So I'm sitting here waiting for my flight, minding my own business. Another of those "days where I could have caught an earlier flight if only..."
I'm on my computer, working on a different post you'll see here soon.
A woman walks in, sits near me, takes out her cell phone and proceeds to talk with someone for about half an hour. She does about 90% of the talking.
A while later a man comes in and sits nearby. He takes out his cell phone and over the next twenty minutes I learn that someone named Frank just got fired, that no one has ever liked Al, that Ed just hired someone who lives in Kauai to serve accounts in Honolulu and when will Anna Luisa realize Ed is stupid, and on and on and on...
So what the heck do these two people have to do with game development?
Question 1:
If your manager were stuck in an airport and talking on the phone, what kinds of things would he or she say? What names would be brought up? What tone would he/she use?
Would they do 90% of the talking? 70%? 50%? Would there be derisive comments about other people on your team?
If you imitated your manager on that phone call, just joking around, could you do it well enough to crack up your co-workers?
Question 2:
What if the people who report to you were asked what you'd sound like when you're talking about work on the phone with a friend?
What if they imitated you on that phone call, without any worries about getting in trouble?
What percentage of the time would they predict that you talked? 50%? More? Would there be demeaning comments about people coming from you?
The imitation, does that feel like you?
If the person they imitate talking in the airport doesn't sound like you, what would you have to change so the imitation was something you'd actually enjoy seeing?
If you know what changes you'd have to make, what keeps you from making them?
In the first management training exercise I ever went through, I learned that very few managers sound to others the way they sound to themselves. All of us got some ugly wake up calls when we learned that our direct reports viewed us very differently from the way we viewed ourselves.
Question 3:
So let me put the question out there one more time, to mull over in your private heart of hearts:
What would you have to do differently in order for that team member's imitation of you to become something you'd like to hear?
Copyright (c) 2009-2010, Don Daglow. All Rights Reserved.
