Leadership Lessons from Video Games
Tags: videogames, leadership
Published: 2022-08-02 12:21:08

I love playing games. My favorites are the World of Warcraft and the God Of War series. At the beginning of my career, it was just a way to relax and keep a work-life balance. After a while, I noticed wisdom inside them.

I became a tech team leader in 2014. As it usually happens, I had no idea what to do in the new position. Everything was new to me. The worst thing about my new position was that I had no plan to educate myself. Thus, I started to read nonfiction books about management, and I watched a lot of management talks from other professionals in this field on YouTube.

When I read a lot of books about management, philosophy, and psychology, I realized that you can learn how to lead from every situation in your life. For example, you can learn it in a gym from your coach, from movies, and even from video games.

## Focus on your goal

Goals give you a destination that you need to reach. They help you to track your progress, discover problems, and give you a clear vision. Goals can help you in every area of your life, your job, and your personal life alike.

Once you have set goals for your project every team member should keep the focus on them. Focusing can help you to activate all abilities in your brain, such as learning, awarenesses, problem-solving, and decision making. Your team will solve problems faster when each team member focuses on one thing for a certain period. Sometimes people can forget about project goals, and it’s a leader’s responsibility to remind them of the key tasks that they should be focused on.

Once I was a leader in an enterprise project with a slow-release cycle. One main issue was that team didn’t build it from scratch by themselves. The project was new to us, and we made many necessary changes before deployment. Unfortunately, the codebase had a lack of unit tests, and we weren’t sure that our changes wouldn’t break anything. We decided to take a business trip and work on-site in order to decrease the feedback time of our actions and to react faster if anything went wrong.

We had a plan for deployment and discovered almost all the risks. We planned our deployment for the upcoming weekend, and this was the ideal time to deploy it because we had no users online.

One of my team members **was worried about deployment and shared his concerns with us**, let’s call him Mike.

Mike told us that we could break everything, and we would be unable to roll back the changes. Also, we didn’t have the necessary information in the log files to fix it. This situation was not likely to happen, but I thought that we could fix it if it occurred.

I used Kratos’ quote from the God Of War 4 game

> Do not concern yourself with what might be. Focus on what is, and always remain vigilant. Kratos (God of War PS4)

I had played this game before our trip and this quote was quite funny to me. I had no idea that I would use it at work. **A colleague of mine said ‘okay’ and started to prepare the deployment**.

Deployment went smoothly without any problems. After a few days of monitoring and fixing small bugs, we determined that deployment had finished successfully.
One evening, later on, Mike came to me and said, “Thank you. Your words were useful for me”. After a small chat, I understood that a simple phrase could make another person confident. Also, **he felt supported by his team**.



A leader should keep focused on a team’s goals and dispel a team’s fears, doubts, and uncertainty. A leader needs to be aware of two other areas when leading a team: decision-making and responsibility.

## Decision-making and taking responsibility

There are a lot of great leaders in the world. Most of them changed our lives and our attitude on some topics. One of them is [Nelson Mandela](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Mandela). He is a remarkable example of a great leader. He was a South African revolutionary who ended the apartheid regime in his own country. In addition, he was elected as President of South Africa in a fully representative democratic election. He took responsibility for the anti-apartheid campaign and it was one of his goals in his life.

> — A man chooses; a slave obeys. Bioshock

Mandela could not choose to end apartheid, but he decided to end it. He was a leader who cared and disobeyed the regime as others did.


As a leader of a team, you will always make decisions, and when you make decisions you need to have as many options as you can to choose the right decision. For example, you have a project with a big backlog and tight deadlines, and you realize that you will never finish all the tasks in the backlog by the deadline. You have many options on how to deal with this situation such as talking with your customer to cut features, focusing on the most significant features, or doing something else. However, it’s possible if you carry out the customer’s orders your team will be overloaded, and this can lead to the emotional burnout of your team members.

