Lessons from multiplayer gaming have a direct and consequential application to creating … [+]
What happens when groups of employees play video games? High-performance patterns emerge that have meaningful application in the real world, too. Much of it evolves around rapid, effective communications, but that alone is insufficient. This study reveals critical components of high-performing online gaming teams that, if applied to the workplace, can have the same high-performance impact.
“We were originally looking at ways to improve change management methodologies for the digital era,” said Craig Moss, Executive Vice President of Ethisphere and Director of Content for the Cyber Readiness Institute.
Moss said the idea emerged after talking to younger colleagues who were gamers. After publishing a paper on the topic in March 2021, they developed interactive workshops to share the findings with corporations.
Craig Moss
“Engagement workshops used clips from high-performing video-game teams and facilitated discussions linking the lessons from the game world back to solving specific change management challenges in companies,” Moss explained.
“We also developed an immersion workshop where the participants become gamers and experience the thrill of playing the game with their colleagues.”
While debriefing the participants, whose ages ranged from 20s to 60s, Moss began to observe the four distinct characteristics of high-performing teams and recognized the business application.
Since then, Moss has run numerous executive leadership engagement sessions in different countries involving people from many companies and company-specific sessions. The immersion workshop was more challenging to orchestrate, given travel restrictions during COVID and organizational cybersecurity issues.
Four High-Performance Characteristics
In multiplayer online games, people often come together without knowing each other. They meet in chat rooms and say, “Okay, let’s team up and play this game!” In high-performing teams, it takes minimal time to determine respective roles and perform well.
But to experience success, four distinctive characteristics are present.
Rapid and Appropriate Communication
Gamers are constantly communicating about what needs to be done. They are also very conscious of critical communication versus chat. For example, while they play, they still cover others. They use direct language like, “Watch for the enemy over there,” or, “You need more building materials ASAP.”
Not only must it be timely, it also needs to be appropriate. If an employee sends her colleague three questions and quickly receives the answer to only one question, that is not effective–although it may be rapid.
Compared to the business side, companies often have inefficient communications, such as multiple channels where people are not consistently using any one of them for the right purpose. For example, one colleague may use email, while another prefers Slack, and a third likes WeChat. That’s not conducive to rapid, efficient communications, according to Moss.
Rapid Trust-Building
Rapid, effective communication impacts the ability to establish trust quickly. If an employee sends a communication and has not heard back for a day or two, they have less trust than when they send a communication and receive an immediate response. In this way, communication and rapid trust building are connected–the lack of communication undermines trust.
Trust-building is also about how time-bound goals are achieved.
“One thing clear in gaming is the time-bound goals. Quickly we’ll discover that you might be a better map reader than I am, but I’m a better builder than you. Our other teammate might be a better shooter or hunter than either of us,” said Moss. “It’s through communication that such determinations are made, setting the guidelines for moving forward. That’s rapid trust building.”
On the company side, projects often have vague goals, according to Moss. Lack of clearly articulated, time-bound goals and ineffective communication spells disaster.
Trusting and Filtering Data
Games present the players with a huge amount of data–a map of the game world, position of enemies, amount and type of building materials or ammunition or food available, health and strength level or changing weather conditions. Players need to know when to look at each type of data and they always trust it.
This trust is not true in business.
Companies also generate a lot of data in different formats, applications and systems. What do employees do when they need data to complete a project? They go to a trusted source.
Dashboards might look pretty, but how is all that data pulled in? That question can tempt employees … [+]
“I hear people all the time say they want to get things off of spreadsheets,” said Moss. “But if someone is an Excel expert, they might be trusted more than the system the company just spent 10 million dollars putting in.”
For employees, the temptation is to pull data off the fancy dashboards and give it to their trusted Excel expert. They don’t trust what’s coming over the system, but they trust the expert.
“When I talk to people, they’ll see numbers showing up on the dashboard, but they have no idea how those numbers were determined, what algorithms were used or where the data was sourced. People aren’t comfortable making decisions based on numbers that they don’t know the origin of,” Moss said.
Moss equates it to being desperately thirsty for a glass of water. Going to the convenience store and buying a bottle of water is one thing; finding a random bottle of water on the sidewalk is something else. Most people are comfortable drinking bottled water when they trust the source. But most people would refuse the water on the sidewalk because they don’t understand the source.
Employees need to believe the data is credible, from its source all the way through the pipeline.
Dynamic Leadership
In gaming, there is less hierarchy. Instead, effective teams rely on dynamic leadership.
As Moss explained, “At this point, we trust each other. We know who’s good at what. Leadership is based on the situation we encounter. If we encounter a situation where we need a map reader, then you’re the leader. I’m the leader if we need to build a structure or a stairway.”
Leadership becomes dynamic, not fixed. And that is the culmination of high-performing teams.
In the company workplace, leadership is not only fixed but also typically hierarchical. The leader remains the same, even when others may be experts in what the team needs.
Team Building Through Gaming Work for (Almost) Everyone
Internet users worldwide who play video games on any device as of 3rd quarter 2022, by age group and … [+]
Gaming is popular across the age spectrum and women are increasingly making up the percentage of users as this 2023 Statistica chart shows. Because so many people are attracted to gaming, team-building benefits increase.
“If you look at this across the age spectrum, we’ve found online gaming can be a way to accelerate trust,” said Moss. “When executives and teams go through this process together, they rapidly build trust and begin to understand the value of dynamic leadership. Different people have different skills and every person, every skill, is a valuable asset to achieving the goal.”
In the working world, the idea of dynamic leadership is a bit more challenging. “Yes, that’s what we’re up against,” Moss said.
These gaming sessions also have positive implications for cross-cultural and remote teams where people have never met face to face.
The biggest surprise in this work, according to Moss, is that participants never thought about the connection between high-performing online gaming and company teams. Both gamers and non-gamers had never drawn the connection between gaming success and the working world.
“The convergence of several factors requires leaders to adopt a new mindset and approach to creating high-performing teams–new technology and data sources, remote and hybrid workplaces, cross-generational dynamics with new generations entering the workforce and younger leaders managing older subject matter experts,” explained Moss. “New collaborations blending internal departments and people from external companies are needed in response to evolving customer expectations, regulations and geo-political realities.”
The four lessons from multiplayer gaming have a direct and consequential application to creating high-performing cross-generational teams to achieve specific business goals. But it requires leaders to become more flexible in their approach to workplace performance.
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