The three masks of a creative startup

The creative, the manager, the entrepreneur

After nearly 10 years after founding White Paper Games, I’ve only just become aware of the many masks and how people are unable to read who you are at any given time.

I read a book a few years ago which I highly recommend to anyone in creative fields called the E-Myth.

I have quite strong beliefs when I communicate. I listen often but when I’ve formed an opinion, I use this to drive my feedback.

Most often, these are in creative situations. I try to use rational drive these discussions which Adam Grant in his book ‘Think Again‘ also says could be an issue, but I realised in creative discussions people don’t know who I am.

Am I the ‘boss’? A term that never gets used but are they seeing me as someone who says it should be done X way from an authoritive perspective?

We believe in strong creative disagreement and we can have many heated meetings. This is always focused on what’s best for our users/players over and never a personal attack and we believe this creates the strongest ideas when people are able to poke holes. You can refer to this as an idea meritocracy.

But when I’m in one of those discussions, I’m in there as a designer, alongside everyone else, but people are unable to see that. They either see me as a production manager, as a studio founder or ‘boss’.

I don’t speak unless I have a strong opinion about something, but how do you know between people thinking your creative idea is the right one as opposed to agreeing due to an unwritten hierarchy?

You need to find people that can engage and question.

You need to separate yourself from the many masks as soon as you’re able to. If you want to be a creative, let someone else handle the day to day business. This can be super tough for 2 reasons.

Money, there’s never enough of it. After 9 years, we’re only just getting to hiring our first ‘non-developer’ role.

You need to spend time an energy making sure the person you bring in understands your vision and purpose. You’ll find it hard to verbalise this over the first 5+ years so you try to take on those roles as well as the creative but as you’ve probably experienced, this can lead so many more complications when scale is introduced.

Being aware and understanding the different masks you might wear will help inform your view in meetings and creative collaborations.

The phrase ‘wearing many hats’ is unhelpful. It doesn’t get to the psychology of the team dynamics and could instead be seen as you’re doing multiple roles, but it goes deeper than that.

You can wear many hats and be proud of this fact because it shows you’re able to (or in a lot of cases unable to) balance the work and do each hat justice. But people can still see you when you change hats. This isn’t the case with a mask. You’re unrecognisable and it’s for you to decipher how you’re able to communicate with your team about this. Knowing it exists allows you to provide context to your thoughts when having a creative disagreement.