Fostering Employee Growth Through Effective Leadership by Joshua Howard of OtherSide Entertainment

April 5, 2024

Fostering Employee Growth Through Effective Leadership by Joshua Howard of OtherSide Entertainment

Joshua Howard is the COO of OtherSide Entertainment, a company focused on providing players with innovative gameplay, immersive worlds, and engaging narrative. His focus extends beyond creating great games; he fosters positive team cultures, cultivates future leaders, and prioritizes employee well-being as the foundation for exceptional player experiences. Joshua's experience spans leadership roles in companies like Microsoft, Crytek, and Big Fish. He actively consults, coaches, and writes on leadership and management within the video game industry. A passionate board gamer himself, Joshua believes the principles of game design can be effectively applied to real-world management challenges.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

How is management a game design problem?
Understanding employee working styles and routing their career path accordingly
Joshua Howard explains how to be an effective leader
Joshua shares resources he used in the early days of his career
What is the “THUD DEI Competency Toolkit”?
The value of having a diverse team
What led Joshua to join OtherSide Entertainment?
Joshua discusses his early days working at Microsoft

In this episode…

Effective leadership is the cornerstone of employee growth. While some leadership styles prioritize control and hierarchy, fostering a culture of empowerment is demonstrably more effective. This approach transforms employees from passive followers into active contributors. However, it begs the question: How can leaders cultivate an environment that ignites employee potential?

Gaming enthusiast Joshua Howard advocates for a leadership style that prioritizes employee growth and empowerment. This entails creating a work environment where employees feel trusted to take ownership of their tasks, contribute their unique ideas, and continuously develop their skills. Joshua also emphasizes open communication, valuing diverse perspectives, and fostering a culture of learning over micromanagement. Ultimately, his leadership approach focuses on building a strong, collaborative team focused on shared goals and mutual well-being. To develop a more empowered and thriving team, it’s crucial to invest in employee development opportunities.

Join Lizzie Mintus on today’s episode of the Here’s Waldo podcast as she interviews Joshua Howard, the COO of OtherSide Entertainment, to talk about fostering employee growth through effective leadership. Joshua discusses the relationship between management and game design, how to be an effective leader, and the value of having a diverse team.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode...

This episode is brought to you by Here’s Waldo Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm specializing in the video game industry that prioritizes quality over quantity and values transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives, and programmers to understand the why behind their needs and provide a white-glove experience that ensures a win-win outcome.

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Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Here's Waldo Podcast, where we sit down with top visionaries and creatives in the video game industry. Together, we'll unravel their journeys and learn more about the path they're forging ahead. Now, let's get started with the show.

Lizzie Mintus: I'm Lizzie Mintus, founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique video game recruitment firm. This is the Here's Waldo Podcast. In every episode, we dive deep into conversations with creatives, founders, and executives about what it takes to be successful. You can expect to hear valuable lessons from their journey and get a glimpse into the future of the video game industry.

This episode is brought to you by Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm for the game industry. We value quality over quantity, transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives, and programmers to understand the why behind their needs. Today we have Joshua Howard with us.

Joshua has been leading video game teams and business for many years, leveling teams up by creating great cultures, growing future leaders, and delivering great player experiences by ensuring great employee experiences. Joshua has led games at Microsoft, Crytek, Big Fish, and others, and has been consulting, coaching, and writing on topics related to leadership and management in the video game industry.

He is a huge board gamer and believes that most of management as a discipline gets a lot easier to understand when you see it as a game design problem. Let's get started. Thanks for being here.

Joshua Howard: Thank you. Great to be here.

Lizzie Mintus: Can you tell me, first of all, how management is a game design problem?

Joshua Howard: I think ultimately what we're looking at is how do we work with a group of people and get them to make progress towards a thing. A game design problem is similar. I've got a player. I don't control them. They've got their own motivations. But I can create an experience for them, and if that is a good experience, they're going to stay really well engaged and they're going to want to keep coming back. At a high level, in some respects, think of it like being a game master.

I've got a group of players who come to my house every so often. And if I'm a good game master, they want to keep coming back. If I'm not, I can't make them. And as players, they have their own journey. They have their own stories. They have things they want to do. And I can structure that and I can provide some constraints and challenges.

But at the end of the day, I can't control them. I think the old view of management was, they were pieces on a board. We moved them around like chess pieces. And how did we deploy the people? And I just think that's a total breakdown. So we manage our people, whether it's at work or at a gaming session, by doing what we can to keep them engaged, giving them clear understanding of what success looks like, helping them really find their own way, whether it's fun or productivity. I think a lot of management and leadership comes down to, you can think about it like a game design problem.

Lizzie Mintus: Very well said. You've said it before. You talked about delivering great player experiences by ensuring great employee experiences. Can you talk about how those correlate?

Joshua Howard: Yeah, I think one of the reasons why I've spent so many years of my career in the games as a service side of the business is it really lines up that incentives of what it takes to build a great game with what it takes to have a great employee experience.

That's to say, in the old days, and even back when I started, it was more common in a fixed world to work super hard, kill yourself, crunch yourself, and just get the game across the finish line. Once that gold master was delivered, it didn't matter how hard you worked, you could take a break and begin to think about the next thing.

That culture of, do whatever it takes, push as hard as you want, often meant that 80 percent of the game got done in the last 20 percent of the actual timeline. And while there were parts of that experience that can be thrilling to be a part of, it's not ultimately an incredibly sustainable approach.

