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About two years ago, I was facilitating a management training program for newer and lesser experienced managers at a video game company. One of the first exercises we did was to define the role of a manager and/or lead. A “lead” is a common supervisory label in gaming, sometimes used as a transitional role into a manager position. As we were listing all the differences between being an individual contributor and a manager, a woman in the front of the class interjected, “It’s a lot of additional work supervising people” with an exasperated tone of voice. I agreed and realized,
“You don’t work in video games to be a manager.
You get into gaming because it’s fun. It’s cool. And you are passionate about the craft.”
However, as employees get more proficient in their technical roles, it’s likely they’ll be tapped to supervise people to do the same function. The challenge? Supervising people to do a job is different than doing the job yourself. And leaders don’t always do an effective job outlining this transition for people moving into that managerial role.
When you are a sound editor, you only have to focus on the tone or tracks or effects you are trying to create for a specific character or level. However, when you become a lead, you have to teach others how to do it. When you are a programmer, you get to concentrate on the code you’re assigned. But when you manage other programmers, you have to evaluate and assign work accordingly, evaluate their code and provide feedback and follow through on overall gameplay. There’s nothing wrong with this expanded level of responsibility, but rarely, if ever, do I hear that leaders have candid discussions with their people about how the expectations change when you move into that managerial role.
When we are succession planning, it’s important to not only think about the role we need to fill and who can do it, but we should also have candid conversations educating people on what the job entails. Their job moves from focusing on the craft and technical expertise into areas of strategy, people, culture, leadership, role modeling and a myriad of additional supervisory responsibilities. By the way, there’s a good chance that some people identified for the next level don’t want that responsibility. Therefore, before we even start to strategize and succession plan, perhaps we should begin by asking people, “Would you be interested?”
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