DawnBringer3D Tips & Tricks, Personal News, Game Development

Team And Personal Values

I’m a fan of values as they help me a lot at my work. Some people don’t use values at all, I see this as a problem because then people “are not aligned to anything” -> how should they act as a company, as a team, as an individual?

Here are some values that I know have worked :

• Individual honesty
  • There is nothing worse than lying to yourself.
• Team instead of individual
  • What is better for the team.
• Company instead of team
  • What is better for the company
  • Everything should be aligned to company vision / target / values.
• Individuals instead of processes and tools
  • Be dynamic, modify the process for the team, not other way around!
• Ownership
  • Let the team and individuals take the ownership of the product they are doing. Let them be proud of what they are doing!
• Learning
  • There is always something to learn!
  • Learn from mistakes -> don’t make the same mistake twice.
  • Encourage to learn : take courses, read books, keep training sessions.

I assume that every company has list of values they act by, but if there is a company that doesn’t have a list of values they really should start thinking about their values and lay them down.

Start driving these values : act by the values by yourself, which is one of the most powerful ways to get your team to use these values as they see the power of values. Also tell your team members why these values exist and what do they mean. Point is that somebody should know why the value is listed and why you should be using it.

What if the values you are driving doesn’t seem to work? Well then it is time to raise the question : do these work at all? has somebody else used these successfully? and so on.

So what is the real power of using values? Well in the best case everybody continuously try to learn new things, try to be honest, and so on. Few examples :

• If people keep learning, it is adding value to your company.
• If people are honest they tell the truth. If a problem occurs people can react to it very quickly as the problem is raised right away instead of hiding it until everything explodes.

Each company, team and individual should have values. I loved working at Nvidia because they took their values very seriously and it worked. You should do the same thing.