This post is a continuation of a personal story that began with My Career Journey as a Process of Values Discovery: Part 1. If you haven’t already, start reading there.
After ten years of making sports games with the company that had once been my personal utopia, I finally left to join a small startup company in Vancouver. I wasn’t the only one seeking greener pastures, as evident by the many video game startups that began to appear in Vancouver around 2006. They attracted talent like me with a message of putting culture first, checking egos at the door, eliminating red tape and empowering the team to kick butt. Joining the exodus seemed to be the most meaningful thing I had the power to do.
Over the course of my first year at this new company, I witnessed many of the same problems start to show up. Politics, power battles, trust issues and dysfunctional teamwork. After overcoming my own denial, I found myself complaining again, drifting back toward a dark place. When I spoke with others about how I felt, everyone seemed too willing to accept these issues as par for the course. Why was it so hard to find others who cared about this as much as I did?
I recalled something that one of my best managers at the previous company had once told me when I was venting my frustration to him. He said “don’t flip the bozo bit”. In other words, never dismiss the input of another team member. Upon recalling this, the wisdom of this statement resonated with me deeply in a way that I hadn’t recognized before. Indeed, if everyone was to follow this one rule, it would go a long way towards solving these problems.
When we make a choice to view another person’s perspective as worthless, even if unconsciously and in the privacy of our own thoughts, it is extremely powerful. Contempt erodes trust, creates politics, unhealthy competition and if not addressed, can spread like a disease throughout a company’s culture.
For how much our leadership focused on what technology to use in our game engine or what team process to follow, it was becoming clear to me that this did nothing to address the biggest threat to our success. It was our failure to tend to these inner dynamics that caused the dysfunction I was seeing. Ironically, this impacted our outer results profoundly but in ways that weren’t obvious. Hardly anyone seemed to be paying attention to this, let alone talking about it. Furthermore, it dawned on me how I had spent my own career so far focused primarily on mastering my outer game without considering the importance of the inner game. I had been contributing to the very problems I was complaining about and I couldn’t deny it.
This realization gave birth to a new value system for me, and a new career goal: Mastering my own inner game and learning how to positively influence teamwork and culture around me. If it was not for my frustration reaching the point that it had, I might never have come to this realization. The darkness had its purpose: waking me up to see all of this and generating the passion in me to want to do something about it. If you think about it, isn’t this how real growth and transformation takes place for all of us? Isn’t this how we discover our deepest values that bring meaning to our lives?
I tracked down the author of the quote, “don’t flip the bozo bit” to Jim McCarthy. Determined to learn more from him, I started to listen to his podcast, The McCarthy Show, which he co-hosts with his wife Michele. Hearing them talk openly about all the problems I was seeing was validating, uplifting and revitalized my sense of hope. I read their book, Software For Your Head, found them both on Facebook and joined one of their online boot camps to learn everything I could from them. They not only spoke about exactly the kinds of things that I was beginning to see, they had spent years refining a set of solutions to these inner problems plaguing teams everywhere. They called it The Core Protocols and I still rely on some of these practices today.
What I learned during this time was transformative, not just for me personally but also for my relationships and the team around me. I began to learn how to shift the tone of conversations in meetings, cultivate deep alignment and shared vision, and within a year I managed to make a huge difference in the company culture even though I was not in a leadership position. I had people telling me I’d be a great manager, but I wasn’t interested in that. All I wanted was to finally work on a team that wasn’t so dysfunctional!
The following polarity map illustrates the wisdom that I was just beginning to understand. Again, the process of values discovery ignited a new level of passion in me, granted me access to new possibilities that I could not see before, and gave birth to a new phase in my career.
When you really start to embrace a new value system, you can’t be half-assed about it. You get tested again and again to see how committed you really are. Mastering my inner game meant facing something scary that I had been avoiding: I was no longer getting inspiration from living in Vancouver. I needed a bigger change to stir things up and maintain my own inner spark. So despite how well things were going for me in my current job, I initiated plans to follow my inspiration and move to Boulder, Colorado, USA in 2010.
Colorado didn’t have a lot of game companies and the ones it did have were tiny. I joined one of them where my expertise was highly applicable to their needs, and what I had learned about teamwork and culture worked like a charm. Things were going well and I was really excited about the game we were working on, an action-RPG for Playstation 3 / Vita.
We were almost a year into development when our publisher pulled the plug and cancelled the project. It hit us all really hard, and then came the layoffs. There I was, after moving my family to another country, unemployed with few other local game companies to choose from. Was I foolish for following my gut and leaving behind the great future that I could have had in Vancouver? Right around the same time, I received news that the studio I left in Vancouver had been shut down.
Staying in Colorado was going to mean looking outside the video game industry for the first time in my career. I was back to wondering if I was going to have to sacrifice fun for the sake of responsibility. Then, perhaps by the grace of something mysterious and much bigger than me, a friend put me in touch with the hiring manager for one of the engineering teams at Google Boulder. Their product was about to be acquired by another company and they were planning to staff up immediately. I was interviewed on day one after the acquisition and not only did I get the job, my skills were highly applicable, my commute was way shorter, the culture was a dream come true, and I got to spend the next six years having loads of fun with great people while making software for architects. Funny how the other passion I considered as a career in high school came back and found me in a way I never expected!
For the second time in my career, I felt like I had really found my people. I could speak with others about the importance of culture and the inner game and they got it. In fact, they were already doing it to a large degree. It didn’t take long before I was offered a management role and I was applying everything I had learned through my own journey of values discovery. I succeeded at leading high performing, self-directed, creative teams that operated on high trust and shared vision. I initiated and led organization-wide initiatives to improve process and culture. I developed great relationships and I’ll even dare to say that I grew to deeply love the people I worked with. I felt like I could really see who each of them was beyond their professional identity and it was deeply meaningful to witness what people were capable of when they felt a sense of safety and belonging, which I had the power to create for them. And I was seeing it all translate into outstanding outer results.
All of this was possible for me because my manager had some understanding of the inner game. He had my back and he knew how to challenge me to grow while creating alignment where we needed it and letting me lead from my own values. He also knew how to respectfully challenge the company’s executive leadership above him, maintaining autonomy for our business unit and allowing us to preserve the most precious things about our team’s culture that allowed us to thrive.
As I mentioned in part 1, when real life reaches this point in the story, it never seems to be as simple as happy endings. In 2017, my manager departed in pursuit of his next gig and we were not so fortunate with the new director who stepped up to replace him. He was much more autocratic in his leadership style, shaming people and overriding them for making decisions he didn’t agree with and flipping the bozo bit on anyone whose values didn’t sufficiently match his. I watched in despair as this created a mood of anxiety on our team, psychological safety disappeared, trust was eroded, and people became less creative and collaborative. It was the exact opposite of everything that I had come to stand for. I started to hear whisperings from many throughout the organization who were also unhappy to varying degrees, but unwilling to speak up about it.
Despite my upset, I could see that my new manager really didn’t intend to have this negative impact. He just placed a very high value on the outer game without awareness of the dynamics of the inner game and just how important it was. He was doing his best given what he was able to see. But how could I just stand by and watch as things went downhill? The angry part of me and the merciful part of me battled it out, and the hardest part was when I became the target of my manager’s projections. I found myself in moments of reactivity, betraying my own values and falling back into a dark place yet again. For the second time in my career, the company that was once my personal utopia had become a miserable place to be.
The story continues… subscribe to be notified when part 3 is posted!
