Don’t Be A Jerk

I’ve been threatening for years to put together a presentation titled “Everything I needed to know about Leadership I learned while running a guild in World of Warcraft.” I still might someday, but I’m annoyed with myself for continually talking about it and not doing it, and one of the points I want to make is top of mind today so I’m just going to write it down in a post and consider it pre-work for my epic future Agile Alliance presentation.

I started playing World of Warcraft shortly after it was released in 2004. I had a small group of friends who had been playing City of Heroes together and we all decided to try it at the same time. When enough of us had gotten the game and decided to stick around to do so, we started a small guild (a guild, for those of you are unfamiliar, is a means to communicate and share resources in the game with a specific group of people). Eventually we met another guild that was populated by people who we thought were neat, and we decided to merge the two guilds together.

For some reason I agreed to lead this new guild.

I won’t go into a lot of detail as to why a guild needs leadership, because it’s not really relevant to this post, but the very short version is that there is a lot of content in the game that requires large groups to complete, and part of running a guild is to help schedule teams to take on that content and establish agreements around how any rewards won from beating it would be distributed among the group. Guild leaders also establish the culture of the guild (ours was considered a “casual” guild, with mostly older players who had responsibilities that prevented them from devoting excessive amount of time to the game) and will also set up rules around acceptable behavior by guild members.

When we formed our guild, we had one rule: Don’t be a Jerk.*

For a while, that worked just fine. Everyone understood what being a jerk meant, and we were all pretty good about not being one.

But then the guild grew. We kept adding people who we didn’t know as well as the original members. As our numbers expanded, the line on what everyone accepted as “jerkish” behavior began to get fuzzy. Common sense, it turns out, is not so common. Especially when you’re dealing with a diverse group of individuals who are paying for the privilege of playing a game. People with different backgrounds, who come from different regions of the world, and have a variety of socioeconomic situations, genders, ages, and sexual orientations (not to mention skill levels). Heck, one of our prominent members was a retired grandmother who used to send me cookies every Christmas.

Mardi, if you’re still out there my address hasn’t changed.

Eventually something happened that I, and the folks who helped me run the guild, couldn’t ignore. I don’t remember what it was, specifically. All I remember is that our response to the thing that happened was to create a new rule, so now we had two of them. It wasn’t too long before another incident got our attention, so we created a third rule. Then a fourth. A fifth. You get the point.

When I finally stopped playing the game in early 2009, I believe our rule book was three pages long.

We would make broad announcements about how we have “noticed certain behaviors” and how those behaviors “violate the spirit of our core value of not being a Jerk.” If the person in question continued doing the “thing” we had created the rule for, we could point at the (newly expanded) rules list and accuse them of violating it, thereby justifying our decision to remove the person from the guild.

You know what we never did in any of these situations (before it was too late)?

Talk to the person in question.

Instead of having an open, honest discussion about whatever the infraction was that caused us concern we avoided confrontation entirely and hid behind bureaucracy.

Our reward? More headaches. The bureaucracy that was protecting us from being the “bad guys” continued to grow and become more complex, and eventually got to the point where we spent more time managing rules and people than, you know, playing the damn game.

Eventually it got to be too much for me and I quit playing. All the enjoyment had been sucked out of the game for me, and I walked away. I still have friends who I met playing WoW, and some of them are still playing and in the guild I helped create, but I canceled my account almost 14 years ago and haven’t looked back.

So what does any of this have to do with Leadership in the professional world?

The first, and most important, lesson I took from this was that creating rules to deal with people problems is a no-win scenario. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have rules, codes of conduct, etc…but if you’ve got someone on your team who isn’t working well with others in some capacity, creating some kind of rule, procedure, or process to deal with that person is not being a Leader. It’s managing (and managing poorly, at that).

The other big lesson I learned is that by creating a rule that applies to all members of a team when only one person is responsible for doing the “thing” that caused the rule to be made, you create a situation where the unintended consequence of your action is to cause people who have nothing at all to do with the situation to suddenly worry that THEY were the reason the rule was created. For example, say you have a person in your organization who has some kind of issue with body odor that is disturbing others and instead of having a conversation with that person you send out an all-users e-mail reminding the entire company that “we all have to work together in small spaces” and to “please be mindful of how our personal hygiene might impact those around us.” The person who inspired the e-mail might not think it is about them, or they might realize it is and get horribly embarrassed and/or resentful. Even worse, people who had nothing to do with the original announcement may start wondering if they are the reason the email was sent in the first place.

