I firmly believed in these expectations, I believed in titles, lead roles, and responsibilities – not to be limited by them, but “this is the foundation of what you should do.” If you’re doing the job, you get the title (including folks like Eric, who were continuously denied a Creative Lead role due more to politics than what they were actually doing).
But - I was told 8 years into the process that this was irrelevant, and that what guidelines I established for designers and lead designers (of every category) wasn’t worthwhile – this was conveyed to me by Feargus. As he told me, giving expectations for every position was, in fact, wrong. Feargus doesn’t give expectations to his producers - nor should we in other departments, as owners. I didn’t have a good response to this at first because I was genuinely shocked.
I argued my case (since his response was a surprise – and the very late response after so many years genuinely surprised me), and I lost – he simply said to provide expectations for each role was the wrong thing to do because “people will only do the expectations you lay out” which is a dim view of human nature. And it says an unfortunate amount about who we hired.
So – to say it, and I covered this in presentations on hiring: I don’t believe “people only do the littlest required” if you’ve hired the right people and plus, assigning roles and responsibilities solves a lot of problems before they become problems. I did feel I was alone in this aspect, but it seemed self-evident to me - give people the title, the responsibility, and the least of your expectations, and good people will do amazing things beyond anything you could dictate to them.
But I was surprised by his late-term response, his lack of faith in design, and I was disheartened by it. Everything I had been coaching and trying to develop as a foundation had been struck out in one, casual and dismissive, 5-minute conversation.
It’s worth noting that after this occurred, I got accused by a number of designers as “not enforcing the expectations more.” I told them that the expectations had been overruled for every position and was now catch-as-catch-can for each project.
* These expectations, however, are now apparently in use today, because it’s not what they were about, but who speaks to them – which is a topic for another time. In my opinion, the truest test of a manager is they treat the facts they are evaluating as facts, not judging them based on the person relating those facts. True story from a DS3 designer (who left for Blizzard after Stormlands) - we did one not-so-amusing test of this during Dungeon Siege 3, where we had two people tell Feargus the exact same thing, and he dismissed one out of hand, but gladly listened and agreed with the other – even though they were both telling him the exact same thing. At that point, I did break a little inside, but I added it to my manager post-mortem of what not to do as a manager.
harvesting
