So I'm sitting here waiting for my flight, minding my own business.  Another of those "days where I could have caught an earlier flight if only..."  You know the sad story so well I don't even need to tell it.

I'm on my computer, working on a different blog post you'll see here soon.

A woman walks in, sits near me, takes out her cell phone and proceeds to talk with someone for about half an hour.  She does about 90% of the talking.  The other person occasionally says something.

A while later a man comes in and sits two tables away from me.  He takes out his cell phone and proceeds to talk.  Over the next twenty minutes I learn that someone named Frank just got fired, that no one has ever liked Al, that Ed just hired someone who lives in Kauai to serve accounts in Honolulu and when will Anna Luisa realize Ed is stupid, and on and on and on...

So what the heck do these two people have to do with game development?

Question 1: 

If your manager were sitting in an airport and talking on the phone about things at work, what kinds of things would they say?  What names would be brought up?  What tone would he/she use?

Would he or she do 90% of the talking?  Would there be a lot of derisive talk about people? 

If you imitated your manager on that call, just joking around, how confident are you that you'd get at least the tone of your manager's conversation right?  After they've worked together for a while many people can imitate their managers well enough to crack up their co-workers.  Can you?

Question 2:

What if the people who report to you (or a key peer, or that animator without whom you'd be sunk, or...) were asked what you'd sound like when you're talking about work on the phone with a friend?  What if they imitated what you'd be like on that phone call, without any worries about it impacting their jobs?

What percentage of the time would they predict that you talked?  50%?  More?  Would there be demeaning comments about people? 

The person they imitate, does that feel like you?

If the person they imitate talking in the airport doesn't sound like you, what would you have to change about your work style in order to inspire the person imitating you to change their act? 

What would you have to do differently in order for the imitation of you to become something you'd like to hear?

If you know what changes you'd have to make, what keeps you from making them?

Maybe you think you'll like hearing your direct reports imitate you talking about work.  In the management training exercises I've been through, very few managers sound to others the way they think they sound to themselves.  When I was on the receiving end of "this is what we think you sound like" it was not a happy day in my management training life, even though I saw my peers having similar experiences with their own styles and teams.

So let me put the question out there one more time, to mull over in your private heart of hearts:  What would you have to do differently in order for that team member's imitation of you to become something you'd like to hear?

Copyright (c) 2009, Don Daglow