Having trouble salving the drama in your healer crew? Dealing with an overly aggressive member of DPS? Banging your head against the desk because of an obstinate tank?
Did you think you left the stressful dynamics of team leadership at the office so you could come home and relax?
Surprise! Welcome to Raid Leadership.
Many of us may not ever stop to consider that leading a Raid (ie: an ongoing team or community, not a pick-up event) can be just as difficult as any typical team leadership assignment in the real world. Indeed, in an online entertainment based medium there can be any number of additional challenges not usually faced in a business leadership environment. For the most part however, the interpersonal challenges universally faced by leaders across the spectrum of team endeavors exist in equal measure for those ill-fated souls foolish enough to try leading their gaming peers in slaying dargons, handling welps, and other various and sundry digital dungeon crawls.
The harsh truth is that when we put out the call for adventurers to journey through the evil keep, we take on a job where leadership principles still matter.
Take for instance the need for direction and correction that exists in any team setting. Effective leadership of the Raid requires that the leader is able and willing to engage in interactions that look much like a coaching session or a formal reprimand – save for the fact that it happens through text or on Vent. Sometimes the encounters that result (NSFW Audio) sound remarkably like the sort of ‘nightmare boss’ scenarios that have been the staple of office banter for decades. It shouldn’t be a surprise to find that lack of personnel skills mixed with highly charged egos can be just as disturbing and hilarious online as they are at work.
Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Just as in the business world, as raid leaders we are often compelled to be Field Generals. Organizing the whole effort, directing individual energy, and coordinating the work of team members and department leaders are all within the scope of a Raid Leader’s experience. Moreover we are frequently tasked with correcting oversights, miss-communications and general failures in execution. All these sorts of interactions are nearly identical to the supervisory responsibilities a leader faces in any real-world environment. They can also have the unfortunate side effect of making us appear harsh, overbearing or just plain mean – just as they do in those same office and business settings we find ourselves toiling through under the harsh glare of the Daystar. Unsurprisingly these leadership encounters can grate on the nerves of our team members, especially the strong willed and driven ones. (Often these are also the ones we most desperately need to keep on-board in order to be effective.)
There are a couple of ways that leaders deal with this difficult reality. Some choose to be detached and completely impersonal (making it easier to take when they are harsh, or so the logic goes…) A few even conclude that being disliked is an advantage that makes their sometimes unfortunate tasks easier for themselves and their team members to digest. Others avoid the uncomfortable conversations altogether, trying to please everyone until eventually the whole team unravels under the weight of unfulfilled (and impossible!) expectations. Many of us find ourselves frustrated at these realities, never quite knowing how to balance the need to keep people positive and engaged with the requirement to actually LEAD.
Pressed in this manner between the proverbial rock and hard place it helps to recall some old country wisdom:
“It only takes one ‘Oh Shit’ to wipe out 100 ‘attaboys.’”
That means we never get as much credit for our good behavior, as we do blame and responsibility for our mistakes. The same is true for leaders in dealing with their team. We don’t get as much support for the positive, encouraging, uplifting interactions we engage in as we do discontent from the negative, corrective, and driving interactions.
It helps therefore to think about what kind of interactions we’ve been investing in with our team members and how much good will we have stored up in each of their ‘raid banks.’
Each of our raid-mates is a normal human being on the other side of that interface, who is bound to be driven by the same emotional and psychological impulses that drive them in their daily lives. As such we can’t engage in an endless stream of corrective behavior and time-pressured direction and expect their responses to always be positive and helpful to the team. We’ve got to fill up our team members’ gas tanks with a certain amount of positive encounters, regularly distributed, in order to gain permission from them to engage in those necessary coaching moments.
This is even more important in our Raid setting because it is essentially an all-volunteer environment!
So what is a raid leader to do? The same things the team leader in any volunteer organization has to do.
On the Proper Care and Feeding of Raids
Make sure to spend time letting your team members know individually how important they are to the group’s success and how much you value their contributions. Don’t be dishonest or lavish praise where it doesn’t belong, but do purposefully commend the benefits they bring to your team and let them know you recognize them. Public praise, wisely and sparingly meted out can be a powerful positive motivator but the real meat of your regular, positive seed-sowing is in short private conversations that re-assure the team member that you see them as an individual who has merit and value.
These sorts of frequent positive interactions win you a generous bank balance from which to draw on when you need to have one of those more difficult conversations to reign in a negative behavior or encourage flagging discipline or diligence. Naturally the more difficult the team member, the more time you have to invest to get these same results. How much time to spend, and at what point the investment is not worth the return in that team member’s behavior are some of the hardest decisions we have to make as leaders. Rest assured though that doing your due diligence in the feeding and care of raid members will help ensure that those less appealing interactions don’t have to result in the sort of explosive impact that can permanently damage an individual’s connection to the team and their ability to contribute.
In a perfect world (or a perfect raid) we wouldn’t have to worry about people being offended by correction, discipline or instruction. In the real world however we know that most of us struggle to properly offer and receive constructive criticism. It helps therefore to keep our team’s bank accounts full so that we can engage in the difficult duties of leadership without being destructive to ourselves, our raid members, or the team as a whole.
So while taking tips from Sebudai the Motivational Speaker might make for some funny screenshots, incorporating a little Maxwell into our raid diet instead will probably net more long term success.
This isn’t rocket surgery after all, it’s just leadership.
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