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Daily Growth

Negotiation

At our studio, we automatically increase everyone’s salaries at the end of each tax year as high as we believe is being competitive with the industry we’re in whilst also maintaining security for the studio.

We believe all departments contribute equally to the titles we create. And although supply and demand dictates salary banding for various roles, we keep it consistent across departments.

We automatically raise salaries for a number of reasons.

We don’t want to create a culture where someone feels as though they need to develop negotiating skills to get paid what they’re valued. It becomes a distraction and you not only have people that want to develop those skills, you have people that may never ask. It results in a loss of focus on the work and also we’ve seen situations in other companies where 2 developers in the same role get wildly different amounts because they negotiated a higher salary when being hired.

We also want to be transparent about salary banding. Not only should everyone have a career progression plan in place, they should know what other team members get in relation to the seniority. It help put role responsibilities into context. We’ve never seen monetary issues affect this.

I’ve heard the argument made “what if someone doesn’t deserve the raise?”. Well for me, if this happens, it’s a result of bad leadership. If someone isn’t pulling their weight in the role you hired for, you either a) hired incorrectly from a cultural perspective (or even skills perspective, but this is easier to avoid) or b) you’ve not provided enough support to develop them into the role. So again, the responsibility falls on you.

We don’t want negotiation to be part of someone’s income and it’s worked for us for over 12 years now. You may not be able to change things over night, but it’s worth considering as a long term strategy so you can focus on the work, isn’t it?

Rage

From around the age of 15, rage was a big part of my identify. It drove me to work hard at whatever I was doing. Working with an intensity that those around me didn’t invoke. I would question this and believe that it was a superior way of interacting with the world.

But you soon learn that this is just one element of life and as a result, other areas come at a cost.

Whether it be in relationships or professional environments, I felt as though this was a strength in my identity but other aspects of my life suffered which only reinforced the rage.

But you realise that not everyone is the same, not every aspires so how you operate and there’s always more than one perspective.

From around the age of 27, it took a lot of time to work on myself, identify that everyone has different aspirations, that your way isn’t always the correct way and that there is more to life than what you currently believe is the more important thing.

But if you’re life is currently consume with work and nothing else, that’s probably a good time to identify tools that may help you work through the rage.

Consuming books on relationships and leadership helped. Gratitude and healing helped. Mediation helped. Sleeping better helped.

There are a number of tools and no single right way. You’ve got to put in the work to understand who you are and how others are wanting to be viewed by the world.

Maintain Consistency

Pick a few key operations you believe the team should be focused on throughout the weeks & cycles and set your focus on them.

If you introduce a new process, but you don’t repeatedly verbalise it and check-in with people on a weekly basis, even though you may be maintaining consistency by using it daily, your team may believe it’s not a focus anymore as you’ve not mentioned it in a while.

How should they know the difference between this process and other processes you’ve tried to implement that proved unsuccessful and shouldn’t be used?

Anything you believe is important to the studio’s growth, repeat and maintain consistency in the delivery.

As soon as you stop putting focus on the process, the process will be lost and you won’t know the consequence until you hit that same blocker again which you designed the process to avoid.

Decisive in action

When asked to make a large strategic choice, you’ve got to carefully consider the actions to take.

But once the choice is made, you should act swiftly and decisively in the direction you’ve chosen to take.

The more you ponder the choice, 2 things happen.

Over time, the fault lines will change. What you took as the data to make your decision has now shifted and you shouldn’t base decisions on outdated information.

Second, the more people you speak to for advice, the larger the circle of confidence goes. If it starts to reach the person/people you’re making the decision about, you lose some of the leverage you have in that situation, certainly the first responder leverage.

So when you’re trying to make a big strategic decision take time to consider the options, understand what it means for your business, but don’t linger. Once decided, act intentionally and swiftly

Giving Space for Creativity

A difficult part of the creative process when you’ve done it for many years is giving others the same creative freedom you experienced earlier in your career.

When you start out, you’re pushing your ideas forward and learning how to communicate in a clear, succinct way. You get to a point where you’re able to verbalise your ideas clearly and to the point very quickly.

As the team or department grows, new people join your conversations which creates a dichotomy.

On one hand, you need to communicate and articulate in the style you’ve developed to help mentor and guide them with the tools you’ve learnt. But you also have to provide a white space to allow them to consider various options and get to a conclusion of a creative challenge without your input.

You can of course steer and provide them with prompts, but it hard to not jump in straight away and provide the answer for them. Your brain is clearly locked into the process but speaking to soon could have a negative consequence because a) you brought people into the team to share their experiences and their thoughts for a more diverse approach, but also b) if you jump in every time with the solution, they don’t develop their own skillset for when you want them to step into a more senior role.

Next time you’re in a creative conversation, try to leave space for the voices you may not hear from.

Maybe provide prompts or questions and get their input on things.

Try to push for more generalised statements or outlines of the issue, try to get their thoughts on the solution.

It may take longer to get to the solution, and many times it may be the solution you thought of in that split second. But to grow your team and allow people ownership in their respective areas and for them to feel as though they’ve meaningfully contributed, you have to create that space for growth.

Write down your first impressions

We’re going through a series of key hires in the studio to help us grow to the next stage of our journey.

