It’s Always the Leader’s Fault
by Trouble on January 13, 2010 under Leadership
No really. It is. Almost. Let’s face the facts: most people suck at leading guilds, whether through lack of experience or lack of talent. There’s no such thing as professional guild leaders; there’s no college you can go to take courses in guild leadership. Very few people even realize what they’re getting in to when they accept a leadership role in a guild or create a new guild and are completely unprepared for it. Even the very small percentage who have professional leadership training or experience in other realms can’t be prepared for the specifics of MMO guild leadership. Some aspects of leadership can be learned, but I’m not convinced all abilities required to be good at guild leadership can be. At the end of the day, some rare natural talents are required to do more than a passable job at it. But still, some key concepts can help you to do a much better job than what you’ve accomplished wandering around the in dark.
The Measure of a Guild
For measuring the quality of a guild I submit that “drama” is a good broad scope measurement of how well a guild is being led. Raid progression has no bearing on a large portion of guilds because being a top guild simply isn’t in their goals, but drama management is absolutely part of every single raiding guild. It is my belief that almost all drama is either directly or indirectly caused by guild leadership decisions or should be quickly dealt with by effective leadership. Very, very little drama is out of the control of the leadership. Effective guild leadership understands this intuitively and is able to keep drama at a minimum with its decision making and responses. Ineffective leadership either doesn’t realize that almost all drama is under its tender or doesn’t know how to squelch the drama in an incisive manner. I’ll give some examples of common drama sources.
- Many guilds, especially newer guilds, don’t have a clear mission statement and don’t have clear policies created for achieving the mission statement. This specifically decrees what the goals of the guilds are and the general methods by which those goals will be achieved. An example of a mission statement is “We are a serious raiding guild with the goal of being the top guild on our server”. Some example policies might include attendance requirements, raid preparation requirements (PvE spec, PvE gear, consumables, etc.), and expectations of performance based on either stats or amount of mistakes made in raids. For a less serious guild the mission statement might be “We’re a group friends looking to experience raid content while having fun doing it”. This kind of guild will have much less strict policies, but those policies should still be stated. The drama begins when you don’t have these concrete rules in place and you begin accumulating members with clashing agendas. The “hardcore” people in the guild get frustrated with the “casual” people in the guild for not putting in the same effort and not being willing to try as hard. The “casual” people get frustrated with the “hardcore” people for getting too serious about the game and making it unfun. Do you blame the hardcores or the casuals? I blame the leadership for not setting clear goals and policies, or not enforcing the existing one by not filtering potential recruits out based on whether they’ll fit the mould. Many guilds have exploded at the seams because of the scenario I just described.
- The willingness to make tough decisions that needs to be made is a requirement for stopping or preventing a large portion of drama. This is a huge issue for the majority of guilds that I’ve observed. Simply put: there’s a lot of times when the only way to stop/prevent drama is to do something you really hate doing. If there’s a guy in your guild who is obviously not a team player, is always thinking of himself before the guild, and doesn’t get a lot with people, what do you do? The obvious answer is to kick him. But what I see 90% of the time in guilds is the leadership making excuses for why he is behaving that way or why they can’t get rid of him (connections to other people in the guild, is a good player and will be hard to replace, etc.). What I’m really seeing is rationalizations for putting off making the hard decision that has to be made. Most people don’t relish kicking/demoting people and most people especially don’t like dealing with the potential fallout from such an action. But having the cajones to make a tough move now is required for minimizing drama and maximizing the quality of the guild. Sometimes you’ll be wrong, but the far worse move is to be unwilling to put your foot down and make those kinds of decisions. Allowing people who are obviously not up to the caliber of the rest of your players or people who have cancerous personalities to fester in your guild or on your raiding roster is just asking for punishment down the road. Yet the vast majority of guilds operate this way, putting off the tough decisions until the damage has already been done.
- A lot of drama comes from obvious bad leadership practices. This includes favoritism, unfairness, ignorance, disrespect, etc. If this is a problem with the GM or the leadership as a whole then there is no solution aside from the leadership deciding to change itself. These problems are sadly very common simply because there’s no filter that keeps people from becoming leaders of guilds. They are simple and very obvious to fix however: stop being a dick. Sadly, this is easier said than done for stupid and/or malicious people.
