Is Your Leadership Showing?

Most members of a team know when they’re doing their work well. They often have a particular area of expertise, and they have deadlines and deliverables. For leaders, it’s a bit different. How do you show that you’re leading? Here are five competencies that good leaders demonstrate. 1. We know that leaders need to be seen by followers--from formal presentations and announcements, to a crisis, to simple “managing by walking around.” As a leader, when do you feel out of your comfort zone? Ask yourself, “How am I visible to others when I don’t want to be?” 2. Many leaders are great at preparing the logistics of leadership (the facts and figures in a plan, or the pitch for a presentation). Just as athletic activities involve physical, mental, and emotional energies, leadership is a “whole-body practice” and requires preparation of the whole person. 3. This is closely related to preparation, because leadership discomfort is greatly enhanced by a lack of preparation. 4. 5.

Don't let popular opinion get in the way of your vision Simon Flesser and Magnus Gardeback of mobile game studio Simogo urged developers at GDC Europe today to "base [design and business] decisions on what feels right instead of what is considered right." With the studio's first game, 2010's Kosmo Spin for iOS, the two-man team created the game following all the rules you're "meant" to follow -- 99 cent price, small file size, lots of updates and a very casual setting. These are the elements they had read would make their game sell. Simogo's second game Bumpy Road also attempted to incorporate a number of these "popular" mobile game elements, with lots of updates released post-launch and cut-price sales from time to time. However, the game was priced higher than 99 cents, and yet still managed to sell solidly, making the development pair question whether there really was a set way to sell mobile games. Nor is the team planning to port the game to other platforms such as Android, even though the Unity engine allows for fairly simple porting.

The keys to a company culture that works In a heartfelt talk at GDC Europe, Harald Riegler, co-founder of Sproing, frankly discussed the challenges and advantages of shaping a company culture that leads to respect and success. "The right company culture will bring really good things out of people where you didn't expect they existed," says Riegler, who manages a company of 65 that works on free-to-play and console games in Austria. Unfortunately, he says, forging the right company culture is a challenge -- but it's crucial to shape it, and that every team member understand it. "That culture will largely decide the success of the studio or team," says Riegler. While "the latest million-selling management style" books offer advice, Riegler was dismissive of trends and tricks. "A good company culture is built on some lasting principles -- principles, to me, means more than a set of rules, it's a foundation on how you live and how you act," he says. Here are his principles: "This is where it gets really tricky," says Riegler.

EA's Core Strategy: Tech, Teams, Brands At Electronic Arts' EA Games label, Patrick Soderlund runs the show. It's within his business that the publisher creates its high-budget games that are targeted towards the dedicated "core" game player. These franchises include , , , and other major series. So how does Soderlund's label foster innovation, when fans of these long-running franchises have built up years of expectations? That's not the only challenge within EA Games -- the label is also in charge of EA's Play4Free business, which is based on the free-to-play, microtransactions-based model. The core games market is changing, and between new tech, business models and high-budget sequels, Soderlund is trying to leave little to chance. Patrick Soderlund: I think Frank Gibeau -- who's my boss and continues to be my boss, and ran the EA Games label before me -- was instrumental in a turnaround for the games label. I think Frank really set the direction for where we needed to go in order to be successful in going forward.

Leading Change - An Excerpt from Beyond Critical [How do you really motivate your development team to change its methods? In this excerpt from his book Beyond Critical: Improving Leadership in Game Development, producer Keith Fuller blends personal experience and literature to explain how you can steer your team.] Okay, so you'll need to do something differently at some point. How? Being a leader doesn't automatically mean people will happily accept any given change you attempt to institute. If the primary SKU is the 360, we should make sure programmers and artists are developing the game with the appropriate input device, right? Clearly there are wrong ways to induce change. I've mentioned that getting people to do something different or think in a new way is not only an uphill slog in and of itself but also tends to induce negative results before you see anything positive come of it. In fact, numerous times I've stated my preference for continuous improvement, something that requires ongoing changes.