Your role as a team leader is to lead. What you did is the most common mistake of the fresh leads (in any fields) : trying to prove they are better than the people they lead by overworking themselves. That (again) is not your job.
Seconded. A good leader should hire people who are better than him (or her). Here I mean "better" in a specific sense, such as programming -- since your primary job is to manage and direct your employees (keep them happy, inspired, and on-task) you won't have as much time as them to write code. You should hire the best programmers you can get, and not be afraid of them being "better at it" than you are (after all, such concern only hurts a project in the long run).
I think others are doing a good job answering your question, just wanna give my thoughts.
Roots, I think the reward for your hardwork is that, your final game will feel really "you-ish", especially when you're involved in the story, engine, and art. So I think maybe you can add :
2. I am the writer who creates the game's story (with feedback from my other teammates) 7. I sparingly do my part in the art department, especially when we our art demand exceeds supply
back to your work list.
You're not working in a company, so I think it wont hurt to do more stuffs (as long as you can handle it), just make sure everybody do their part, dont overshadow them and make them feel like they're unneeded in your group.
I don't officially work in the game industry but I'm trying to get myself started. However, as a business administration student I do know a lot about work delegation and managing specific departments. What you are doing now is an excellent way to learn more and get "more points", however... it's far too much.
You should not stress yourself with so much work. What I recommend yourself to do is delegate some of your tasks to the rest of your team, which is what you originally asked. Hey, delegation plays as an important role when being a leader (just don't do it too much, y'know?).
All game development teams SHOULD have some kind of manager. You have all of that corporation stuff with presidents and managers and whatnot, but you really only need a couple based on the size of your business. Make sure there's a president, then some kind of director, then your "heads" which are the managers of each specific department. If you're working with programming, as you say, you should be focusing on the most important programming tasks and not what's going on in the artist department unless you have some free time.
You seem like a jack of all trades, and that's great. However, in order to have things run smoothly you need to delegate to others. Too much work just holds projects back. Hey, get some feedback from some of your workers if at all possible by how much work you should be doing and how much help they need to get.
If you feel a need to control everything, I have a suggestion for you. Do all the programming, story, and artwork, but do it like a draft. The other guys on your team will have enough work, and you won't stress yourself so much.
-----------------------------------------Everyboddy need someboddy!
Original post by Roots But I don't want to force any of my work onto others simply because I'm too busy, you know?
You have to understand that you don't make the game all by yourself. If you understand that not everything is your work, than you will not feel guilty for letting your team do their share.
How about the fact that it's more efficient to do it the way you want it done yourself the first time than recruit someone, orient them, explain the assignment, tell them what changes need to be made, possibly repeat this step a few times if they're just not getting it done, and maybe get 2 or 3 pieces of completed work out of the person before they abandon the project? I'd be ecstatic not to have to do any of Xenallure's concept art, if only I could find a talented artist who would commit to the project rather than wandering away once they realize it's work.
I want to help design a "sandpark" MMO. Optional interactive story with quests and deeply characterized NPCs, plus sandbox elements like player-craftable housing and lots of other crafting. If you are starting a design of this type, please PM me. I also love pet-breeding games.
Original post by sunandshadow I'd be ecstatic not to have to do any of Xenallure's concept art, if only I could find a talented artist who would commit to the project rather than wandering away once they realize it's work.
Kind of off-topic, but the way my team avoids this problem is to only hire people that we feel are genually interested in our game. The best applicants want to join our project, and not just any game project so that they can get some experience. Very recently, we turned down some applicants with a very impressive background and level of experience in favor of some less experienced (but still suitable) applicants simply because they gave us the impression that they really wanted to help us with this game.
We've made the mistake of not hiring these types of people in the past, and sure enough those people wondered off only after a short while and didn't really contribute much of anything.
I want to reply to this thread because I think there are some really good points here. Additionally, the struggles you are going through are similiar to the ones I went through over the last 18 months as I transitioned from being one of the most productive programmers in our company towards a leadership role responsible for technical direction.
When I signed up for the job as a lead I thought it would be a simple matter of doing some documentation and running meetings. What it became was an opportunity to work with others, consolidate technical goals into a team-mandate, assess risks and manage sollutions. Unfortunately, it took me a while to figure this out. I spent a number of months working myself to death trying to be a coder and a manager.
Ultimately I realized that what the team needed was not a good (but exhasted) coder and sometime manager, but a leader, a mentor and a technical director.
