The hidden potential: serious gamers in your organisation could help you excel at remote leadership
The hidden potential: serious gamers in your organisation could help you excel at remote leadership
It’s not hard to imagine a future where virtual working will dramatically increase and where leaders are faced with the complexity of managing remote working teams. Leading teams with very little, if any, traditional face-to-face interactions is surely a skill that leaders quickly need to grasp in these times. Who is successful today and to where do we look to quickly get up to speed? Our colleague Heikki Otsolampi shares his thoughts in this first of a series of articles, on why it’s important to look for insights and experience in places you might not have looked before.
In a recent blog Hanna Sutela of Statistics Finland (Tilastokeskus) speculates on how the Corona crisis might speed up the increase in virtual working. In 2018 nearly one-third of Finnish employees handled at least a part of customer work remotely. It's not hard to conceive during this period of intense telecommuting, that in future at least part of the temporary increase in virtual working will remain. We are also likely to see a wave of consolidation of companies, as the strong players in the market, devour the weaker competition, thus generating ever more, ever larger, distributed corporate entities. In some respects, the technological development and environmental factors all will increase the need for communication and collaboration with a sinking proportion of face-to-face interaction also in the longer term.
To those struggling with remote work and video calls now (and judging by the amount of video conferencing memes out there this probably rings true for many of us), a future of increased virtual work might not sound too appealing. Indeed, many of us are still not quite good enough at handling video conferencing software, let alone leading teams and generating results remotely. But could there be a distinct group of people proficient at working in this kind of environment? One that we can look to for guidance and inspiration to help us succeed?
Leadership over phone and video call in these times is essentially the same as during normal times when we get to work (more) face to face. Though many leaders will get away by blaming technology (or the lack of it), a real leader as we often describe him or her in our line of work at Alumni will still successfully:
unite the team around a common mission, with common goals,
pick up on individual needs and answer them,
motivate, inspire and
stay on top of how work is progressing.
While this may be hard enough during normal times, it is even trickier when we are forced to work remotely with limited contact with even our closest colleagues. But practice makes perfect and, in a sense, we could see the current situation as a kind of high-altitude training camp, where we train under more challenging conditions than usual but emerge stronger. Just as with high altitude athletics where there are people who normally live in high-altitude conditions and thus have an inherent edge, there are people who normally work and lead virtual teams, if not entire virtual organisations that we can maybe learn from. This is where we get to gamers.
New(ish) skills rising in demand
For the last twenty-something years people have played online games, where the only contact method is through various remote connections. These games that have evolved into Massively Multiplayer Online (Role-Playing) Games (MMO & MMORPG) are usually designed in a way, where the team needs to work together to reach a certain goal. The players thus need to coordinate their, often complex, actions to reach that goal. In many cases, these teams consist of people they've never met face-to-face and additionally, these teams might be culturally more diversified than the typical team in any given company (disclaimer: there is a bias towards more men than women in the gaming community). In the category of “sandbox games” there is yet another level of involvedness where the player community even sets the objectives themselves. The game EVE Online is a good example of this group of games. They are very much like the society we live in, the environment has given some metrics on how others perceive success, such as money, power and recognition and then the player-driven communities try to compete for these.
Getting people to collaborate when they can opt-out at any time is particularly hard. In an employment relationship, a big part of the motivation comes from the fact that your livelihood depends on the work. Whereas on the other hand, one can assume the people playing a game voluntarily are intrinsically motivated as they are doing this for fun rather than for money. But for just that reason, the successful individuals leading volunteers have become experts in motivating people – even the boring tasks need to be fun or there needs to be a reward at the end for a volunteer to get them to do something they don’t like. Translating the experiences and learnings from gamers leading completely virtual teams, achieving goals in a constantly changing environment is a skill that most workplaces value, especially now.
Serious MMORPG gamers are typically not lazy teenagers as stereotypes would have it. It’s estimated that there are 2,6 billion gamers globally and stats indicate 50% of players are full-time workers so, you likely have a serious gamer somewhere in your organisation as well.
Competences found in new places
Leadership actions in this artificial world are very similar to real life. The leader needs to frame the vision, sell it to the team members, formulate (and hopefully facilitate the team to formulate) a plan, set milestones and KPI’s, follow-up measures and eventually reflect on the results to increase individual development. As exemplified by gamers in this case it’s not far-fetched to argue that there are large untapped pools of potential experience going unseen because it comes in an unconventional package. As new(ish) skills rise in demand, such as distance leadership during quarantine and beyond, it pays off to zoom out and source competences in places you haven’t looked before.
In my opinion, a company struggling to find their ways and processes for remote work should utilise the serious gamers in their organisation. For example, just to facilitate a workshop on how to improve the remote working efficiencies. Not all valuable experience comes from formal studies or professional work experience.
Heikki Otsolmapi
Consultant
E-mail
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