We’ve hired slowly and intentionally over the 12 years. Going from 6, to 9, to 12, and now to 15.

This means that we haven’t had a huge amount of reps in interviewing and hiring. It took us 4-5 years to identify what our values were as a team and to hire people that lifted and changed the culture in positive ways.

We want to hire with inclusivity in mind, whatever someone’s background and experience may be.

Hire with your Head (for me, it was the 4th Edition of the book), is a great book to help work towards a fair process that aims to remove as much bias, or at least be able to reflect on bias when it happens, to help build your team.

A key takeaway is the idea of writing down your first impressions of a candidate. It’s an easy first step, and it helps you understand your initial judgements of people, and on reflection, if they turn out to be justified, or, after digging a little deeper, whether they were unjust with a demonstration of your bias slipping through.

To do this, write down a few key takeaways you have in the opening minutes of when you meet the candidate. After a serious of interviews, reflect on those first impressions. See if your initial judgements were true, do any of them still hold up?

This tool will help you think and articulate your reasons for liking/disliking a candidate, with the ultimate goal of bringing a diversity of minds to the team as you continue your journey together.

Changing Priorities

It’s always hard trying to find the best way to plan your time. Do you list tasks as A,B,C priority? Maybe you do ‘Immediate’ and then 1st Pri, 2nd Pri, 3rd Pri, 4th Pri & ‘Quick’ to create a unified order to tackle.

Inevitably you end up tagging lots of things immediate and anything that drops to 2nd priority or lower, never quite gets done. Sometimes you’ve tackle lots of quick things, but then you’re not focusing on the deep work.

You have to fill the rocks first and then put the sand around it.

The proverb goes that you have a glass jar with some rocks and sand and you need to fit everything into the jar.

If you fill the jar with the quick tasks (sand) first, the rocks won’t fit in. But if you only do the rocks without leaving time for the sand there’ll be no foundation.

The answer for scheduling my day came from an unlikely source – ‘Sell it like Serhant’ – a book about selling real-estate.

It’s a great book for entertainment purposes but it also has some great business advice.

The formula is FKD. An anacronym being ‘Get FKDd’.

F is for Finder
This is your deep work in the morning. Find new business, podcast guests, new design work, whatever your area, find more.

K is for Keeper
Focus on what you’re already running, does your team need support on anything? Do you need to build a new studio pipeline? Galvanise your work in this period.

D is for Doer
In this period, just do the work It doesn’t require as much brain power, but you do just need to do your work. You need to put your headphones on and just get the work done.

It’s been a really useful system to follow and helped me launch a creative side project that I can do on evenings and weekends.

If you’re having trouble with focus and an unending list of tasks, try this approach for 7 weeks, it might help with plan your day.

Floating

There’s a concept of ‘floating’ in food retail which means to not lock yourself down into one position so that you’re able to support the team wherever bottlenecks arise.

Is there a certain type of food order running out of stock? Does a delivery driver need a note signing? Are the fries running low? All these issues wouldn’t be possible to look out for if you were locked into one position not being able to see the full scenario.

In the real-time industries, we have producers and directors of projects, and although showrunners exist in film and television, maybe we need to introduce a floater role.

We need generalists that are able to jump from position to position to help support people when they need some time.

The floater’s time is there to support a creative team.

I notice this to be true especially in the smaller teams when every pound and penny is needed to stay afloat financially. You don’t have room for overheads such as producers and directors – you’re all in to create the best project you can.

But if you’re able to have someone who is trained in all aspects of your development pipeline, they can support and see bottlenecks and be integrated as part of the deeper production whilst helping move the project forward.

If you don’t have experience, create experience

You need 3 years of AAA experience for this role.

What they’re asking for is not that you’ve completed 1,095 day of development. It’s that you should have experienced stages in production and committed yourself to long term goals in that time.

You’ll have learnt how team’s work and develop on a larger scale. You’ll likely have shipped a project.

But you can recreate this experience yourself. You need to be self motivated and focused on doing the work. But if you do, then your application will stand up.

In the games industry, I’m not one that participates game jams, but completing game jams consistently whilst building your portfolio will show focus and, well, consistency.

Set yourself smaller projects.

Most students leave higher education with the belief that they can complete a large project over the summer and this inevitably happens because life hits.

Instead, have smaller goals and be consistent. Set yourself a realistic schedule and show up.

Try some 2 week challenges. Complete them. Upload all submission materials to a professional standard. Reflect on them. And then select your next project.

If you have to get a part-time job whilst you look for your career, do the right amount of hours where you can put in an extra hour a day before work or after work to create the body of work you want to represent yourself with.

If you’re learning these skills and deliver consistently, continue reaching out to companies, you can get around the 3 year wall. It’s an arbitrary number in that respect but what the number represents is the important thing.

As long as you continue to focus on your craft, the real-time industries such as games reward the work that is put in, as long as it’s focused, disciplined and consistent.

Showing Up

The games industry like most creative industries just ask one thing of you – that you show up.

If you’re consistent in your work and able to reflect to improve, take on feedback to adapt and to focus to be disciplined, you’ll find the route through.

These industries reward the hard work invested and so, even if it’s day one, just do the work and show up for the long run.

Focus on the internal aspects of what you can control and the external will take care of itself.