The games as a service model says we can never stop. We've got to keep going forever. How do we build a system that lets people engage as employees essentially forever? As a player, it's better. I want to play a game and come back to it and know that there's something fresh and new and exciting. But also as an employee, I like the confidence of we can't crunch to get to the finish line because then who's going to be there the day after launch.

So we align the incentives of both sides of it. Hey, player, stick around for a while and we're going to keep giving you more delight. Hey, employee, we're going to treat you well so you can stick around for a while and help us continue to build.

Lizzie Mintus: What does it mean to treat your employees right? What actionable steps can companies take to do that?

Joshua Howard: I think there's a bunch of things in this area. I think I'm a big believer in when we lead through outcomes. We give our employees a great understanding of where we're trying to go and why. And then it's our job as leadership to empower them through constraints, resources and other considerations. But to avoid getting in the way of that problem solving. Now I got into games because I love games and I love designing games and I love thinking about games and there are a lot of times when I want to get in and I want to be part of the problem solving, but in the role of leadership, how we treat our teams is really about giving them clarity about where we're trying to go.

So with clarity about where we're trying to go and why, what we're trying to accomplish, what outcomes we're after. I've set up a situation where employees get to do the fun stuff, the problem solving of what are we going to do? How are we going to get there. And it's a constant dance of If the problem I'm giving them or the opportunity is outside their grasp and they're feeling a little underwater, that's not helping.

But if it's too preliminary, too basic, that's not helping either. So part of the art of management is being able to articulate a stretch just a little bit enough so that someone has a sense of where they're going and can work with the tools, the resources, and the people around them to stretch and get there.

So when you give people that opportunity, often they rise to the challenge. They're more creative. They're more invested. They're more engaged. That's a job they really enjoy. That's not a job they complain about when it comes to I get told what to do all the time. No, I get given exciting challenges that are just a little bit more than I'm ready for.

And through that, I feel like I'm growing every day. That's a great experience.

Lizzie Mintus: I had Raph Koster on the podcast and he talks about what makes games fun to play. And Feeling like you're learning all the time. So I have the same thing, right?

Joshua Howard: Exactly. And that's one of those. I've known Raph for many years and the way that he thinks about games. I often feel like I think about the employee experience. So when employees are learning all the time and what does that mean? It doesn't mean we're constantly in lecture mode. Cause that's not fun, but to be doing something that's a stretch. And what that means for each of us individually is different.

And this is where I think good leadership is a set of tools and systems that help you understand how to have that conversation with your team, how to stretch them, how to support them, when to push, when to support all of that.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. How do you really figure out objectively? Obviously there's a lot of gray zone and all the situations are different, but how do you figure out what someone's limits are? I always think about this too. Like you have some people who are on this really high growth trajectory, and then some people who want to bop along and what this person wants is not what this person wants. How do you understand that and then route their career path accordingly.

Joshua Howard: Yeah. So one of the key ways is I'll start having the meta conversation with the whole organization. As in, we're going to talk about, hey, if I'm doing this right, you feel excited and a little nervous, but overall empowered and confident. If you feel underwater, if you feel anxiety, if you feel the kind of pressure that makes you not sleep at night, then I'm not doing this right. If you're bored, if you feel like I'm micromanaging you, I'm not doing this right.

Creating that sense of what good looks like and feels like, and what bad looks like and feels like, means we can have a conversation. So when I say, hey, I need you to go think about this outcome, if someone gives me the deer in the headlights look, I got no idea, I don't even know how to begin. That's going to freak me out. What do I do next? Oh, okay. Let's work together to find a scale of that outcome or a step on the way that you can begin to wrap your head around. So creating the language to let the team talk about the meta, how do you feel when this doesn't work, how does it feel when it does work means we're constantly calibrating, Hey, go think about X.

Joshua, that's one of those examples where I have the foggiest idea of where to begin. Can we break it down together? I'd love to do that. Let's sit down and do that. Over time, the team gets more comfortable having that meta conversation, not just with me, but also with each other. And then we get better at calibrating. For this person, this kind of thing, we can come at this level of abstraction, but this other kind of thing. So there's obviously a bunch more to that, but that basic idea of create a language that lets you talk about that, talk about what good feels like, what bad feels and then when I ask you to do something, let's talk about how it feels. If I didn't get it right, I want to do it better because I want to set you up for success.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. And it reminds me of parenting. I have a three year old and we talk about feelings. Not to degrade it at all, but I always think about the things that I'm talking about with my kid and how I'm talking about them with people of like, all ages and all scenarios.

Joshua Howard: Yeah. I'm a big believer that feelings actually have an important role at work. And I think too often, We were raised sometimes to believe that you gotta leave that at the door, you should just do your job. I think, especially when we're building entertainment, especially when we're doing something as subjective as, say, fun, you gotta be ready to use your feelings.

Not let them get in the way, not let it devolve into a cycling around feelings and making no progress, but how you feel about what you're doing is an indicator of how well we've set you up to succeed. And if you don't feel good about it, it's my job as leadership to figure out why, what do I need to do differently to fix that.

Lizzie Mintus: But if you don't feel good at work, you're also not doing your best work.

Joshua Howard: Just like I, I can't force a gamer to come back to my table for board game night. But if they have a good time, and the games we play are cool, and the metasystems we put in place make them feel challenged, that's great. You're going to keep coming back.

