Managing Your Party
The original version of this article appeared on my LinkedIn account.
Battling Sephiroth in my first Final Fantasy VII (original) playthrough didn’t go well.
I had played my favorites up until that point, ignored and left out those characters I didn’t really bond with, and then, in that battle, had the stomach-dropping revelation that I needed to rotate between party groups. My success hinged on party members I had shoved aside and not bothered to level up or develop. The battle turned to disaster and I had to rethink the care I put into the characters I picked up along the way. My personal apologies go out – begrudgingly - to Yuffie.
And I was frustrated! Why did I have to bother developing characters I didn’t care all that much for when there much cooler characters to work on? The truth is, I couldn’t beat Sephiroth with just the three party members I wanted. It took everyone on my roster. I needed careful and strategic collaboration to succeed.
Do I dare suggest that you, Accomplisher of the Many and Slayer of the Perpetual To-Do List, need to collaborate to have a healthy career? Why yes, yes I do. As a socially anxious introvert, I’ve just thrown up in my mouth a little. In truth, we can’t be effective with a team of all fighters or all mages. Inevitably, we will encounter an enemy – a problem – that needs a collaborative approach.
Why did we focus on cohesion level building in XCOM? Why do we collect, train, and evolve across all types in any Pokémon game? In Mass Effect 2, why do we claw our way through the very fabric of space to build up the crew of the Normandy SR-2?
It comes down to balance. Learning to recognize and leverage the strengths in others allows you to support your teams on a higher, more effective, level.
In video games, your party balance keeps you alive when the bosses get tougher, it ensures you as the strategist are equipped to meet ever-shifting challenges, and it allows you to appreciate the skills of your party members.
In your career, the people you partner up with – be it for a one-off project, a committee you join, or the very executive you support – will garner you a ton of valuable experience. When you have a balanced party in your career, you are able to get diverse perspectives on problems, draw on skills you don’t have to solve them, and grow your network.
When you work with a team, you’ll likely see the classic Tuckman’s stages of group development at play. Those forming, storming, and norming phases are incredible opportunities to identify party balance. Based on the issue you’re solving for, what skills do you need? Who has them? Who can support them?
So, how do you achieve a balanced party? It takes an understanding of the working landscape and a strategic eye.
Know what your party is made of.
I find value in some of the working style assessments that are out there, particularly the DiSC Assessment. Understanding your own communication and working styles, and learning your colleagues’ styles helps you see where you can fit naturally with each other, and where you might need to put in some extra work. This is like comparing character stats in a game or checking affinity progress to maximize a companion’s output.
In the DiSC assessment, I’m deep in the Conscientiousness style. I’m not even remotely close to the other letters. The strongest strategic partnerships I’ve experienced in my career as an assistant come with executives who are strong in the Dominance and Influence types. My sweet spot is that style balance of us quickly generating ideas and me swooping in to execute them.
Make and influence strategic recommendations. Delegate, even.
Not all of us directly manage employees, but so many of us have the opportunity to exhibit lateral leadership. With lateral leadership, you effectively influence those around you without organizational-granted authority. You have the ear of decision makers in your company and you can plant the seeds of career growth for others. You know the players in your organization and you see the result of their work when senior leadership sometimes doesn’t, or can’t. Recommend someone for a project or introduce people you believe would partner well together on an initiative or those who have gone through similar struggles and could help each other. As a baby step, try delegating a piece of a project to someone you know with a fitting skill set. I promise that “delegate” isn’t a dirty word. To this day, I still have a gut panic reaction to being prompted to delegate something; if I delegate to someone else, am I showing that I’m not good enough to accomplish that thing?
No. You’re connecting, you’re growing others, you’re enabling someone else to level up.
What a balanced and unbalanced party looks like:
An intentional side effect of effective party management in video games is that no single character gets to hog all of the glory. A balanced party is successful because everyone shines together; they pool their skills and resources to make a unified effort against the antagonist. The same can be said for managing your real-world party.
When people aren’t acknowledged for the skills and unique voices they bring to the table, and when we don’t figure out how to utilize those skills harmoniously to make the organization better, we have an unbalanced party. An unbalanced party can look like team members thrown under the bus or made into scapegoats during update meetings with leadership, people working in silos out of frustration, unfruitful communication, undermining and sabotage.
A balanced party makes you feel like you’re on top of the world. Have you ever done an escape room as a team building activity? Talk about party balance! I did one with a team and it was a blast watching my peers shine. I could see how their natural strengths played out, from the person who walked around and poked at literally everything to find secrets, the person who tried to brute force their way through the puzzles, to the person who looked at an object in a different way and found a solution. And me – the person who coordinated what each member should be doing. Not a single one of us could solve that escape room on our own, but thanks to our different strengths, we worked together and made it out on time. Cue the credits, the cheesy team photo, and the “A Winner is You!” meme.
The end is never the end is never the end ~ The Stanley Parable
Once your party has accomplished their goal, don’t let those members become memories. Fold them into your career network. Check in regularly, and continue to add value to the relationship by connecting them with resources, other people, or other projects they can sharpen their skills on.
And don’t forget that you may be a member in someone else’s party, too. You may be passively influencing someone else’s Hero’s Journey.