Playful Management, players, and NPCs

Following on from some ponderings about Playful Leadership the other day, and a subtle but important realisation I had... I was thinking about how that came out in my management style and why I sometimes restricted reportees a lot more than at other times.

Most of the time I tend to be quite open and flexible in how I manage people - I give them lots of freedom to do things the way they feel is best. 

In terms of play, I try to set (as clearly as I can), the winning conditions - or at least the end point - of the game.

There are some rules that always exist around the workplace, both explicitly laid out, and implicit in the culture we try to inculcate, but I try to give a lot of flexibility in how they play that game. I try to support them in "winning" (or at least finishing) the game, or the task I've set them, but I'm rarely explicit in how they should do that. 

So I'm often more of a coach and expert advisor than anything else - I try to help people develop the skills to complete tasks in the way that they think is best, pointing out rules of the game they may have missed or mis-interpreted, but rarely telling them what move to make next.

Sometimes, however, I have to interfere a lot more - I have to be very explicit about what they can and can't do, about the approaches they should take to a particular tasks. I wonder if this is when I see the task in certain ways - when the person I manage isn't one of the main characters (even though they may think they are), but more of an NPC. They need to follow a much restricted path than normal, as it's about aiding the main characters arc, not theirs! It's my job as the manager to see these intersecting priorities, tasks, games(!), that are going on and try to make sure that members of our team play the appropriate role. To also see whether they are on a huge group quest, where we need to balance lots of demands, or in a little mini game to the side that is largely just about them.

That's hard on them sometimes - it's my job to have the overview, to see how things fit together, but some people will always see themselves as the main character, never the supporting one, or even the NPC. They can find it hard to see the bigger picture, as it's not really their role to do that, and feel like I'm imposing strange ways of doing things. Worse still, they can feel like I'm too vague sometimes, and too restrictive in others, but not understand why that is. 

They might also feel I'm being unfair when I point out "rules of the game they may have missed or mis-interpreted" (see above), as they are rules they don't recognise, and might not agree with.

I'm not 100% what I've said above in this post is true (for me), I'm just working things out as I type this, but I think there is an element of truth in it at least. This means I probably need to be more explicit in setting out when we set off on tasks and projects, the amount of freedom they have and why. Whether they are the main character, or a supporting one (or even an NPC) - but not using that language of course! 

It's complicated as well by the fact that they can be the main character, freely skipping across the countryside, doing things as they feel is best, and not realise they've stepped into a minefield - they were fine up to that point, but as soon as they've gone into dangerous ground, I need to be more explicit about what they do next. They'll resent this - why shouldn't they skip across the lovely grass? They may object to me telling them the exact path to take next - after all, they haven't been blown up yet! But as the manager, it's up to me to recognise the risks and have the tools to extract us all as safely as possible. Again, I need to consider how I flag these things up effectively, how do I interfere when I need to, without killing the playfulness and freedom that they'll normally have?

Playful Leadership Vague Thoughts

   

 (This is a CC-0 image that came up in a quick search for "playful leadership" - don't know about you lot, but it doesn't look that playful to me!)

For several years I’ve tried to pin down what I mean by playful leadership, and I haven’t been able to do it. I’ve also been struggling to be playful recently, probably not helped by living through a global pandemic, which hasn’t particularly helped me articulate what I mean when I think of playful leadership.

I’ve read lots of leadership and management books and articles, as well as plenty of stuff on play and games. Sometimes I feel like I’m starting to get somewhere, when an idea or model triggers a small “a-ha” moment, but then I fail to pull it together into any sort of coherent whole.

Part of this could be the temptation to pin these things down into neat models, or a clear set of steps (“5 steps to playful leadership!”), which we can follow and magically become a “playful leader”. None of these models, or steps, or whatever I found seemed quite right to me, even when I found several that seemed to touch on play – they’d sometimes have play as an important element, but perhaps not quite at their core, or reflecting how I felt about play and leadership. I also struggled to mash some of these different leadership models together, as I couldn’t successfully pull out their more playful aspects to form any sort of coherent whole.

Then, while in a very low mood and generally struggling, I had an important realisation. What I think of as playful leadership is really about encouraging a playful mindset in others. It helps if I play too, but I don’t need to all the time – the important thing is that I can enable others to play.

One of the components of my management style at work that is quite important to me is (trying to) protect colleagues from institutional politics, from micro-management of others, from unnecessary blame and retribution when things go wrong. In effect, these are also ways I try to gently shift the workplace culture towards giving permission to try things and fail. To play with different ways of doing things, knowing that they will be allowed (encouraged) to do so, and that as long as they don’t cause harm, it doesn’t matter if there is no immediate benefit either – as they can learn from that experience and try something else next time that might work better.

So my evolving understanding of my particular flavour of playful leadership probably has something like this at its core:

Helping others to be more playful.

The bits that stood out for my in other play and management texts, probably did so as they were potential enablers for that to happen. It’s ok that none of them were complete answers for me, and may even have been contradictory. But all of them could be tools that help take me part-way to being a playful leader – as it’s not a set way for me to act, but the impact I have on others.

I don’t need a 7 step method, or 4 zones of playful leadership, or anything else that pretends to be a complete answer. What I need is a clear idea of what I’m trying to achieve, and then a kit bag full of possible tools to help.

I don’t need a routeplan and detailed map to follow the “right” path. I need a compass, maybe a vague map, a penknife, a change of clothes, etc., so that we can find a good enough route that depends on the people present at the time, where they need to get to, and have some help for the challenges we need to overcome together. It doesn’t matter which things we need from that kit bag, or the exact route, just that we have a selection of tools that are available to use if we need to.

So what sort of things do we need in our kit bag? What goodies can help to enable a playful attitude, so I can be my sort of playful leader? I’ll have to start thinking in that way over the next few months and see if I can pull something useful together!