Even when you have a bad day, even when you lose, because once in a while we lose, even at work, but overall, people tend to come back for that.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. I read your blog in preparation for this, which is a great read and you talk about a manager that changed the way that you work with other people. Can you share the story?

This is open for interpretation, but on the blog specifically, you talked about a manager and the way you came at problems, was maybe a little bit more harsh and they helped you understand your impact on other people.

Joshua Howard: I sometimes impolitely say, I feel like I'm a reformed asshole. That is to say early in my career, I was rewarded for being someone that really made stuff happen. And if you gotta knock heads to do it, then so be it, so that take charge, order people around, do what it takes. It's not that I love doing it, but boy, was I rewarded for doing so.

As I was maturing professionally, I had a few key coaches, mentors, managers who politely pointed out that you're leaving a lot of bodies in the way and maybe there's a better way. And so there, there were a couple of key moments on that journey. That eventually made me realize, A, that's not who I want to be, I don't want to show up that way. That's not who I am at home, that's not how my kids think about me. That's not what my friends see, so why am I that guy at work?

Understanding why I was helped me understand I want to find a different way to do it, and instead of looking at role models that were also about knocking heads, I looked at role models that were quietly effective. Role models that rallied teams, role models that were still incredibly successful at getting things done, but did so in a way that lifted up. That's who I wanted to be.

Lizzie Mintus: Okay, and if anybody listening here is on the journey to be a reformed asshole, what did you really learn in those instances. Do you have a story or a moment of clarity? I'm sure there are so many that led you to that or any tips on effective leadership that makes people feel good.

Joshua Howard: So here's a good example of something that was actually, that really happened and yet was really pivotal for my journey, which was I feel like I'm a pretty bright guy. I had the luxury of going to work early in my career at Microsoft, where I often felt like the dumbest guy in the room. And that was an exciting opportunity. You say hire people smarter than you, but then when you actually work with a room of people who are a lot smarter than you, it can feel a little intimidating. Coming from an environment where I might have been the smart kid in the room in college or in previous jobs, I had defaulted to, you can think about it as, speak, then listen.

I would often sit in a room and I'd say, here's the problem. Here's what we're going to do. I'd love to hear what you have to say. And I felt like I was including people and I was being collaborative. And even if I wasn't being a jerk about it by so confidently, so sternly, so directly stating where we are, where we're going to go. It was unwittingly shutting down conversation.

I had a coach at one point say, I just want you to reverse it. Listen, then speak. That was weird. But, took them at the advice and tried for a while. I'm going to lay out a problem and then I'm going to shut up. Hey team, what should we do about this?

When normally I might've said we should X, Y, and Z, and here's why. And here's how that looks any input. I would just let the problem sit there and watch my team. And what I found was, holy crap. I've hired a really good team. Actually the solutions they come up with while being different were often really good because even if they Objectively better. They were better in that they owned them. Yeah.

This was my plan. Hold me accountable to this Josh, because this is what I'm going to do as we work to solve that problem. It also helped me understand that if it's listen, then speak, sometimes you don't have to speak often the room takes care of itself, not always.

Part of the job is making sure when it isn't taking care of itself, we help it get back on track. But a lot of the time, more than you might imagine, if you've made the right hires, the room will take care of itself. For someone who feels like they've got to step into a room and take charge, I would ask you, think about instead of speak then listen, just flip it.

Listen then speak. See what you learned through that process. See what your team steps up and does that might surprise you.

Lizzie Mintus: Who is this coach? Was it a leadership coach you brought in? Was it a friend? Someone from work? You don't have to name the name if you don't want, but I'm just curious how you came to have this coach.

Joshua Howard: One of the great parts about being at Microsoft for almost 20 years was Microsoft really invests in development. And so there are a number of formal trainings over the years and a variety of systems that have been involved. There was a particular management training I had an opportunity to do probably 15 odd years ago now, that at the time we called middles. It was this really interesting exercise where a small number of people, like two, three, would be called the tops. They were the bosses, and a whole bunch of people were the bottoms. They were the workers. But a small group of us were the middles, and we were given a management challenge. And in that challenge, the tops got to be decision makers, and they would tell us middles what we had to do. And we had to figure out how to organize the bottoms to actually get the work done.

It doesn't take long for a system like that to begin to fall apart. The tops don't really understand what they're trying to do. They're directing. The middles are doing their best to interpret and turn that into something the bottoms can use. The bottoms are confused. Remember, everybody's been chosen arbitrarily. There's no rhyme or reason to who became a top, bottom, or middle.

As a frustrated leader in that exercise, my tendency was to say, Forget the rules of the system. Let's just all talk about what we're going to do. I was trying to stand up and take charge. And that was when the facilitator of the event said, I think you understand the problem. I'm not sure your solution is the right one. Why don't you try listening first?

So the power I offered in that exercise for the three days, we did it was I got to articulate the challenges and then let smart people in the room go, oh, you're right. Hadn't thought about it that way. What should we do about it? And just watching how people treated me differently, how they became a lot more engaged, that was a powerful moment. A number of really excellent resources available while I was there, but that was one of those that continues to stick with me to this day.

