Why Management (or “Why Not Leadership”)

Amongst the other names I had for this blog, one stood out in direct competition to ‘Managing Game Development’.

‘Leading Game Development’

After all, isn’t managing and management a ‘Bad Thing’ but leading and leadership a ‘Good Thing’?

I’m sure we’ve all seen the following image (or a variation of)

And we all know who this guy is

It’s popular to declare that you don’t need managers to effectively run a business, or production (as management is popularly called in the development process) just gets in the way of the creative people actually doing the work.

You hear of companies that ‘have no managers’, where everyone is a decision maker and where everyone is a leader.

And while that’s an environment I’d love to experience, it’s not always that black and white.

Leadership needs space to flourish, it needs to be encouraged and it needs to be allowed to grow.

Management needs to have trust, confidence and belief in the people they are guiding.

Without one, the other becomes much more difficult, impossible even. In those management-less organisations, there is always someone who decided it would be that way, someone who created the environment to make that possible.

And without that person (or people), the organisation would be significantly different.

While I believe leadership is a role often comes naturally to those lucky few, management is a skill that most people can develop and grow in a much more practical manner. In the same way someone can develop their programming skills, develop their carpentry skills or develop their presentation skills, management skills can be developed and honed through hard work and perseverance.

So thats why I choose ‘Managing Game Development’.

By developing our management skills, by investigating how we can better manage the space around us, we can create an environment in which the latent leaders within our organisations can grow and more than likely become leaders ourselves.

And that all leads to better products, better working environments and more enjoyment in the jobs we’re doing.

And at the end of the day, I believe that is what most people want.