What do you think would help a game designer on GameDev.net earn the respect of his team members as the team leader? For example, tips on making a good Help Wanted post for your long-thought-up project that has become a part of your heart, and what to do if you get the members you need from your Help Wanted topic?
Also, sharing your experiences would be helpful.

Edit: I've edited in some of the helpful replies below.

Game Leaders:

A game leader shouldn't:

Suggestions below provided by user "Wai", slightly edited by me

.Be ego centric (can't admit his/her faults)
.Fail to consider suggestions (Be close minded)
.Be unable to see the strengths in others
.Have an immoral or unethical view and try to justify it
.Be selfish
.Be impatient
.Be demanding
.Be manipulative
.Be incompetent and try to hide it (i.e. asking everyone to come up with ideas without generating any him/herself)
.Be unwilling to learn
.Take others' credit

A game leader should:

Some suggestions below provided by user "JBAdams", slightly edited by me, and some by me

.Know how many people his/her project needs and know where to station them
.Respect the ideas of his/her team members, especially those who are more talented than him/her in the field they're discussing
.Be easy and comfortable to talk to
.Make sure everything is organized (the team website, if any, and the GDD) before even beginning to recruit a team
.Have a well-rounded game idea with no obvious flaws or imbalances in the gameplay

Game Designers:
A game designer should:

Following suggestions provided by user "JBAdams", with changed wording and slight editing by me

.Have understanding of mathematics. A couple areas of interest would be probability and trigonometry. Sometimes, a basic knowledge of physics will also come in handy. You should be able to define formulae for things such as weapon damage, chances to hit, etc. and perform basic balancing prior to the additional tweaking that follows actual play-testing.
.Have basic knowledge of psychology. In other words, knowing how players will react to parts of the game and being able to design gameplay to evoke specific moods. Generally, games should be fun, and though inconveniences and consequences aren't totally wrong, extremely frustrating and unfair consequences will reduce the appeal of the game.
.Have studied the flaws of existing games, and be able to avoid them; read the "Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie!!!" series from the Designer's Notebook column.
.Have a working knowledge of business; you should be able to estimate development timetables and costs, and should have an idea of how your designs can be monetized.<BR itxtNodeId="1244">.Have an idea of what is technically feasible, and should be able to clearly and efficiently communicate with those who have greater technical skill in situations where they require guidance. Good communication skills are essential for a designer, as you must be able to get your ideas across to your team.<BR itxtNodeId="1240">

What do you think would help a game designer on GameDev.net earn the respect of his team members as the team leader?

Several successful released games that credit him as having been the designer AND several successful released games that credit him as having been the team leader / producer.

Well, you can't really get that in your checklist until you earn the respect of a team well enough to make a successful game. But it is a good suggestion, and I'm sure it would help a great deal in adding a known professional touch to your "Things I've Done" section.

Respect

Speaking personally, I would respect you even if you have not completed any game or even if you are new to game design.
So experience is irrelevant. To me, respect is the default. It is there even if you post nothing. But when you start posting and
discussing, I could lose my respect to you depending on how you reply.

You would lose my respect by doing these:

o Fail to admit faults (Being ego centric)
o Fail to consider suggestions (Being closed minded)
o Fail to follow an argument and dismisses it as unimportant
o Being unable to see the strengths in others
o Have an immoral or unethical view and try to justify it
o Being selfish
o Being impatient
o Being demanding
o Being manipulatively
o Being incompetent and tries to hide it (i.e. asking everyone to come up with ideas but don't generate any yourself)
o Unwilling to learn
o Takes others' credits

If I see your post with a lot of experience and I decide to join your team, I could be joining for a number of reason. For example,
I may join because you have a record of success, which leads me to believe that joining your team is a good investment of my
time. If I join only because of that, repect may not be present (i.e. I'm just doing it for the return, you are not a person to me, but
a mean for me to earn some benefit).

