Bad team collaboration is the antechamber to Crunch.

Your design perspective narrows, information doesn’t flow, and people don’t trust each other. One of the best ways to make your collaboration effective is to improve your Social Skills. After that, you can do your part in building and maintaining trusting teams, which will always lead to better games and healthier development.

This week I’ll show you 3 often unnoticed mistakes Game Designers must avoid so you will get the most out of your Social Skills.

If you fix these mistakes, you’ll see a significant boost both in your team and yourself as a Modern Game Designer.

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To improve your Social Skills you want to avoid:

• Giving Incomplete Feedback
• Mistaking Collaboration For Constant Communication
• Ignoring Self-Confidence

Without further ado, let’s jump right in.

#1: Giving Incomplete Feedback

Incomplete feedback makes people talk and trust each other less.

Trust is a crucial indicator of a good and effective team since collaboration can’t happen without it. And feedback plays a vital role in building trust since it’s one of the major ways a team exchange information.

Most of the time, the problem is not the lack of feedback but their quality. Feedback is not an expression of likeness (or dislikeness) in a regular chat. If you, as a Game Designer, receive feedback, you must do something with it (acknowledge or discard it). However, if it’s not good constructive feedback (”This doesn’t work”, “Change it”, “It’s confusing”, etc.), you won’t know what to do with it. And that’s the worst situation since maybe there’s something wrong, but you need to discover what by yourself.

You might say, “Discovering problems is part of your job!”. And you’re right, but if I could have seen the problem myself, I would have solved it by now.

So let’s see how to solve this issue.

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Create and maintain a team culture where good feedback is the norm.

Your focus must be the team culture because if you’re the only one giving good feedback, this will not help much. But first, let’s define what’s good feedback.

Good feedback has 3 characteristics:

• Specific: It highlights a specific thing, not a general concept.
• Motivated: It has supportive arguments about why that thing doesn’t work (or does).
• Honest: It says what needs to be said, not what the person wants to hear.

Look around you, and you’ll find very few good feedback.

For example, “That mechanic doesn’t work” is not good feedback. On the other hand, “The exploration feeling is weak because there are no reasons to explore in the level” could be a good one. But how do you make other people improve their feedback? Your best weapon is questions.

Whenever you receive bad feedback, ask a question for each of the 3 missing characteristics. Tell them to be more specific, ask why, and reassure them they can be direct with you.

Doing this takes time and effort, but the resulting team environment is worth it.

#2: Mistaking Collaboration For Constant Communication

Collaborating doesn't mean working together.

A team that doesn't collaborate is doomed to fail, and it's hard even to consider it a team. However, especially small teams often go the other way around and work together all the time.

This is based on a big misconception about collaboration, which is not actively working together on something. Collaborating is not doing a 4-hour meeting every day. Collaboration means doing your work being aware that you're a component of a bigger structure called "Team". If you work alone, you're the agent of every step of the pipeline, so you don't have to take care of what and how to get done after.

In an effectively collaborating team, every member does the work but also takes care of how other members will access the result.

But how can you foster real collaboration in a team environment?

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Leverage asynchronous communication tools and deep work.

First and foremost, the entire team needs to shift to asynchronous communication and limit real-time as much as possible. You don't need to avoid it, though; use it for what it is for: review and relationship building.

But why is real-time communication a problem? It destroys deep work. As the amazingly famous Cal Newport book says, deep work is a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes cognitive capabilities to their limit. To have a 100% functional team, you need to incentivize deep work as much as possible. I know most of these behaviors are on the company's shoulders, and the individual has little to no agency.

However, the most effective thing you can do to persuade the team to make the shift is to learn to use a tool that fosters asynchronous communication and leverage deep work at the same time. This underrated tool is called Documentation.

With properly structured, written, and used documents, team productivity it's guaranteed to rise.

#3 Ignoring Self-Confidence

Lack of self-confidence is the first step to hiding, lying, and faking.

Some people are born with self-confidence. But anyone can lose or gain it since our environment strongly shapes it.

This issue often goes hidden, but its effects are tremendous:

• You’re afraid of telling you’re made a mistake.
• Your feedback weakens because you feel you can be wrong.
• Other team members don’t trust you because you are fake.
• You do the bare minimum because you don’t trust yourself.

A team with these behaviors it’s a ticking bomb.

And the worst part is that the lack of self-confidence is contagious like a virus, and if not cured, it will spread.

Let’s see how you can improve your self-confidence.

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Solidify your self-confidence by helping others build theirs.

Self-confidence doesn't come from praise or motivational speeches. If you lack self-confidence, and I repeat every day that you're good at what you do, you won't gain anything.

You'll feel appreciated in the short term, but you'll be back to normal after a few days. The best way to build self-confidence is to help someone else build theirs. By helping others, you will feel better and realize you can achieve great things and are a worthy team member. And want to know the best part? It has a positive ripple effect on the whole team's trust (and consequently performance).

So next time you feel you're not worth it, help your team members with their work. And on the other hand, if you see someone struggling with self-confidence, genuinely ask them to help you.

Being a team also means taking care of each other.

Social skills are also called "Soft Skills" but are far from soft.

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Key Takeaways:

• Create and maintain a culture where good feedback is the norm.
• Leverage asynchronous communication tools and deep work.
• Solidify your self-confidence by helping others build theirs.