A great example of decision-making and taking responsibility is Jocko Willink’s story he gave in his [TED Talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljqra3BcqWM) about extreme ownership. He told a great story about taking responsibility for the consequences of the entire situation. In his story, the actions were during the war in Iraq. There was a fog of war, and his battalion opened fire. In the end, a friendly Iraqi soldier was shot, and one of his soldiers was wounded.

The commanding officer said they needed to shut down all operations, and Jocko needed to prepare a debrief. “Who is responsible for what had happened?” was the critical question in the debrief. Jocko realized that as a senior man on the battlefield, he was responsible for everything that happened. Also, he shares lessons learned after the debriefing. When he took responsibility by taking ownership of the problem, the commanding officer started to trust him even more, and so did the team, and they realized that he would never shirk responsibility.

> — Even the good leaders make poor decisions. It is the best leaders who take responsibility for them. Kratos (God of War PS4)

Jocko is an example of a good leader. He gave me a clear understanding of taking ownership.

When I started to own all project problems and shared this point of view within a team, everything became more accessible. It means that we are all responsible for the outcome of a project. When a team owns a project, they think differently. For instance, when a team is responsible for everything in a project, they care more about quality, about incidents concerning production, and they strive to have a project without problems, while before that, they can look the other way and disregard some problems. The team acts more proactively, and I even had suggestions from the team to talk to customers to gain time to decrease technical debt.

> — We all make choices, but in the end, our choices make us. Andrew Ryan (BioShock)

**The project's success depends on the manager**, and all choices the manager makes give a result that can lead to success and failure. Let’s talk about how we can deal with failures.

## Retrospect

Taking responsibility for the project’s success as a leader means that you’ll fail sometimes. People deal with failures differently. Some of them take them as lessons, while others take them seriously.

There are a lot of stories about the failures of successful people you can find on the Internet. Michael Jordan missed 9000 shots in his career. 12 major publishers rejected the first book of Harry Potter. One of Stephen King’s most successful books, Carrie, was rejected by 30 publishers. As you can see, most of them didn’t give up and continued achieving their goal.

How to deal with a possible failure? One way to deal with it is to face your fear and accept that you’ll fail anyway. There is a chance that it won’t happen, but most of the possible failures become real. When you accept that you will fail, you can change your interpretation of it. You can act differently, and you can see that failure is not as bad as you imagined; and when it’s not bad as you imagined, you can be patient when you deal with consequences.

You need to accept your failure and **learn** from it. Failure is a necessity for learning and you need to correct your behavior, find all errors you made, and find a solution on how to not repeat them. That’s how you’ll become better.

> Don’t be sorry, be better. Kratos (God of War PS4)

## Dealing with black boxes

> Atreus: We will fight? Why?
> Kratos: Because you are afraid of it. (God of War PS4)

Let’s imagine the situation when you need to take a project from another team. The project runs in production and has a lot of users. It was implemented poorly and had no tests and no documentation at all. The last team disappeared. You have no one to ask questions, and you need to implement features for the system. Also, you need to gather a team for the project.

Once you’ve onboarded new team members to the project, newbies will be afraid to change anything because they will suffer from a lack of documentation and tests in the project. Even if they get a working copy of a project on their machines, they will be afraid to deploy their changes to production because they are not sure they wouldn’t break anything.


As a leader, you should help your team to solve problems. You need to facilitate discussions, test, and deliver value. You need to have working sessions, discover the risks of changes, and reduce fear in the team by taking responsibility. For instance, you made a change, but your teammate is afraid to deploy it. He feels very uncomfortable in this situation. As a manager, you can push him to deploy it by taking responsibility for his action. You can say that you’ll inform customers, and we can roll it back if anything goes wrong.

## Conclusion

The leader needs to constantly improve his skills. Also, he needs to focus on his and the project’s goals, make decisions and take responsibility for them, learn from his failures, and open black boxes. As a leader, you can find leadership lessons almost everywhere in your life. You can find them in the gym, in movies, and even in video games. You can find a lot of wisdom in video games’ stories that apply to real life.