Hi friends!
The next set of leadership roundtables organized through Game Dev MTL discussed feedback, reviews and 1 on 1 meetings. Here are the notes that were shared with the rest of the roundtable (shared publicly with their permission).
Note that some information here may be missing the context of the in-person conversation, but I still think they can be helpful.
Roundtable 1/3: Designing & Maintaining Company Culture
Roundtable 2/3: Feedback, Reviews & 1 on 1s
Roundtable 3/3: Hiring and Onboarding
Feedback
We started off talking about why we give feedback in the first place, and some interesting points came up:
Also, this very important point:
The way people like to give and receive feedback, its frequency, etc. is all very cultural. This is important to keep in mind especially working with employees or partners in different countries, speaking different languages, etc.
Then we got to how we give feedback, and other things related to how feedback can be received. It’s important to note that there’s a difference between small pieces of feedback, which are small adjustments to modify behaviour, and important “we need to talk” issues.
A couple of the sticky notes above needed some elaboration:
⭐ – “need to be explicit about expectations” – this came up in the context of giving someone feedback without it being clear what the expectations were in the first place. If you tell an artist that you want a first pass done of a character, and they present something, and your feedback is that it’s not polished enough or doesn’t look representative of the art in the final game, then this kills your feedback and credibility to give feedback! They’ll learn from this that you’ll criticize their work regardless of what they do, since you’re not being clear about what you want in the first place. Also, getting negative feedback on something that was missing clarity can cause confidence issues (especially in juniors).
⭐⭐ – “feedback for validation → can cause issues” – if folks need positive feedback to validate everything they do, this can be a problem because:
- they’re less likely to do something imaginative and out-of-the-box because they depend on that validation and it’s less likely to happen if there’s negative feedback, which will happen if they take creative risks with their work
- it will scare us (managers) into not ever wanting to give them negative feedback because we know it’s tied to their personality / self-esteem
- this is generally a bigger problem which could mean the person isn’t receiving any positive validation from their social / familial ecosystem, and is dependent on you (the manager) in an unprofessional way (i.e. more as a parent/child relationship and not a boss/employee one)
🔎 – The feedback model from Manager Tools (linked in the resources below) goes something like this. “When you _, here’s what happens. How can you do this differently?” This applies to things like folks showing up late to meetings, work product being sub-par, folks not paying attention in meetings, etc.
1:1 Meetings
We started defining one-on-one meetings, but it’s clear (throughout all of management in all fields of work) that 1:1s are different for different people. Some notes came up:
Some folks at the roundtable had set questions which they asked every time, others had a more free-form meeting. Some question ideas include:
- any problems?
- any positive highlights?
- how is the sprint going?
- any roadblocks?
- how is X (task, project) going working with Y (person)?
One of the participants shared their review structure which ties into 1:1s, and which many others found inspiring due to the fact that it tied 1:1s back to evaluations and back to company culture:
Performance Reviews
There were a number of different points raised about performance reviews, including their frequency (most did annual, one person did every 6 months), how people do self-evaluation, etc.:
We talked about 360 reviews, where some number of people who work with the employee review them, and that data is often used to help create annual reviews.
Other Misc Notes
A lot of stuff came up in the chat! Here are some sticky notes:
Resources & Future Questions
- Love Languages at Work – article on LinkedIn — came about in the context of talking about feedback languages and how similar they are to love languages.
- Manager Tools Podcast on Feedback — (best thing I’ve ever consumed around management ever!!!)
- Manager Tools Feedback Model
- Atomic Habits – book by James Clear
- The Playlist – Netflix series about Spotify’s beginnings (and a guide of how not to do certain things)
- If Books Could Kill – podcast on Spotify, iTunes, etc.
And a bonus question which we didn’t have time to dig into enough: “how do you give feedback to someone who is simply working too slowly?” We discussed it a bit, and there were questions around workload, how well they’re being managed, etc… but we didn’t reach a solution!
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Hope this was useful to you, I definitely learned a lot from the sessions!
❤
Rich
Richard's Blog 