Lizzie Mintus: Thanks for the story. That's a good one. And thank you for the introspection and ability to share the story. It's great. If you are in a scenario as a leader, and you are letting your team make the decision, this is like a classic leadership challenge, but your team is headed in a bad direction, and let's say you have some constraints.

You're in production and you only have X time and X budget, right? How do you recommend getting them back on track in a way that is not dictating?

Joshua Howard: I think we want to drop to control when things are not going well. And so the instinct to step into control is natural. Breathe instead of control, what's the way to begin to provide the guidance necessary, right?

The first sign of problem. If you dive in and start telling your team what to do, you've destroyed your credibility as a leader who wants to empower the team. I want to empower you as long as you only do exactly what I think, and you only do it exactly the way I want to do it.

So when things are going wrong, first off, it really is important at leadership levels to put systems in place, to see that coming, right? So it's not a terrible fire by the time I hear about it. It's a, I see the possibility of smoke and we're going to talk a little bit about that. I want you to see what I'm seeing and understand why I'm seeing it. In a more local setting, I might sit down with some of the local leadership on the team and say, hey, I'll be honest. This feels familiar. This feels like a situation that might go south the way I've had situations like this go south before. So I just wanted you to be aware of that, and let's talk about it.

Helping them understand why I feel that way. What are the ways that this situation is similar or not? Or what are the signs that I'm seeing that say, I don't think this is going the same place you think it's going? At that point, if the team doesn't get it and they're beginning to really dig in, there's a part where it's not about taking control, but it is about refocusing on a set of outcomes that give them a license or permission or a mandate to think differently about their plan. If we started this with an outcome of world peace, but that's heading you off in a strange or direction that I think is problematic, partly, I need to take that as a sign that the outcome I've asked you to target isn't the right one.

So what's another way of talking about the outcome? What's another way of phrasing it or a way of breaking it into smaller pieces? Because perhaps that's part of the problem is you're getting lost on a journey where you can't see your way to the end. When a team isn't reacting the way that success needs them to react, don't think of that as a problem within the team. You got to think of that as a problem with your leadership.

What am I not providing them? And so instead of diving in and going into control mode, which isn't fixing the problem, think about how you as leadership need to reframe it, need to re constrain it, need to reorient it. So that, when done well, how does it feel when done? It feels like the team saying. We were headed down a direction and leadership helped us realize that we perhaps had our ball, our eyes on the wrong ball, and we needed to think about it differently. And that was exciting. What feels bad is when we had a plan and we all believed it. He came in and changed it all and what the hell?

It's hard. But that's the discipline of really good leadership is seen as a reflection of your leadership, not as a reflection on what the team is capable of.

Lizzie Mintus: Makes sense. Putting them in control first.

Joshua Howard: Control is an illusion, but who's driving and who's acting, right? Often my teams will hear me say something like, hey, sometimes the most clarity we can provide is that we're heading west.

I don't actually know if we're going to end up in New York or Florida, but right now we're going to head west. I'm not here to tell you what left and right to take on the direction, but we're going to head there. And during that journey, we may learn something in the process.

Control is an illusion. Roads are closed. Weather happens. Vehicles break down. Plan a coherent and reasonable reason that you can accomplish the goal. Those are all possible, but when somebody says, I need to control, what I'll typically begin is the conversation around control, maybe not the right model to think about.

Lizzie Mintus: It makes sense. The manager training that you talked about at Microsoft and the facilitator seemed like a great resource. What other resources have impacted you in your career? Books, people, courses.

Joshua Howard: Yeah, early on in my career, I made the switch and began to realize I can do this with people, not against people. It was really identifying for me, the local leaders who seem to be good at this. And I began to realize that there were parts of this I was pretty good at, but couldn't describe why. So early in my career, I started trying to articulate what I thought was working and why as a way of reflecting it out.

Part of it is sharing. If I can share something I've learned, that helps me learn it better. I've never learned more than as a teacher. Can I turn around and teach it? And in that process, inevitably, I'll be sitting down with, our HR support person and I'll say, I've got this idea about how when we start thinking about making decisions, we should be really clear about what hat somebody wears, because sometimes I want my boss to wear the executive hat, but what they often want to wear is the, let's try to solve the problem together hat.

And that's when this person said are you familiar with something called RACI? I was like, no, I never heard of that. So she points me to this resource and I learn all about this idea of a decision making model. RACI is one of them. Responsible, accountable, consult, inform the different roles in a decision. Coming up with the ideas I had, sharing them with people who were more knowledgeable and letting them point me to resources that say that's actually pretty similar to X or Y or Z. Early in my career, I came up with a way of thinking about the way leaders need to take different stances with their team.

I thought of it like that. This is a defensive stance, or this is a more aggressive stance. And I articulated a model only to have somebody, again, who is a lot more involved and came up through this world say, actually, that sounds a lot like what we might call situational leadership. And so I got introduced to Blanchard's model and understanding what it's about and how it works and how it's way more detailed than what I had considered having realized that there was a whole world out there.

Then I started exploring it myself, ultimately several years ago, going back and getting my master's in leadership and management. I will say 70 percent of the program were things I was already aware of. But it was exciting to fill in the gaps and to see the research and solid scientific basis for a lot of these things that I've come to believe.

I believe them because I see them work. I believe them more now that I understand the underlying theory, psychology, sociology, science, sometimes neuroscience, behind why these things are effective. Part of why I wrote the blog is and I share is how can I take some of the things I've learned and turned them into digestible pieces because not everybody has the wherewithal of the time to go get a master's in leadership and management.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. What did you learn? I'm so interested. What did you learn that scientifically backed that was shocking?

