When Leaders Won't Talk To Their Devs

Have you seen leaders assigning tasks in Jira and asking for estimates in Slack, but rarely having a personal conversation with the team?

There's more and more distance between those leaders and the people they lead. (This is the phenomenon Mark Darrah describes in his video "Faceless Leaders.")

I think a lot of that distance is driven by a need for control, a desire to know what's going on. A leader's reasoning can become, "If I can keep you inside a process box or a structural box, I don't have to worry about you doing something I don't expect." But that control comes at the cost of a more human-to-human relationship with their team.

When Process Feels Safer

A desire for control can get stronger when leaders are scared. Scared leaders fall back on what they know and the things they think are going to keep them safe. For a lot of leaders, that's reports and status updates, controlled meetings, Slack check-ins and making sure everyone's Jira tickets are in order.

Their thought becomes, "If I can say all this stuff is in order, then I can show that I'm valuable, that I'm doing work." The problem: what feels safe for that leader isn't necessarily safe for the organization. It can decrease their team's chance of making a successful game.

From that leader's perspective, though, sticking to the process feels like the right move. This is especially true if the leaders above them are ALSO scared. Bringing up "negative" issues to senior leaders might be considered (and actually be) more dangerous than keeping their reports "all green" and not rocking the boat.

The leader's concern isn't just, "I don't want to risk doing the wrong thing and getting in trouble for not having my reports in order and knowing where all my statuses and tickets are." It's also, "Maybe I'll be perceived as threatening to the senior leaders above me who are scared because they know things aren't going well, but prefer problems not be brought up because it could hurt how they are perceived."

This thinking causes a cascade throughout the organization. Leaders become a bunch of process monkeys, thinking, "Well, tickets/planning/reporting/etc. is what I do and I do it well. The fact that the game is totally borked? Hopefully somebody else will solve the problem. I just need to keep running the meetings and make sure my and my team's productivity can be made to look like it's going up and to the right."

Unfortunately, these defensive behaviors can help a leader's career in the short term, teaching the wrong lessons. Meanwhile, the future is looking worse and worse for everyone involved because of what we're failing to talk about.

Be Open About Failure

If you lead a team, being open with them can feel risky. If you see someone who failed get fired soon after, you are certainly not incentivized to admit failure. Some of you may have had that experience: somebody was doing well, made a mistake, and now they're gone.

See it enough times, and you realize, "I guess I'm just not allowed to make mistakes," which really means, "I guess I'm not allowed to let anyone see the mistakes I will make because we all do." That changes how you interact with the organization.

To make it worse, your team is also learning from how you handle your failures. When devs see leaders covering up failures, they learn that failure isn't okay inside the organization. They too learn the lesson, "We all might fail, but no one can ever know or we'll get in trouble."

Everyone keys off of leaders culturally and behaviorally faster than you'd realize. But it works both ways. If you as a leader are okay admitting failure, that means those who follow you can be okay admitting failure too.

Now, I'm not saying go and fail deliberately. But when you do fail, be open about it. That's the culture you want to create: we can all talk about our failures. They are opportunities for learning.

Because if we can't talk about our failures, that won't stop them from happening. It'll just mean we aren't able to address and learn from them.

If you want to go deeper, I reacted to Mark Darrah's "Faceless Leaders" here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkqIYnEhLdQ

Ben C.
Building Better Games