Struggling at work
I've been working for a while on a video game company in London. A few months ago I got promoted from being the main artist to become the Lead of a whole department, and as time passed and the company started to grow, everything changed as well.
The last months have been quite hard. We are working on multiple projects at the same time, and that's been hard to handle from the start. We do not do extra hours, but the work environment is getting really stressful. I'm a cheerful person, and I do my best to make everyone feel comfortable, but deadline after deadline I get more and more burned out.
I got some rest on holydays, but ended up feeling as always only two weeks after that. The Direction says we're crybabies for complaining about the pressure we've been through, and when we genuinely say we can't get to what they want, they just try to ease our pain saying something like "just do what you can", but when we start to feel confident and think everything is getting better, they put even more pressure on us, tightening the deadlines, demanding absurd improvements or getting us into new projects without even asking anything to us (if we can handle anything else, to begin with).
And in another hand, I feel I'm starting to do less and less artistic work. I spend my days managing and training my team, solving problems, and talking to the other leads or to the Direction. I know that as a Lead artist, that's to be expected, but I'm an artist deep inside, and that's something the Direction cannot understand, and do not care about.
I feel like my time in this company has come to an end, but with the Covid situation everything has become scarier, and I don't know for how long will I be able to keep up. I feel exhausted. When I get back home I just want to lay down and get to sleep. Lately I've got health issues that come from trying to keep up. The Direction knows about this, and talked to me in this regard, saying that I should slow down a bit, but the deadlines and their requirements are still the same, ironically.
I think I'm just writing this to cool down a bit and see if anyone else has been through something like this.. thanks guys
Replies
There's plenty of work to be had for talented experienced professionals. Especially now! Covid has opened employers' eyes to the viability of remote work.
Don't mess around with your health or your sanity. Change is good, and healthy!
Transitioning to a lead role is tough - everyone struggles and very few people are naturally able to pull it off without training.
The problems are compounded when expectations of what exactly it is you're supposed to do are unclear.
The assumption is often that once you put someone in a lead role they'll magically fix all the problems below them, even if nobody explains what those problems are from the studio's perspective.
I'm by no means a management expert but there's a few observations I've made from being in lead roles over the last 10 years or so.
Once you have a team of 4 or more to directly manage you no longer do any work yourself.
Nobody directly supporting 10 people has the time to negotiate with upper management as well.
You get to choose how your team is structured.
Shit needs to travel upwards
Talk more with your managers, learn why they make the decisions they do. You might learn some things you didn't know about. Unseen issues that someone has to deal with, otherwise the money stops coming in.
Or you may learn your manager is incompetent. But more likely, there are just a bunch of issues they are trying to shield you from stressing out about.
what i mean is this...
Upper management determine what needs doing, Department heads/leads etc. are there to determine how, how long and at what cost it gets done.