{"id":366,"date":"2014-03-31T19:07:53","date_gmt":"2014-03-31T23:07:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/betterrealities.com\/?p=366"},"modified":"2014-03-31T19:07:53","modified_gmt":"2014-03-31T23:07:53","slug":"gdc-2014-positive-signs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/betterrealities.com\/?p=366","title":{"rendered":"GDC 2014: Positive Signs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This was my first year running the Leadership roundtable at GDC. I had two fears going in: 1) that no one would show up, and 2) that I&#8217;d end up with a room of alpha personalities, each of whom would try to run the room. So, when I showed up half an hour early for my first roundtable and saw 4 people scattered to the edges of a room that could handle 80, I was sure that I was in for #1. By the time the session started and we had 70+ people in the room, I was sure it wasn&#8217;t going to be #1, but #2 was a real possibility.<\/p>\n<p>Instead, we had a very smooth, supportive conversation that was encouraging on a number of fronts.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Leadership as supporting the team.<\/strong>\u00a0 This was definitely the subtext of the entire conversation, that leadership is not about driving the team, running the team, or whipping the underperformers, but rather that effective leadership in a collaborative and complex environment like game development is about supporting the team. \u00a0At the end of the first session, I asked the participants for some quick-fire, aphoristic summaries of their approach to leadership; what came back were things like &#8220;to protect and serve&#8221;, &#8220;remove the obstacles and let the team excel&#8221;, and &#8220;take care of everything extraneous and let the team focus&#8221;. \u00a0I think that would have been a very different conversation fifteen years ago. \u00a0It seems that we are, actually, maturing as an industry.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Women in leadership. \u00a0<\/strong>There were a number of strong, compelling female voices in the conversation, and in general a fair number of women in the room. \u00a0I don&#8217;t have exact stats, but I&#8217;d say that we ran about 20% women on the first day, which isn&#8217;t bad for the games industry but still woefully inadequate. \u00a0The good news is that it was just completely normal for these women to be there doing what they were doing. \u00a0No one challenged it, directly or indirectly, and it&#8217;s clear from the participants that the future for women as leaders in games is bright indeed.<\/li>\n<li><strong>We are getting better at this.<\/strong>\u00a0 Part of a roundtable is getting people to share their problems so that the rest of the room can help. \u00a0There was a clear pattern in this, as the more common problems got responses from all angles. \u00a0The more abstruse difficulties got fewer responses, usually from the more clearly veteran folks in the room. \u00a0What this says to me is that the bar for what qualifies as a difficult problem is definitely going up. \u00a0The common problems have been solved multiple times, repeatedly, and in a great variety of contexts. \u00a0As an industry, we&#8217;re moving on to more challenging ground.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;m not sure whether I&#8217;ll run this roundtable again next year. \u00a0Some of that will depend on how the surveys come back; some of that will depend on what else I&#8217;m committed to. \u00a0What remains clear, though, is that we are making progress in this area. \u00a0Oh, and there is clearly a hunger to make more progress, which is encouraging in its own right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This was my first year running the Leadership roundtable at GDC. I had two fears going in: 1) that no one would show up, and 2) that I&#8217;d end up with a room of alpha personalities, each of whom would try to run the room. So, when I showed up half an hour early for &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/betterrealities.com\/?p=366\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">GDC 2014: Positive Signs<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/betterrealities.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/betterrealities.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/betterrealities.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/betterrealities.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/betterrealities.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=366"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/betterrealities.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":367,"href":"http:\/\/betterrealities.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366\/revisions\/367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/betterrealities.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/betterrealities.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/betterrealities.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}