Teamwork

?The year that this group photo was taken was 1993; this is the team that produced John Madden Football on 3DO, the first American football game in 3D.?What’s worth noting is that the original team was only four!?With two programmers and two artists, the project started in 1991, and we had to learn to work together.?It sounds easy now, but games were mostly made by one or two people back in those days.

?

One of the reasons why the games from the eighties looked the way they did, was because we didn’t have professional artists; we called it programmer art. I would know because I made six pieces of entertainment software by myself before I joined EA; I composed the music, made the sound effects, developed the software, made the art, designed and drew the package cover, and wrote the user manual. That’s what it took back in the day to get a product done.

?

Then at Electronic Arts, we started seeing the need for bigger teams because the quality had to be good enough, the cartridges for Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis were a few megabytes big, but a CD-ROM could store 600+MB; what would we put in them??Some people back then really doubted we needed that much space to store the game data. ?You must know that was back in 1991, the era of “multi-media,” before the internet.?Not only did the new generation of game consoles have faster CPUs, but the storage medium also just got huge!

?

For many reasons, we had to have bigger teams, and project management started becoming a necessity in game companies.

?

Like most teams, we went through the stages of forming, norming, storming, and performing. Toward the end, we trusted each other and joked around in the office. This was one of the best times in my professional career; working in a highly functional team gives you such a high that most people can’t comprehend.

?

Later in life, I tried to chase that feeling to no avail.?Eventually, I was in an executive position, and if I couldn’t create a highly functional team, it was all my fault.?That was really humbling, especially since I had the euphoric experience of working in an effective team…. I knew it could be done! I stopped complaining about other executives after it was my turn, and it really wasn’t that easy until I cracked the secret much later.

All the highly functional teams share one common factor, that is, the team has a common enemy        

Many executives are not very approachable, and not all of them understand how you do your work, but that doesn’t stop them from demanding that you produce results.?All the highly functional teams share one common factor, that is, the team has a common enemy; nothing helps a team to unite more than a common obstacle, challenge, or an unreasonable boss.?It is unfortunate that if your team is in solidarity, thinking that you are an a-hole, I wouldn’t want to lead a team where they are all in agreement that I am a bad boss.

?

Ideally, the deadline can be an enemy; the never-tried-before-technology can be an enemy; bugs in the game can be an enemy; what you don’t want is the corporate bureaucracy to be the enemy because you will end up with a team that hates the company.?My bosses would buy us dinner, so we didn’t have to leave the office and spend 1-2 hours away from work; we really appreciated that.?I copied that behavior long after I left Electronic Arts. I would organize buying dinners; I drove colleagues to and from work because of their personal reasons, I listened to their personal ambitions, and I stayed up with them whenever we pulled all-nighters.

?

It is only after decades of being in management that I started to understand that employees don’t trust selfish managers, and they certainly don’t trust managers who don’t keep their word.?It takes a long time to earn trust and only a second to lose it.

?

Trust is fundamental to creating the fertile soil of a performing team; I was in a 400-meter relay track team when I was in high school. If you know anything about this sport, you pass on or receive the baton in split seconds, and there is no room for oops.?If anyone drops the baton, the entire team suffers the consequences.

?

This would be an exceedingly lengthy article if I were going to explain how to build a highly functional team, but if there is only one takeaway from this article, which would be the word trust!?An executive is useful only if he or she delivers. If an executive only rests on his/her laurels and does not lead by example, how can this executive be trusted?

if you want a super team, you must make sacrifices.        

Yoshiki Okamoto, the creator of Street Fighters, was my mentor at Capcom, or san-pai in Japanese. He gave away his entire bonus to his team because the company didn’t give a large enough bonus package to the studio.?If your ego or greed is more important than your team, they would know.?It would appear that we have a paradox here, we go to work to make money, and here I am talking about being selfless, making your team more important than the bonus.?There is no conflict here; if you want a normal team, keep the bonus, but if you want a super team, you must make sacrifices.

?

You know, some people tell you what you want to hear, so you will do what they want you to do. Do you remember how that made you feel???Don’t be that guy, don’t take the easy way because you will miss the opportunity of learning all the good lessons from telling the truth. You will be surprised how much better it is by being transparent.

you must earn their trust by you trust them unconditionally first        

Finally, I want to say that ego goes broke, don’t try to feel superior by distancing yourself from your colleagues; that doesn’t work well in today’s workplaces now.?You demand that everyone needs to be mature, I know it’s a lot to ask sometimes, but if they want to be treated as adults, they must act like ones.?The respect you will get comes from them trusting you, and you need to earn their trust, not the other way around. You must earn their trust by trusting them unconditionally.?

?

This may be harder in different cultures, but I am sure this is how you would like to be treated. You want to be trusted, and you want to trust the others on your team.

Hell is other people, Jean-Paul Sartre, 1943.        

Hell is other people, Jean-Paul Sartre, 1943.?Hey, you can be a paradise for other people as well. It’s up to you.

A super team is a team with no hell.        

A super team is a team with no hell. Everyone on the project can be him/herself and perform at 100% and more.?Remember the time for the 400-meter relay is less than four sprinters running the 100-meter dash??How??It’s all in the passing of batons.

?

Great teamwork allows us to focus on our strengths, and we get to become very specialized at doing specific tasks.? We do have better-looking games these days, not because programmers got better at making art.?We learn to work with specialists more efficiently. It takes too long to make big games without big teams, we have no choice but to learn to lead teams effectively to make big games.

?

When you have teams, you must learn to manage teams effectively, or they will prove to you how Sartre was right.

If you like this article, please follow me at https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/msingman/