How to deal with someone else’s variable performance on a game development team

This sounds like a horrible situation and I can hear your emotions. Unfortunately those bosses will unfairly dismiss you unless you can be convincing in a way they understand. And that likely means you’ll have to put aside your emotions when having conversations with people.

Today we’re talking about how to deal with someone else’s variable performance when you’re not their manager or producer. It can be super frustrating when this person isn’t pulling their weight and you have to deal with the consequences. We’ll talk about how to keep calm and get change to happen.

Consider your perspective

You should start by fully considering your perspective of the situation:

• You’ve noticed a pattern, right? What is that pattern exactly? When does it start and how does it play out?
• Why is their behaviour such a big deal? What are the results of their actions? How does it impact the rest of the team?
  • Related to this, think about your intent in solving this problem. Think of top level things that the others on the team can agree to. Like shipping the game on time, not throwing out work, having predictable sprints and so on.
• It sounds weird, but there’s no need to come up with solutions yourself. That’s something the tech director will come up with themself. And if they can’t, then production, HR or someone else will come up with a solution. If you try to problem solve, like saying the only way is to fire them, then people will focus on that rather than on the pattern and results you’ve noticed.

How to talk about it

Next up is talking about what you’ve found out. You’ll be having conversations that go along these lines:

• My intent is (say why this conversation is important in a way that draws the other person in, e.g. not miss the next deadline).
• I’m observing a pattern where (specific observations about when the tech director isn’t doing their work).
• This means that (insert the results you’ve noted).
• I’m wondering what we can do together. Do you have any ideas?
  • If they don’t have any ideas, you might be able to suggest an idea by saying something like: “Would it make sense to…”? Where you invite the person to engage and make the solution their own.

In these conversations, take out your negative emotions. Be genuinely curious. Remember: You don’t really know what’s causing the issues with the tech director. It could be something bad going on in their personal life. Maybe it’s actually a predictable thing (e.g. school holidays). It could be that they don’t like a particular type of work. Finding out which type of work they don’t like gives big insights. It might be that they’re in over their heads and need to demoted or need additional support.

The hope is that a calm and curious conversation leads to eyes being opened and solutions being found together that everyone believes in.

Who to talk to and questions you can ask

Who you actually talk to will depend on your relationship with the tech director both personally and professionally.

• 1. You could talk to them directly on your own.
  2. Or talk to them with someone else like a producer, manager, or HR as well.
  3. Or you could also just talk on your own to your producer, manager, or HR.

That list is ordered from best place to start to final resort. Let’s look at what you can say in these different conversations.

1. Talk to the person involved, the tech director.
   • This is where being genuinely curious is absolutely essential.
     • You don’t want to back the person into a corner where they just lash out defensively or start targeting you.
     • There is some mystery going on with their performance.
     • You want to get this person curious as well.
     • I believe that most people want to do well at work. So if you come into the conversation with curiosity rather than blame, you’ll have a better chance of getting through to them.
     • Note that some people are just jerks. But we need to make that judgement after they’ve been given a chance to change.
   • The dream is that once they can see their own behaviour, they’ll come up with their own solutions to change.
   • Some useful questions you can throw in here are:
     • How can I help support you?
     • I’m curious what this looks like from your perspective.
2. Talk to the person WITH HR, management, production or someone else
   • This might be difficult to setup since you don’t want it to seem super confrontational.
   • You could try saying: “Will you come with me to talk with X so we can discuss a pattern I’ve been noticing in our deadlines”. Or whatever your intent is.
   • If they don’t want to be part of the conversation, then just jump straight to talking to the other person without the tech director.
   • If they did want that conversation, the conversation you’d have with them present should be pretty similar.
3. Talk to HR, management, production or someone else without the tech director
   • Start with something like: “I don’t want to overstep my role here, but I want to ensure you are aware of the impact on the rest of the team.”
   • Show humility and diplomacy throughout this conversation.
   • Some useful phrases and questions:
     • My coworkers actions are affecting my ability to do my work. But I’m not having any luck addressing it. I need your help.
     • I really want to (state your intent), and I need your help to do that.
     • “I’m curious what’s happening here for you.”
     • You could go more specific too like: “How can we avoid mismatches in what we expect the tech director to do and what actually happens?”
     • Or more generally: How do you think we could make more accurate predictions on everyone’s work output?
     • Another way to approach the situation could be saying:
       • Everyone’s under so much stress. Can we talk about how we can best support one another and the team?
   • You should ask explicitly for change. In fact you can ask for change directly with the tech director.
     • However you ask for change, set a fixed time to check in about it.
     • If the change is a simple process, like changing something in how sprints are run, then your timeline is likely to be 1-2 sprints.
     • If the change is about the tech director changing their behaviours, then you’ll probably need a much longer time frame. Like 3 months.
       • That’s because you can’t expect instant change when it comes to someone’s behaviour. I mean, you know how hard it is to change yourself, right?

That’s all I’m going to say about conversations right now.

Possible Solutions

I’m going to finish with a few brief suggestions for solutions. But like I say, it might not be your place to suggest these.

1. 1. Don’t start work until the tech director has finished their part. That way you know whether there will or won’t be enough time to finish and implement your work within the game.
   2. Ask everyone (not just the tech director) to create time estimates for tasks and then keep track of how much was actually done. It’s not meant to be a competition. It’s about getting individuals to predict their own output better.
   3. If you’re directly involved in planning estimates, you can:
      • Allow more buffer in deadlines.
      • Predict output from the TD to be significantly less than others. Or assume that they will deliver late.

The overall goal is to try and get the person to change themself to reduce their performance variability. If that can’t happen for whatever reason, then the goal will be to understand as much as possible about the variability so the rest of the team can predict it and factor that into all future plans.

Conclusions

Thanks for reading and joining me today. For today’s session I drew from this book: Powerful Phrases for dealing with Workplace Conflict by Karin Hurt and David Dye.

Remember: This is general advice and it might not be right for you and your team, even if you’re the one who wrote in the question! For me to help better, it needs to be a dialog between me, and you, and your entire team. You can hire me to consult for you —> jennsand.com