Joshua Howard: One of the examples was, I think early on when I heard this idea of, fight or flight response. It didn't make sense to me that in a workplace, a boss being upset with you had any sort of equivalence to you feeling afraid for your life.

While I thought it was a convenient model to have a theoretical conversation about, people get nervous. When you dive deeper into the science. Actually, it turns out our brains trigger pretty quickly under moments of stress and whether that stresses a lion is about to attack me or my boss is yelling at me, from a brain neurochemistry standpoint, those are very similar.

That sort of opened up a world that I hadn't really realized. Just because we're in an office and just because we have the luxury and privilege of being knowledge workers and God forbid, even in the video game industry. Which admit it, we're not curing cancer, most of us.

What happens at work can really impact, as people, our health, our neurochemistry. And I don't think I had appreciated that nearly as much as I should have until I had gone through the program and really, as a skeptic, gone through the research and understood it. That's an example of a thing that you hear about, but I had to go deeper into it to really understand it and believe it and internalize it.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, interesting. I like that. Tell me about your THUD DEI competency toolkit, launching it, evolving it, what it is.

Joshua Howard: Sure. I'll start a little bit with the THUD. In a studio I was in many years ago, we were large enough to need a sort of a formal framework around how we help our staff think about what career development looks like. We spent months on an internal project that brought together dozens of experts across a variety of disciplines, with a pretty rigorous process around how we would propose something and embed it with others, until we came up to a framework that we actually felt really good about, a really robust framework that would help a AAA studio think about, from entry level hire up to director level, for designers and producers and artists and audio people and everything in between. And then the studio folded.

While that's always sad in that process, I reached out to the board and I reached out to the folks managing the dissolvement and got agreement and got permission to take this resource that we'd spent months of time on and clean it, generalize it, and create a toolkit that could be something that I would release open source.

Joshua Howard: The THUD is this open source toolkit that really speaks to video game development. It's something that I've shared at GDCs multiple times, I've done a number of consulting gigs, helping organizations think that through. If you're big enough like a Microsoft, you can pay a huge HR consulting company to do it for you.

But a lot of the video game industry is small enough, none of this industry are experts in that field, so this toolkit turned out to be a really helpful tool. That was about 12, 13 years ago now, looking back on it, there were some aspects of the toolkit that seemed pretty empty, that seemed to be a miss, because there were issues at work that we didn't, frankly think about as actively that long ago.

I think back then we might have summarized it simply as don't be a jerk, and left it there. And over the years, we've learned a lot that, don't be a jerk is not sufficient. That if you really want to create the kind of place that really does bring in a wide diversity of perspective and experience, you've got to be a lot more thoughtful. Even those of us that felt like we had happy childhoods and were raised in healthy homes have some habits that perhaps need some work in a workplace that wants to truly be as open and as comforting, as welcoming as possible.

Part of it was me going on the journey to say, if I really want to understand how to be most effective as a leader in terms of diversity and equity and inclusion, there's a lot I need to learn. And in that process, I met with DEI executives and experts across a number of fields. I interviewed a number of people, peers, who focus in that area and through all of that began to distill, essentially, a sort of a set of observable behaviors that someone could use to understand how these very good sounding values actually could manifest in the workplace, because I think often connects back to a core idea of me for leadership is leadership has a responsibility of articulating what better looks like. It's not enough to just say do better. That's not of any help, but what better looks like is important. So if I want an organization to feel more diverse and to be more equitable and more inclusive as leadership, I've got to be able to tell my team what that actually means. What behaviors does that turn into?

While I'm not necessarily the expert, and I haven't spent my life devoted to that the way some of the people I spoke to had, I was able to distill it into a set of clear indicators, a set of competencies, a set of inclusive behaviors that could let any objective person go through this list and say, against this particular value, how do I tend to respond. And then reflect that perhaps that's not as mature or as enlightened as I thought it was.

What does better look like? Better looks like that? I never thought of it that way. That's a direction that's now something I can be heading towards. That was the goal of it. That was the use of it. It's been exciting seeing how it was received. I must say, As a, as an old educated white guy, it's I try to be very careful that this doesn't come across as preaching.

But I did feel like my journey of collecting all of this wisdom, I could share it out and make it useful. Part of what's been exciting is the conversations that it started. The organizations that have used it as a jumping off place for a really rich conversation about how we do better.

Lizzie Mintus: Can you talk about some success stories that have come from it?

Joshua Howard: Yes, at a certain level of abstraction. I've a number of peers that I've got tremendous respect for over the years. Over the last 30 years, we've learned a lot about not just what's acceptable, but how to be really much more intentional. With a group of my peers, the toolkit became a really interesting conversation as some of them, were initially like, I think it's crazy. I think it's ridiculous. I think it's an example of, you're too woke or you're too politically correct. Having the frank but honest conversation with people I've known for years and have tremendous respect for about, if you still do these things, then nobody should be working for you. Nobody deserves that. And what does that mean? And how does that feel?

And in that conversation, some of the peers in that group who are not old white men, being able to step forward and say, that is my experience. That does happen. If it creates a forum where there can be an honest human conversation that no, that did not sound like a joke and no, how you meant it didn't matter, then people who are genuinely open minded and willing to consider an alternative learn that there's some room to grow.

