The best thing you can learn from the diverse teams
Alright-alright, that’s a clickbait to some extent (with the doggos!). It’s only one of many things you can learn by working with people of different backgrounds, cultures, and areas of expertise. But today I want to talk not about technical insights or hard skills but about communication. Everyone keeps repeating that “Communication is vital”… but how exactly?
About a month ago I was on a weekly catch-up call with our cinematic artists. It’s a rather casual meeting that is used to update each other on tasks’ statuses, blockers, and — sometimes — on things not directly related to work. At the end of the meeting, one guy asked our opinion on ellipsis: “How do you feel about people using an ellipsis in their messages?” To my surprise, the opinions were quite different: one person said that they don’t care and it’s completely fine, another one said that it is a sign of passive aggression, and the third one confessed to using them and explained that it’s his way of processing information. What sounded like a very minor and unambiguous thing for me turned out to be important for some of the team members. This is a simple example that illustrates that the same things can be and will be processed by different people in different ways. It starts with small stuff like the in the example and goes up to high-level concepts like company values or product goals. To prevent this, we need to achieve open-mindedness and develop an ability to look at things from people’s points of view. And when I say “we” I don’t mean “fellow producers” or “managers”, I mean everyone on the team.
Before coming to game development, I was working in a court where people with all kinds of jobs and social statuses come to solve their problems. That’s an interesting experience that helped me to gain patience, empathy, and communication skills that can be extrapolated to the teams I work with. When I joined Tactile, we had nearly 200 people and now we are somewhat around 300. In a big multicultural company like that you can expect colleagues with different mindsets but what you should remember is that identical background does not shape persons equally. Though people from the same countries or departments obviously have some similarities, they are also individuals with their own perceptions of everything around them. There is this ancient meme, “this is Six, this is Nine” originally but I found a more refined version.
This pic takes us to a psychological concept known as “The False Consensus Effect”. The false-consensus effect refers to people’s tendency to assume that others share their beliefs and will behave similarly in a given context. Only people who are very different from them would make different choices which often means “those people are wrong”. This does not necessarily create a conflict but what it surely creates is assumption and misunderstanding. It can with equal success, happen both internally (within the team) or externally (between the team and clients/players/other teams).
Let’s take it from theoretical blah-blah to more actionable steps: how to mitigate this? I believe this is a two-three-whatever-way process and the best thing to help you with it is… W-O-R-D-S.
W — “What do you mean”?
Clarifying is not scary. If you feel that you misunderstood a task — don’t be afraid to look incompetent, just ask. If you sense some friction in messages — don’t be scared to clarify. Most likely, the person you are talking to has been in a similar situation where they were not sure if the perception is the same on both sides.
O — Objectivity is subjective.
Remind yourself from time to time that your opinion is, you know, your opinion. E.g., you can agree on product goals but for different reasons. So talk it through and make sure that everyone is on the same page. And if you want people to onboard your vision, you need to be extremely clear in explaining it.
R — Respect others.
Even if the person is behaving inadequately (I’ve seen that A LOT in the court), that does not mean they are wrong. And even if they are, you can do better than getting on their level of dumbness. If you are working in an IT company, you can learn that from user support people — I still can’t believe how limitless is their level of patience.
D — Don’t assume, ask questions instead.
I’m personally guilty on this one, especially when it comes to tools that we use daily I assume sometimes that everyone knows how to use them but that’s not the case. So instead of assuming that people know, ask if they really do (Do you copy, Murad?).
S — Stop second-guessing.
If you push these ideas to the extreme, you might end up being too critical about every word you say. If you think you’ve made some communication mistake, it’s never too late to clarify it. But accept the fact that you’ll never be able to make everyone happy as sometimes people are overly dramatic for their own reasons. Everyone defines their own level of acceptance so ask yourself: where do you draw the line between emphatic understanding and ridiculous drama?
Pick your words wisely and be true to yourself, “Gentle words bring life and health; a deceitful tongue crushes the spirit”.
