Hello there! Dani here, Director of Dischan Media.

The Salty team have been quite busy lately working on… uh… that thing they’re making… uh… what was it called again…? Salty Something.

Ah, whatever. Anyway, turns out writing blog posts takes a lot of work and creativity, and since they’ve been working so hard on their thing and trying to keep you guys updated so diligently (and because I also happen to be friends with one of the devs), I offered to write a guest post to help them out. They accepted.

So here I am! And what am I going to talk about, you ask?

Unfortunately, not about anything Salty Gears related, because I don’t know anything you don’t already know. I’m just like you: an outsider looking in. Instead, I thought this post could be a nice mini-leadership lesson for those of you who hope to lead in the future. Actually, there’s only one particular point I want to focus on in this post. It is, at least in my opinion, the single most important quality in a good leader: the ability to swallow your pride. That’s right, one of the most important qualities of a leader is the ability to back down. Let me give you an example.

Let’s say you get in a fight with your team member over the color of a character’s hair. You want it blue, and they want it red. You fight for hours, and it looks like there is no end in sight.

How do you proceed? Well, if you agree with my philosophy, you back down. You tell him or her that maybe red isn’t so bad, that maybe you just haven’t been coming at it from the right direction. You try to make yourself like red.

The other person calms down, and why wouldn’t they? You are finally starting to see the superiority of red hair. The conversation resumes in a more calm and productive manner. Hopefully, your teammate will appreciate your new flexibility on the matter, and may even admit that perhaps blue would be fine as well. In the end, maybe red is chosen, or maybe blue. Which it ends up being is not important, what is important is that you defused an argument that could have turned personal and destructive, and opened an avenue to a productive resolution.

People sometimes confuse being a leader with always getting what you want. A person who always gets what they want is a tyrant, not a leader. A leader is not simply a person who tells you what to do. A leader is more like a guide, a person who carves a path and directs a team toward a common goal. Certainly, there may be times when you must put your foot down, but I have found those to be extremely rare.

There have been many contested topics I have backed down on during my time at Dischan. Some of those things I was likely completely wrong about, for others it’s hard to say. The point is that the sky never fell on our heads, the project is still trudging along, and everyone is still relatively happy to be a part of the team. Sometimes there is just more than one right way to do something.

I hope you enjoyed this mini-lesson, and that it will be of some use to you. If you’ve never heard of Dischan before, I encourage you to check us out. If you liked this post, I talk about some similar stuff on my blog. You may want to check out that as well.

Thanks for reading! I hope you’re all as excited for Salty Tears as I am.

Stay salty,

• Jeremy “Dani” Miller Friend and leader, Dischan Media