- Drama also just happens naturally between members of a guild. It’s impossible to build a group large enough to sustain raiding where the members all love each other. There are inevitably personality clashes. Drama also is a natural result of continuous interaction amongst people in stressful situations. The leaders of the guild need to play mommy and make it all better. This means being on the lookout for potential sore spots and stepping in when necessary to mediate. This means ejecting people from the guild who simply don’t fit in and who will most likely be a continued source of chafing.
Taking Responsibility
When I say “it’s always your fault” I’m not doing it to assign blame but rather to emphasize responsibility. As the leadership of a guild, the ball is perpetually in your court. You can have the expectations for the quality and conduct of your members, but it’s up to you to enforce those expectations. “All bark and no bite” is an endemic problem amongst the guilds that I have observed and it is the reason why drama is so commonplace in the community amongst guilds. WHEN THERE ARE PROBLEMS IN YOUR GUILD DON’T JUST SIT THERE AND COMPLAIN ABOUT THEM; TAKE A STAND AND DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. It takes balls, but it rewards well.
01/13/2009
12:28 pm
But there is one point I'd like to discuss. The first note on a guild mission. It ended with the common debate (or point) of hardcore players would not ever work in a casual guild, or the other way around, or maybe even a guild for both.
Can these two groups never properly co-exist? I have a hard time thinking that way. I guess you'd call me a hardcore player, but I do have many friends who would be a casual player. We've been in quite a few guilds together, lot of drama, a lot of past. Are all guilds I'm in with them doomed to fail, just because of the fact that I put more or want more, into or out of the game then them.
I want to know if there are guilds out there with the hardcore / casual dynamic and making it work. I know it's a lot more effort to make everyone happy, and run a raiding guild. But I don't see why we can't be in the same guild. Is this just wishful thinking? Maybe because almost every guild that said they were casual hardcores (that I've been in), had disbanded or pretty much died.
Maybe I'm asking you, do you think I should give up playing with some of my friends in order to raid as much or get what I want out of the game?
01/13/2009
12:48 pm
My recommendation is that you can play with your friends without raiding with them. PvP, 5 mans, event content, etc. There's a lot in this game outside of raiding. But your raiding goals just don't overlap and it'll be hard for you to make it work.
01/13/2009
2:05 pm
If your hardcore raiders don’t know your policy for “casual membership”, its easy for them to develop resentment towards them if they aren’t involved in progression achievements. If you don’t have a policy documented, create one and post it on your forums in your policy section (every good guild has a policy section on their forums, right?). That way if someone complains, you can point them to the policy and nip it in the bud.
01/14/2009
4:14 am
Regarding a mission statement, having a clear intent and purpose in a guild also makes its members feel part of something so they are less inclined to guild jump at a later date. What makes your guild different from the others? Give everyone something to be proud of.
Lead firmly, but fairly. Strangely enough, members will react better to strong leadership that tells them off for doing something wrong, than one which lets it slide, and you will gain their respect.
Stamp out any bickering or arguing immediately. You and the officers need to be policing guild chat, raidchat and voice comms. Encourage participation but if anything negative is said in these environments, put an end to it immediately.
Do not wash your dirty laundry in public. You should reprimand in private, but praise publicly.
Do not try and be a one-man show. GMs who raid lead, run the website, do the recruitment, put raids together are just begging to burnout, or do at least one of these jobs poorly. Delegate jobs to those who are best suited to it, and in the process build a strong team of officers.
01/16/2009
7:47 pm
I use to lead a guild during the aq40 push, and i had been through several washes of players leaving due to my lack of drama handling, in which lead to a lack of progression. At the time the only sparkle of positive i had was i could recruit decent players almost as fast as i was loosing them. I then drew a hard line in the sand and redefined the guild's goals. Instated what i thought to be fair rules with stern consequences. I lost a handful of people because of that; friends, great players, and even a cousin. Even through it all, we triumphed and cleared aq40 and up to 4hm in naxx.
Just for real life to creep up on me and require me to reduce my wow time significantly needing to step down from leadership. The guild then imploded with my step down and BC on the horizon.
We live and we learn, and hopefully after all we have done we can walk away knowing a little more then when we started. After all knowing is half of the fight. It is great they're websites like this that exist for GMs and potential GMs to learn from.
"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men then himself."
John Stuart Mill 1806-1873