Over the last year I've come to realize that helping my peers and seeing them succeed is hugely rewarding both for me and for the product we are developing. I spend a lot of my time looking at the big picture and working with the producers to make sure that all our ducks are in a row. If there are any technical risks or unknowns I spend time with the pertinent programmers to try to find a sollution. Sometimes it comes down to me spending a day or two working on a test application to prove out the feasibility of an idea, but mostly I work with other team members to try to come to a sollution that everyone is part of.
I've seen other people step into a leadership role only to realize that it isn't for them. Our company doesn't penalize people for changing their mind. We want a solid leadership team that loves their jobs.
Some of the pitfalls I fell into earlier on you've pointed out and others have answered. I'll go through your four points and address them from my perspective:
1. How much work is too much work for a team lead to take on by himself?
Realistically, the team lead should be taking on the same work load as everyone else. The kind of work he does should be different from the programmers, artists and producers. I work ~45 hours a week, just like everyone else. Sometimes I work more, sometimes less. I simply spend more time talking to people and worrying about the product in the big picture.
Your comment 'I don't just want to be a manager for my game. I want to be a contributor!' just begs the question to be asked: should you be the lead? I'd say no; if you want to be contributor you should be in production. If you want to be a lead then contribute at a higher level. Only get into the trenches if something bad happens; work through others so they can grow and gain confidence and ultimately feel good about their contribution to the product.
2. Should an overworked team lead begin delegating some of his load to others on his team?
YES. The team lead should never be overworked. If you are overworked you will miss the big issues. Your job is to find things that slip through the cracks, to make sure everyone is on the same page. If you are too busy to talk to everyone on your time routinely you are not doing your job. The team is counting on you to worry about the things they don't/can't/won't want to.
Of course it's acceptable to delegate and you should. You are no longer a do-er, you are a make-things-happen-er, for lack of a better word(s).
3. Should a game development team try to hire a manager/administrator?
They should always have a manager or administrator of some kind, whether it is hired from outside the company, or within. The key point is that the manager must believe that managing is their primary responsibility, not secondary.
You'd be suprised the kind of people who want to do this kind of work. Your question 'how can you trust somoene over the internet that you've never met' is an odd one. Arn't you already working with programmers & artists over the internet? Do you trust them? If you don't then you need to find a way to trust them and for you to be trusted. Without honest and earned trust management is never effective; it decends into a tyrannical relationship where someone 'above you' is telling you what to do and you never communicate openly about the real issues that need to be addressed.
Your later point about a good leader doing his share of the work is totally true. If a programmer works ~60 hours a week and the manager works ~40, there is a problem. Work with the programmer to try to identify why a 60 hour work week is needed. There is probably something you can do to help: move responsibilities to other programmers, work with producers and designers to cut features, delay a feature until later when there is more time. Doing your share of the work doesn't mean doing the same tasks as everyone else, it means putting in the same amount of effort to the end goal.
These are my observations from working in the industry for a number of years now. I know you are working independantly in a non-paying situation, but I still feel they hold true.
My recommendations to you would be this:
- Quit being the lead. You clearly want to work on production, not management. - Find an administrator. Someone who can maybe manage the project and do web development, or collapse the tasks together. - Work at a pace you can manage; breaking your neck and working long hours quickly reduces code quality.
Hopefully you can implement some changes that will make you more comfortable with yourself and your position on the project.
Thanks everyone. [smile] I pointed out this thread to my team a couple days ago to see what they thought, and we talked about it and came up with a solution I feel. No one wants me to stop being the lead (which is a good thing I'm assuming [grin]) and honestly I don't really want to stop being the leader either. So my team has asked that I delegate more of my administrative-type work to them and stop doing all the "painful" work myself. [wink] So it looks like things will work themselves out on our team.
Original post by sunandshadow How about the fact that it's more efficient to do it the way you want it done yourself the first time than recruit someone, orient them, explain the assignment, tell them what changes need to be made, possibly repeat this step a few times if they're just not getting it done, and maybe get 2 or 3 pieces of completed work out of the person before they abandon the project? I'd be ecstatic not to have to do any of Xenallure's concept art, if only I could find a talented artist who would commit to the project rather than wandering away once they realize it's work.
It maybe more efficient once but it isn't the second, third fourth etc..... Train someone and they will do it right from then on. That is what a team lead does. They accept that although they may be better than any single team memeber if they invest their time in the team (rather than just doing work on the project) they will end up with a better team. Maybe not at the start but the longer terms gains vastly outweigh the short term costs.
