another technique, by the way, that’s very important is that you do not want your team—you want your team to feel as if the team is accomplishing things. Not you, not the individuals. So one of the things as a lead is, I always go last. Whenever there’s any kind of input, whether it’s creative input, whether it’s feedback, I always go last.

The reason I always go last is, I want—if there’s an important point to make, I would rather somebody else make the point than me. If there’s important feedback, if there’s something that—even if I know the feedback, if I know the thing, if somebody else on my team can provide the feedback, it makes it feel like the team is making decisions.

That you give—if you always go first and you always speak and you’re acting on what you’re doing, and a lot of what you’re going to do is acting on—I mean, you’re the lead, you’re going to have a general sense of what you want to do. But the more you can get the team to feel like the team is coming up with things and you’re reacting to them, and a really good trick of that is just go last. Just talk last.

And if somebody else makes the point you were going to make, I mean it’s okay to sort of go, “I agree,” but let it be okay, go “That’s a good point. John made a good point. Mary made a good point.” Part of being a team leader is fostering a team confidence and a sense of a team accomplishment.

And that is very, very important. That—let me talk a little about what we call emotional investment, which is you are going to put extra energy in something that you feel emotionally connected to. You will go the extra length for your child because it is your child.

And creative endeavors are a lot like your children. That when you make something, you are very possessive. It is your thing. And what you want is, you want your team in a creative endeavor to feel like they think it’s their thing. It’s not your thing, it is the team’s thing. The team has made it. The team has generated it.

And the reason that’s so important is, when you feel emotionally connected, when it’s something that you have bonded with, you are so much more willing to invest time and energy. That if you want to get the best work out of your team, you want to make them feel it’s personal and it’s theirs, and connected to it. And there’s nothing you can do that will get the team more motivated and more excited than having them have emotional investment in the overall product.

And that, like I said. It’s really, really important, you want to establish a good camaraderie between the team, you want to establish roles between the team, and you want to establish that—well, here’s another really good tip.

At the end of every meeting—so, in writing, you always start with a thesis statement, and end with restating what you’ve done. In fact, teaching is the same way. I’m going to teach you this. I teach you it. I have just taught you that.

The same thing. At the end of the meeting, reinforce what you’ve done during the course of the meeting. Make sure the team walks away going, “Wow, that’s what we accomplished today.” You want to walk in the meeting knowing what we’re going to do, you want to walk out of the meeting knowing what you’ve done.

And, and this is important, people feel good when they get recognition. It is very important when you’re leading a team to tell the team that they’re doing good work. So I mean—I’m not saying lie to them, when they do good work—get them to do good work, and then acknowledge that they’ve done good work.

And that you want to reinforce and you want to make sure that as the team is doing stuff, that you—as a lead, people look to the authority figure for approval. That is just—starts with Mom and Dad, and continues all through your life. That is’ important, if you’re being an authority figure and the team lead you are, that you’re providing approval. That you are making it clear what you expect, and then when they accomplish that, you’re letting them know that. That is very, very important.

And like I said. When you are creating a team, what you are trying to do is you want the team to as a whole understand its role, be possessive of what it’s doing, be proud of what it’s doing, and have a harmony in working together.

So that’s another big thing about team thing is, make sure the goals of your team align with each other. If two people have goals that contradict each other, you’re going to create conflict. So that’s for example why I’m not super big—I want to acknowledge people did things, but I also want to be careful not to like keep a checkboard of who did what, or—I don’t want to make a competition between my people. I don’t want my team to feel competitive between themselves. It’s okay for the team to sometimes feel competitive outside, the team’s going to do well against some outside metric, that’s okay, but you don’t want your team being too competitive within itself. You want your team to all feel like it’s working together.

Another important thing is, make sure that your team understands that it is not a democracy. That is not the role of—that when I make a team, it is not that—I do not make every decision something the whole team votes on.

Early on in design I used to do that, and I realized the problem was that you don’t end up with the best results through whatever the most people agree with. The way you get really good design is having strong vision.