Lizzie Mintus: Say the least. I think the industry is headed in a better direction. People are talking about it at least. I think studios are evolving and realizing the need for it.

Joshua Howard: Yeah, and part of what I'm excited by is that there's really two great reasons. One reason is we should always be treating people really well, like hands down. All people doesn't matter, like full stop. There's no condition. But also it's great for business.

Lizzie Mintus: I just talked to Gina Joseph. She's a chief strategy officer at VentureBeat and there's Harvard Business Reviews, having women and people of color on your board and in leadership positions makes you more profitable. And you as a business owner have a fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders to make your business more profitable.

Joshua Howard: It's a great example of where the science is fascinating. We can do studies about productivity and effectiveness of teams. And if you look at teams that are homogeneous versus teams that are different, there's this wonderful relationship that says, yeah, homogeneous teams can hit the ground running a little faster and in the beginning can feel a lot more productive, but at some point they're going to top out. Whereas that team that's full of differences, it took them a little bit longer perhaps to get started, but once they've got their engine running and they figured out how to work together, that team has so much more headroom, so much more capability. Just that idea that there isn't just a thing we do to be polite, although we should always be polite, it's a thing we do because it's genuinely better for the businesses we operate.

Like it's a no brainer. I have so little tolerance and patience for someone who takes a less enlightened view of this these days.

Lizzie Mintus: A less enlightened view. That's a very eloquent way of saying it. But I think, there's always people you want to work for and people that you don't want to work for.

Joshua Howard: Yeah. I think that's the way it should be. Cause not everybody's meant to work for everybody or vice versa. I'm sure there are some people out there who have found that maybe I'm not their favorite boss. That's okay. I'm comfortable, but more often than not, I think I do that pretty well. And I want to go work for people. I feel the same about.

Being clear that one of the powers we have is we all have the ability to vote with our feet as hard as that is or as challenging as it can be. If you don't like how you're being treated, do something about it. And I get that I come from a place of privilege when it comes to that conversation. But throughout my career, I've helped a number of people understand that voting with their feet is a power that they get to That they get to utilize when they need to use it.

Lizzie Mintus: I had Joe Nichols on my podcast. He runs Timber Games. They are 50 percent women or non binary, a game studio. And he has a great talk called Old White Guy talks about diversity.

Joshua Howard: Exactly. Yeah.

Lizzie Mintus: But it's okay. I appreciate you doing that and being an ally and making progress. Cause I think a lot of people want to do something, but are maybe paralyzed and worried about doing the wrong thing.

Joshua Howard: There still may be something in the toolkit that somebody has an issue with, but I'd rather that and have the conversation, then leave it as a taboo topic that nobody knows how to discuss, right?

Lizzie Mintus: It's important and it's uncomfortable, and it's hard when you're trying to talk to an audience that is not you and try and support their best interest. But I saw in your blog, and I really appreciate that you have that at the end, if you think something isn't correct, if you need changes, if you need updates, here's my email. So thank you for that.

Congrats on your new role at OtherSide as COO. Can you talk a bit about the company for people that aren't familiar and what led you to join?

Joshua Howard: Yeah, thank you. Very excited to have joined OtherSide. Several years ago, I got to work with Warren Spector. We were working at the University of Texas at Austin in a first of its kind program called the Denny Sam's Gaming Academy. Our focus was how do we teach leadership and management for the video game industry. A lot of video game higher education programs out there, but Warren especially felt early on, at this point, skills development is something you can get in a lot of places, but that set of management skills, leadership skills, the business skills to think about how we operate as a business, we're missing.

Joined Warren to do that, and we had a fantastic time. I've never learned as much as a student than I did as a teacher. So thankful for the opportunity, thankful for the school, for the programs, for Paul and Paul Sam's. Who helped fund the program, but the chance to work with Warren was also pretty magical.

Why? As long as I've been doing this, there were still somebody who built the games I grew up with. Warren and Richard and a number of folks are in that category. So I've stayed in touch with Warren over the years and we've continued to talk and have conversations. Earlier last year he said, there may be something at other side you could help with, given your skills and talent.

So Warren brings me to other side and part of what I really liked about other side is it's a collection. He and Paul Narath. are two folks who have a long track record of building incredible and innovative products. I love that. For them, it's been about, we're going to deliver experiences that truly delight and amaze players. It's a great example for me of a founding team that has real clarity about what they are doing and what they are not doing, what sets them apart. And it's not for everybody, but if that's a niche or if that's a vision that resonates with you, it was great.

And I'm very excited about it as a player. , so it was a professional opportunity, the chance to work with Warren and Paul was exciting. The team they've collected is very exciting. The products they're building are very exciting. I'm a big believer in the games as a service model. It's been better for us as employees, as well as for our players. And it's exciting to see other side say, we're going to bring the best of what a premium PC game can offer combined with what the best of a games in a service can offer. That's a really exciting space. And it was nice to hear guys like Warren and Paul say that's not something they have incredible depth of experience.

I'm one of a few people who've been brought into OtherSide in part to help make sure we get both sides of that working with some incredible game makers, and working with some people who, like me, have got really extensive experience in how we run and operate services, I'm excited about what we're doing.

We're not going to do licenses. We're not going to do puzzle games. All those things are fine, but OtherSide is real clear about what we're going to do. And although we may be quiet for a couple of years, I can't wait to show the world the projects we're working on.