If I join your team because I respect you, it means that:

o I believe that your goal is worthwhile, and you are a good person
o .. that I want to help you achieve your goal
o .. that I want to work with you even if your project changes
o .. that I want to know you even if you have no project

I don't know whether this answers your question. Perhaps you would decide that what you need is not a team that respect you,
but a team that is efficient, competent, resourceful, etc... But if respect is really what you want, the above analysis shows that
if you want to attract team members that respect you, your post would need to be candid, open, thoughtful, and concise.

Candid: This shows that you are fair and not trying to take advantage of your team members
Open: This shows that you are someone who others can work with
Thoughtful: This shows that you are capable of considering and making decisions
Concise: This shows that you can sort through distractions to make correct decisions

Respect alone would not get you a team. On top of that you need competence. The above only shows what it takes for the
team to respect you. The situation is like this: It doesn't matter how competent you are. The bottomline is that I would work
with you only if there is mutual respect.


* * *

To be fair though, different people look for different qualities in a leader. Respect is just one aspect. It is important in some
group dynamics, but not in others. For instance, you could always blackmail every member of your team to make them work
for you, beat them up until they submit, or pay them a lot of money. Having respect is just one situation. Different quality attracts
different team members, and being respectable isn't a quality that one can easily fake.

[...]

Excellent post, I would agree with all of those.

I have some tips of my own to add:

1. Presentation is important; your post does not have to be some beautiful work of art, but readers should be able to tell that you've put in effort and that you care both about what you've written and what you've written about.
   • Your Help Wanted post should be free of spelling and grammatical errors. You should run it through a spell-checker as well as proof-reading before submitting.
   • Your post should, as much as possible, be free of obvious flaws such as broken links, unclosed tags or incorrect formatting. Use the preview function and look carefully over your post before submitting. Check any links to make sure they work as expected.
   • Your post should be detailed and include all the relevant information, but without rambling on endlessly. If you're posting here at GameDev.Net you'll need to follow the Help Wanted template, and you should have good, well-thought-out answers for every section. If you're posting elsewhere you should be sure to still present all the appropriate information up-front, and in some neat, structured fashion; you may still want to use our template as a guideline in this case.
     • Some good things to include in a detailed post include concept art, mock-ups, or work-in-progress art for your project. You might also include video, or when you're far-enough along should include some work-in-progress screen-shots.
     • Use thumbnails for large images as appropriate, and don't include too many -- if you've got more to show and your post is becoming too large you might consider linking to an off-site gallery and/or saving some of your additional content to post when "bumping" your topic at a later stage.
     • If you're willing to share your design document -- you already know that I'm of the opinion you should, but it's your choice -- don't paste the thing into a topic and have a giant wall of text. You should instead link to the full document off-site, or attach it for download. If you wish to include a few small snippets you could consider doing so using spoiler tags (in the "other styles" drop-down of the full post editor), which look like this: [spoiler]This is an example of a spoiler. Even with many lines of text it will collapse down to a single line.[/spoiler]

Your post should not make excuses for errors, or for content you have not created yet. Rather than mentioning that you're not sure if something is spelled correctly you should find out before posting. Don't mention that you'll have some screen-shots in a few days, but instead wait a few days and include them.

If you don't have a team-name or project name that's fine -- plenty of people don't -- but these sections of our template are marked as optional, and it looks sloppy to include the headings if you're not going to provide the information.

You should be ready before you post. Make sure you have your design document, and if you're planning on learning a technical skill make sure you've learned enough to be useful to the team before recruiting. Consider producing some example work, even if it's just maps or mods for an existing game, or mock-ups of your ideas.

Don't look for a huge team right away. Start off small, and add extra people only as you need them; far too many teams recruit a whole load of people and then don't really have proper jobs for them to do, and a large team means you'll have to spend more time managing the team than actually working on the project. Only bring on more people when your current team can't handle the project without them.

Look for the right people. You won't necessarily find experts in every field, but you don't have to recruit everyone who wants to join. If someone seems unsuitable or doesn't offer any real value to the project then don't add them to the team.

I have some more to say, but once again I have to run for now -- hope some of that helps!

Along with what has already been said... a big one for me is... HAVE TALENT.