Now, part of that is setting the vision so the team’s all on the same page. But another part of it is, you as the lead are the final word. The final say. You actually—one of the things I say, the very first meeting, is I say to my team, look, you are here, we as a team are going to make this, but let me stress, we are not a democracy. I have final say. That if I believe something’s correct, I am going to do it, and I will always explain to you why I make my decisions, and you are always free to question my decisions up to a point, but I will be making decisions. I will be the one that’s the final say. And I want input from the team, and I will ask for input from the team, but it’s important that the team understands that even if the majority wants to do one thing, if I the lead think it needs to go in a different direction, we’ll go in a different direction. And it’s really, really important early on, like I said the very first meeting, to establish that.

I also think, by the way, you want your team to look up to you as the lead, as—if they’re not sure of things, you want them to look to you as the authority to help make many decisions. A lot of times in trying to solve a larger thing, you need to figure out what you’re doing on the micro level. And they look to you to say, “Help us, can you give us some role or some guidance?” And that when the team comes to you and asks, that’s important you can give them clear and concise guidance.

And that’s another big thing about being a team lead is, a lot of options will present before you. But you as the lead need to keep making decisions. Part of iterating is going down paths. And sometimes, there’s multiple paths, and what you have to do as a team lead is figure out which path you’re going down.

Now, be aware. Sometimes you’ll pick a path that’s the wrong path. You will have to go back and go back down another path. But that is better than not picking a path. A real common mistake sometimes I see with my design leads, people that I oversee as Head Designer, is sometimes people are a little afraid to commit to a decision. They’re like, “Oh, option A, B, and C are all good options. Maybe we can continue playing with A, B, and C for a while.”

And early on, you can play with A, B, and C. But at some point you’ve gotta pick A, B, or C. You’ve got to say, “Okay, we’re doing A.” Or “We’re doing B.” Or “We’re doing C.” And drop the other ones. And like I said. Even if you find out that it’s wrong and you have to go back, you will get more accomplished than if you just don’t make a choice.

And part of the lead, part of your role is very much making that choice. It’s very much trying to decide what is the next step you want to take. Because one of the things about design and iteration is you want to keep moving forward. You want to keep making advancements and changing the file directed toward where the end state is.

And like I said, I’ll stress once again. That doesn’t mean you can’t make mistakes. It doesn’t mean you can’t learn things and backtrack some. It doesn’t mean when you go down a path you can’t go down a different path. But it means you have to commit and try things. You have to commit to trying a path. Because the only way you will learn if something works is committing to it. Trying a little of everything doesn’t teach you what you need to do. And so it is very important that you are able to do that. And so as a team lead, having the ability to make the hard decisions is very important.

And, getting your team to see that you’re making the hard decisions is also very important. You want your team to look up to you. You want your team to believe that you are the authority on the topic you’re doing.

Now, right now it helps a lot, like when I lead a team, like I said, I’ve been doing it twenty years and I’m leading my 23^rd or whatever design team, it’s very for my team to go, “I have some confidence, he’s done a lot of this.”

But even when you are newer at it, you still want to make sure that your team has a sense of confidence in what you’re doing. And part of that is making sure they understand your vision. Because if they see your vision and see what you’re trying to do, it definitely gets (???) confidence from them that you know what you want to do.

Now, are you, the team lead, ever unsure of things? Yes. Should you ever communicate that to your team? You can to a point. You can understand, when you’re not sure of something, you can talk to your team of how you’re trying to figure something out. But you want to make sure that your team has a sense that you have a larger goal at hand. And you want to be a little bit careful. You want your team to always feel like you know where the next step is coming. And even (???) always know when the next step is coming, you want to create a sense of confidence for your team. And that’s important.

Okeydokey. Well that, my friends—so like I said, I hope today was informative. Leading teams is definitely something that requires a lot of different skills. There’s a lot of people skills. There’s a lot of process skills. There’s a lot of organizational skills. But when it all comes together and you’re able to do it, and you’re able to sort of produce something, it is real fun. It is great running a team and watching your team accomplish something.  I mean, I think back to all the designs I’ve done and how proud (???) of my teams, that we just made some really awesome, kick-ass designs.

But anyway, that my friends is everything I have to say about leading a team. But I’ve parked my car, so we all know what that means, it’s time for me to end my drive to work. So instead of talking Magic, it’s time for me to be making Magic. See you guys next time.