Lizzie Mintus: Okay, I was going to poke more at what you're working on, but I will not. So when you're ready, come back on the podcast and tell us about it. You worked for Crytek and you help transform them into a company capable of supporting games as a service. How did you make that transition for them?

Joshua Howard: Yeah, I've helped a number of studios that were traditional, double, triple A, we make games and we ship them on CDs understand and learn about what the service world looks like. A lot of organizations, Crytek understood that its strength was they're an incredible developer with an incredible engine, and that there were parts of this business that they still needed to learn from. So instead of going out and from day one trying to do it all on their own, Crytek set up some relationships with a few key publishers that had a lot to teach.

So working with Nexon in Korea, working with Tencent in China, working with Mail. ru in Russia at the time, and there were a number of other publishers that I was part of helping bring on board for this title, somewhere in place when I got there, but growing out more with a very intentional strategy of, we've got something to learn and let's not be arrogant that we're going to come into this market and understand it from day one, but simultaneously, we also made the decision to self publish the title in Europe and the United States.

Working with partners internationally to understand how they thought, how they operated, how did they organize, gave us an opportunity to then say how do we want to think and organize and what works for us? So helping Crytek, think about how does this change the way you think about development? How does it change how you think about the product? How does it change the way you hire? What does the team look like? And beginning to make those changes. So if we could operate the service successfully in the regions we were responsible for, and. Be a successful developer for the regions where it was being published, that felt like a great way to work our way into the system.

I think ultimately, frankly, it was a, it was an exciting challenge that did not necessarily go a hundred percent as well as we all would have liked, , but nothing worth doing often does. The foundational elements of helping a team understand that you don't take a AAA game and just put it online, that it isn't just an after the fact set of conversations that.

What it means to be an effective service and engaging service is really something you're thinking about from very early on. And the advantage of the product that I was involved in, was the team had really spent a lot of time working to understand what that means. And it was built with online in mind. While it wasn't perfect, it was a great first attempt. And then working with world class publishers. Yeah. boy, they were quite verbose in the feedback about what we needed to do to improve the product. And at the time, as hard as that might be sometimes, that's exactly what we needed. That helped us iterate pretty quickly. It was nice to be involved in a business that was strong, but small. My tenure there had actually grown significantly in revenue and population and concurrency. It was pretty cool.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. I want to go to the beginning of your career. You joined Microsoft in the 90s and at the, on your LinkedIn, you share some details and you end with contact me for details. I would love to hear more details about early Microsoft days and stories, what you learned, what you worked on.

Joshua Howard: Sure. I got hired by Microsoft right out of college. I got hired into product support. Even to this day, I think people who've had some area of support or community work are some of the best people in the industry. Really understanding what players go through can be important. I got hired to be a phone jockey supporting, this is going to date me a little now, Windows 3. 1. And I loved it. It was an easy job. You go in, you're on the phones for a few hours, and then you head out, and there wasn't much more to it.

But I was itchy, because Microsoft was a place that, if you could make more impact, they were welcoming of it. So pretty quickly, I moved up into a different set of roles. I was no longer in support. I was what we call a program manager, a producer, but not quite in the old days. And while I was doing that and having a great time, I saw a crazy job listing that said Microsoft was starting a games team for their interactive television.

So I went and met somebody, and I brought my board game design. Because as a hobbyist, I've been a board game designer and developer. I dabble d not nearly as much as some of the pros that I've worked with, but enough that I've done it for fun. I brought some of my board game designs and sat in front of somebody who'd never played a video game in his life, and he hired me. So there I was, a producer at a games team and a technology years ahead of its time.

Ultimately, that team got shut down. There's a reason why Microsoft Interactive TV doesn't ring a bell with the consumer, because it didn't go anywhere. But, we built a team, we built an engine, we built a set of products, and as that team was shutting down, I shopped that team around, and we ended up landing in another part of Microsoft, and eventually went on to become, in the early days, the Internet Gaming Zone, which became MSN Games.

So building online games was something we were doing from the very first day. I have to my credit the PM producer designer of the very first multiplayer game Microsoft ever launched. It was a kid's game called Microsoft Ants. It was a tiny little skunk works project we did. The team actually, we, as a business, the group shut down before we finished the game, but we didn't have anything to work on before they knew what to do with the rest of us. We decided to keep working on it and we finished it and we tested it. And then we hosted it on a server and told a bunch of players about it and boom, we chipped our first game. That ended up getting us an opportunity to more formally join a games group, which went on to actually become a very major player in the casual game space, building MSN games that would grow to concurrencies of hundreds of thousands.

So being a part of that journey, what does casual game meaning? How did it grow at the time? It was a very exciting time to be a Microsoft.

Lizzie Mintus: I like that you just shipped the game anyways.

Joshua Howard: Yeah don't ask for permission, right? Ship it and see what happens. I'm not sure you can get away with that today, but Probably not. At the time, we could.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that's a good motto though. When I was a kid, that was my motto too. I was a difficult child.