Seriously, there's nothing worse than an untalented leader/designer. As a game designer/leader, you need to be a jack of all trades. You don't have to be amazing in one particular field, but you do need to have a grasp on a little bit of everything.

You need to be at least good (don't necessarily need to be great) at:

- leadership
- communication
- designing
- writing
- art
- music/sound
- programming

The way I see it, the guy leading the project and designing the game better damn well have a background in everything, because he needs to know a bit about everything in order to fully understand game development. Without having knowledge in an area, you can't possibly know the limitations, or the work involved, etc...

Also having a good natured personality is pretty big. You can have all the above qualities and lack a good personality and nobody will want to work with/for you.

You need to bring something to the table other than just being the idea guy. If that means helping do some rough artwork for the artists to later improve, fine. If that means doing some sound effects, fine. If that means writing up dialogue for characters, fine. But do *something*. Not just "I have a grate ideea 4 a game! Make it 4 me!"

Show me you are a leader - show the way by doing. This is really often missed - a prototype, even a rough one, would give your project a much better chance of finding real talent just because it shows you are committed to the project enough to get your hands down and dirty. A well written GDD could do the same. Or perhaps some artwork? Music? See there are a hundred ways to show you got talent and the will to use it. The question boils down to how can you show it? What skills do you have and which must you enlist help to cover?

But regardless, a leader should communicate efficiently, promptly and clearly with all the respect your team members deserve. It's very important the leader has a clear minded way of communicating what the next stepping stone is in the project and making sure the team completes their jobs on time.

Wow, really good stuff here.

Under the heading of the communication, be sure to emphasize documentation. The design lead generally produces the most documentation of anyone on the team. He has to convey his vision in writing to the rest of the team. Not only should he grammatically write well, bit he should be very, very, very (did I say very?) good at explanation.

If he is also the team lead, he should be Hell and Jesus at organization, tracking, and asset management. He should also be able to control feature-creep.

In that role he is not only in charge of getting the game done, but how it gets done.

Wow, a forum post that has good replies only (at least so far hehehe)? How rare!
Of course, I'm asking this because I'm a 'game designer' myself.
Though I've never published a book, I am a fantasy writer myself, so I know a little bit about explaining things well, mainly because I have experience trying to explain things in the least amount of words required (so people stay on track).
The GDD for my project is, so far, 23 pages and growing, but it's not even halfway done with quests and story.
For making windows, rather than saying "Put a box on the left side and a larger box under said box, oh and two on the right side", I made some really crappy Paint documents. That way, you can at least get an idea of where the 'boxes' are supposed to be. Do you think this is a good idea, or is it telling the artists how to do there job in the wrong way?
Konidias said:

But do *something*.
Not just "I have a grate ideea 4 a game! Make it 4 me!"
[/quote]
I think this kind of view of game designers is common around GameDev.net. At least, that's what I noticed.
Are all game designers really like this?
It seems like writing up the GDD is almost considered to be no work whatsoever...like people just disregard it and say "You've done nothing so far" even if you have a detailed, well-written GDD.
That just seems to be what everyone gets at when they talk about game designers - the GDD means nothing and they're useless members unless they code well, regardless of the GDD's state.
As usual, JBAdams gave me a really long, well-written and helpful reply, and so did Wai. The rest of the replies were great, too, as they added in some things the others didn't have without re-writing everything and making a huge post without much point.
Thanks to everyone! I'm on my least favorable computer right now, so I don't want to go on very long. Maybe I'll edit the post and quote some of the posts.
And...maybe, just maybe, the post could get STICKIED (I can barely contain myself with the sheer anticipation...!!!)
In the meantime I'll leave you with the question I asked in this reply a few blocks of text ago and the following one.
I've heard that a boss telling his team something in the way of "I got this all down - here's how you should code it, I wrote it down but you guys should just finish it up" is really annoying. He/she (the one I heard this from on one of my other posts...I'll find his/her nickname) said it throws away their talent and confines them to something an inexperienced person suggested.
So do you think it's annoying when your game designer tells you how to draw something or how to code something?
I didn't think it'd be wrong to give a simple suggestion, but what do you think?