Advice Column: How To Lead Others

Hi! This is the first entry to a monthly blog series drawing from my personal experience as a VN dev. This time, we'll focus on strategies you can use to lead a team as a director and the sorts of priorities you need to have. 

Many VN projects are collaborative efforts, with a lot of moving parts. Managerial efforts tend to be scrutinized, especially in popular media, as being lazy, inefficacious, and overall pretty damn helpless. I've worked with really good directors in the past, and I've worked with really, really bad directors. And sometimes, I get to step up to wear the hat myself. There are some common trends I noticed that should be applicable to people either leading or being led by someone else on a team project. 

The core tenant to being a successful director is to have a consistent creative vision, and to communicate it to the people you're working with. This communication can be handled a few different ways. You can make your point heard over meetings, and you can prepare style guides and common creative documents for review. So long as this information is kept to one place and can be reviewed on the regular, you should be in a good spot. 

You should expect people to be coming to you for feedback regularly; that's a part of your job as a director to essentially keep tabs on how things are going, and you should be routinely checking on them for feedback as you go. As the primary creative vision, your input is the most important, and crucial to how your partners go about executing on ideas. Be sure to have an attentive eye during all stages, particularly the concept stage, and if there is someone who isn't sure what to do, you can make sure to point them in the right direction.

Of course, part of the merit of collaborative projects is to recognize that all parties contributing their ideas, their skills, their perspectives, and their vision. Allowing a degree of flexibility to allow your contributors and partners to put their personalized mark on the project and share their experiences that can shape the project productively. Being a good leader is to listen to feedback, and to do your own homework and research. 

That said, it is also incredibly easy for contributors to get lost in the minor details and the minutiae of dumb bullshit that does not matter in the grand scheme of things. Don't be afraid to put your foot down, make a decisive motion, and move on to bigger and better things. You have to think big picture.

As a point of note, I always try to lead by action; by that note, the people in charge will often have the largest workloads, both on the managerial fronts and on the content-production fronts. If you think you aren't ready for a workload, a game jam or a volunteer event where you can see how a team environment works out is likely your best way to get a feel for how the week-to-week dev cycle will entail. 

The best directors I've worked under—and the times I was the best at what I did—the director was an active part in the creation process, with a clear, communicate creative vision. The worst directors I've worked under were incredibly hands-off and had poor communication skills as a whole. It's probably obvious, but communication skills are always key in any collaborative project and you shouldn't be scared to talk with your teammates. If you are, it might be time to reevaluate your approach!

These are some of the things I think about when I look for good leadership: if they're consistent, active, are good communicators, and have a clear vision, it's easy to get the best out of people. Of course, it'd be nice if they aren't jackasses either! :P

Hit up the comments if you have questions or comments, there's probably some other points I forgot to cover. And if you have stuff you'd want me to touch on next month, lemme know!