I knew going into this that my new manager was pretty hands off. Personally I like it that way. I have had managers that were in my back pocket and quite frankly I find it irritating. Leave me alone, I know what I am doing. I will get done what you need me to do, just make it clear what my priorities are (and if you don’t, I will – so don’t be surprised if I don’t do what you think is the most important thing first). I’ll come to you if I run into problems that I can’t solve by myself. If I don’t ask for help, please stay out of my way. I’ll tell you what you need to know so that you don’t get caught unaware.

I guess what I am trying to say is that even if you have very independent people working for you remember to acknowledge what they are doing. They may not need guidance to get their job done, but an occasional pat on the back to let them know that they are on target is invaluable. Some of the folks that report to me have been working some crazy hours lately. It was pretty obvious based on what was accomplished over the last week. I’m hoping that my couple of words (thank you) meant as much to them as my manager’s meant to me this week.

First off, this is a position that I really, really want. Since I’ve been interviewing it is one of only a very few that I have been very excited about. This isn’t pretend excited, this is chomping at the bit to get started excited. I was beginning to wonder if such a job exists or not… well, it does.

The reason for this post is because I learned something completely new and different. I’ve done a lot of interviewing. I mean a LOT. I’ve probably personally interviewed well over 100 people. I’ve asked technical questions, I’ve asked behavioral question, I’ve made people really squirm. On the other side of the interview table, I’ve learned to answer questions with stories about my past rather than general feel good statements. This week I learned an interview technique that applies extremely well when you are interviewing for a role that has many different interpretations. Ask the interviewee to present what the role means to them in 10 minutes or less. SO Simple. Duh! I should have thought of this!

Actually, it’s a little more than that:

• Describe what you think that this role is
• Describe how you’d approach this particular role in this company
• Describe what makes you uniquely qualified for this role

So simple. But yet, so effective. I put together 8 slides and presented them to a panel of interviewers who then asked me questions about my background and my presentation. It was a quick, effective way to get to understand how a person would approach a job. I’m going to remember this for when I am interviewing to fill positions again.

So, you’re probably wondering… how did my interview go? I’m cautiously optimistic. My one regret is that I wasn’t able to sit down with everyone individually. It is much harder for me to make a connection with people when I am talking to a roomful. I don’t know how much that hurt me.

You can find the video here.

Well I learned something. It really DOES make a difference if you are speaking about a topic that you are passionate about. I had a great time.  I also can’t tell you how many people came up to me yesterday afterwards, stopping me in the hallway, grabbing me at the bar to tell me how much they enjoyed my talk. It felt GREAT! I even had one of our competitors come up to me and he started off by saying that he went to my talk to “see what we are up to”. He really enjoyed the presentation and then he proceeded to ask me if I wanted to come work for them. <snort!> That was awesome, it never hurts to have supporters and friends at the competition.

One thing has become pretty clear to me, people in the game industry are still struggling with how to incorporate professional management into their companies. This is a group of very unique and creative individuals and a lot of them have some serious quirks. Take those people and promote them to management positions without training and it becomes a very difficult situation.  I was lucky, I had management training . I had conflict management training. I went through personality type analysis. Looking back at it, I didn’t think a whole lot about it at the time, but geeesh it made a huge difference. There are some things that are good about working for big companies.

Wish me luck! I’ll share parts of my talk when I return.