Joshua Howard: Yeah, that is a core Microsoft value, the Microsoft that I grew up in. Better to ask forgiveness than ask permission. Like you, perhaps, I took that for all it's worth, much to the chagrin of my managers. I get to fairly say, looking back on it now, I was quite a handful and quite a troublemaker, but you learn a lot and get a lot done in the process.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I'm sure I was very difficult person to manage for sure. I just want to do things my way, which is probably why I have my own business. But I got a lot done. Actually I know I was frustrating. I would do so much. I would just do whatever I wanted to do once I proved that I was good enough to do that and I'd work remotely and I travelled a lot, but I was always at the top. So what can you do? Oh, Lizzie is doing her thing.

Joshua Howard: Yeah. And I think that it's in wonderful contrast to being in a large organization. I began to realize if I wanted to be more effective, I had to find a way to bring people along with me. Because I wasn't just the boss. Not to disrespect because I've known some incredible entrepreneurs like yourself.

For whatever reason, my DNA wasn't break away and do it on my own. My DNA was, how do I begin to be effective? The way I think about leadership and management today, management is getting results through others. I learned how to do that at Microsoft and I learned how to be effective and do it in a way that people wanted to join you for the next project. Ultimately, that's how you grew up. Microsoft. Developing a sense that people could confidently follow you and achieve business results.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Curious your thoughts on Valve and the whole model there. It's the most interesting company in the world. You have to get people to join you. You have your desk on wheels and no agenda.

Joshua Howard: What's fascinating is the variety and how these are all reflections of the leaders involved, right? Valve wouldn't be Valve without not just Gabe, but that core team around him that helps run the company with him. I love that. I love that you can say, we're not gonna, we're not going to follow the rule book everybody else wants to follow. We're going to find our own way now. They had the luxury of doing so for a variety of reasons, but it is exciting. I think what we've seen again and again in industry as a whole, nevermind video games, is when you build something that becomes such a compelling player experience, it generates freedom as a developer to do things your own way.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, and try untested things, and then that creativity sparks something that's a hit.

Joshua Howard: That's right.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, you just have to create that killer thing first.

Joshua Howard: Yeah that's why at the end of the day, as exciting as I am to continue to build great cultures and great employee experiences, At the center, at the very center of the bullseye has to be how we think about the player, how we think about a player experience that engages them, enraptures them, gives them a sense of awe.

I will say I've worked with a number of professionals who they're so invested in making sure the team is treated well, that I think they've done a disservice to their teams by taking their eye off the ball. That's the purpose we're here for, and when you stay committed to that focus, That's what you can rally a team of people to do amazing work on. When you lose that focus, it becomes harder to keep that rally, that sense of focus together.

Lizzie Mintus: I have one last question, and I got it from WIGI, the amazing nonprofit for women in games. They have a whole program built around, I wish I knew X at Y stage of my career. They call them cheat codes for the next generation so they don't have to learn the hard way.

You've definitely shared some, but do you have any other cheat codes that you can share, something you wish you knew at the start of your career?

Joshua Howard: Yeah, I think the word leadership, not only was scary, but I rebelled against leadership my whole life. I was a troublemaker. I did not respect authority in school. So the whole framing, it didn't feel like something I ever wanted to be because it'd been the thing that I'd been fighting against all along. And I think, many years later, I came to understand leadership very differently. If someone had helped me see this a lot earlier in my career, I think I would have been happier.

And certainly the people around me might've been happier. And that is, for me, leadership is all about committing to the success of others. And I had to endure a lot of heartache to come to that. But having come to that, and having learned it and lived it, and believing it to my core being, I think that's one of those things where, I think too many people don't understand it what leadership is, because there's a lot of bad examples. Ignoring all of that context and just saying, look, if you are genuinely committed to the success of the people around you, you may not be good at it yet but you can get better at it if you've got that core intention.

That's one of those things when I deal with students, when I deal with people early in career, oh, I don't want to be a manager. I want to do the work. I want to make the game. Hold on leadership happens from any place. It happens in any role. It happens at every level. It happens in every discipline. We all have an opportunity.

I like to build cultures that I would describe as a leadership culture, which is everybody in the organization understands that they have a responsibility to take a leadership role, when they're the right person to do it. And so for some of us, that's a lot of the time, on a lot of different issues, but for someone much early in career, it might be on this problem with this team. It's your turn and your time to stand up and say, I'm going to help us make this better. Leadership is something we all do. It's not a title we're given.

Lizzie Mintus: That's good advice. Thank you. We've been talking to Joshua Howard, who's COO at OtherSide Entertainment. Joshua, where can people go to work for you, learn more about you, read your blog, download your toolkit?

Joshua Howard: To find out more about what OtherSide's doing, and we are hiring, and probably will be slowly over the next couple of years as we build up. Check out the OtherSide Entertainment website, OtherSide-e.Com.

Check out my blog, thereisknowthem. wordpress. com. From there you can find the toolkit, thethud. wordpress. com. And then if you're even really ambitious, and you want to see how the other side of all of this, there's actually some of my writing that you can find online on medium as well.

I think that's a nice bookend to, if on one hand, here's the Joshua work on the other hand, here's the storyteller is at the end of the day. That's pretty much all I do for a living is tell stories. Hopefully they help people be more effective or they help people learn and grow the way they helped me.

Lizzie Mintus: Thank you. I learned a lot on the podcast. It's the best part of the podcast. Thanks for being on.

Joshua Howard: Thank you. I really enjoyed it and I appreciate what you do. Thank you very much.

Thanks so much for listening to the show this week to catch all the latest from Here's Waldo, you can follow us on LinkedIn. Be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes. We'll see you next time.

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