This lesson shows up in the Agile Manifesto, of course. “Customer Collaboration over contract negotiation” is one of the four values found in the manifesto. Talking with people and working out situations directly is much more effective than hiding behind contracts (and what is a list of rules in an organization but a contract that one agrees to abide by to continue working there?), and how can we argue with the fact that most effective means of communicating information being face-to-face communication?

If I knew then what I know now, I’d have spent a lot more time talking to people and a lot less time managing a list of complex rules. The short term discomfort of having a difficult conversation pales in comparison to the drudgery and annoyance of dealing with the red tape of a ridiculously long rule book.

*In the interest of full disclosure, the word wasn’t jerk. I think you get the drift, though.

Brain Dump

I started writing this post a few days ago.  I figure I’ll just go ahead and append on the end of it with the understanding that, perhaps, my head space is a bit different than it was when I first began this ramble.

Not only do I feel the need to break up the utter and complete monotony of posting nothing but my workouts here, I also have a compulsion to simply talk about a few things.  Get some stuff out of my head and out there in the ether as it were.  As a result this may end up being an incoherent post at times, so I apologize in advance.

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End Of An Era

Well, I finally decided to put my money where my mouth was.  After I wrote my last post I continued thinking about my feelings about World of Warcraft and opted to finally cancel my account.  I did so this morning.  The last day my account will be active is April 7th.

I realize that those of you who don’t play the game will never understand why this is such a big deal, and that’s ok.  I can try to explain, but the best analogy I can come up with is that I feel like I just broke up with someone I have been dating for the last four years.  I consider many of the folks I play with to be close friends, and frankly it is those friendships that have kept me playing for as long as I have.

I just can’t do it anymore, though.  I can’t justify spending the money to basically use the game as a chat interface, and I truly detest what they have done with the game.  It’s not fun for me anymore.  I’m getting a similar experience playing Runes of Magic and it is free.  As much as I’m enjoying that game, though, I’m determined not to get sucked in as much as I have been in any other MMO in the past.  I just don’t have the time for it.  I’m going to do things like, oh, yard work….house cleaning…home improvements.  You know, that stuff that you don’t do when you’re spending 5-6 hours a day playing a video game?

I’m also concentrating on [Super Secret Project], which I’ll be able to talk about more in a month or so.

So, yeah.  So long, World of Warcraft.  It was great fun while it lasted, but this cowboy needs to be moving along.

On The Death Of Community In WoW

Back in December I wrote about how I wasn’t excited about getting back into the World of Warcraft raid game.  At the time, part of my reasoning behind that is because I did not feel that there was much of a challenge in it for me, and the hope was that future expansions would ramp up the difficulty a bit.

Well, that has and has not happened.  From everything I’ve read, they are going to continue to have “hard mode” versions of certain encounters in the raids that are optional but keep the base difficulty level fairly low.

This, along with some fairly drastic changes in my work schedule recently, has pretty much killed any remaining interest I have in raiding (and may honestly be the final nail in the coffin that gets me to cancel my subscription to the game).

I’ve seen a lot written about how the game has changed for the worse (and, in all fairness, how some think it is much better now), but to date I haven’t seen anyone really put their finger on why that has disappointed me.

I can sum it up in a three word sentence : Difficulty builds community.

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Captain Random Strikes Again

I think I might need to take another look at The Artist’s Way. Sam got me a copy of it several years ago, but the touchy-feely aspects of the book really turned me off and I put it down.  I don’t even know where my copy is.  Krystalle picked up a copy of it for herself a few weeks ago, and while she was just as put off by those aspects as I was she has been working with the program and it seems to be making a big difference for her.

I need to do something, though. I feel like I’m out of touch with my writing.  I’ve gotten used to communicating via 140 character messages on Twitter and I seem to lose cohesion on my longer posts very quickly.  Yesterday, for example, I started writing a piece on super hero archetypes as leaders and why Bush, who could be compared to Batman, failed.  It started out strongly enough but I just kinda fizzled out and ended up saving it to a text file on my desktop.  I may or may not pick it back up again at some point.

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More Blatherings on WoW

Wrath of the Lich King has been out for just over a month now, and so far I have to say I’m enjoying much of the new content.

Well, let me put a disclaimer on that.  I’ve found ways to enjoy the time I’m spending in game much more than I was before the expansion was released.  For one, I’ve been holding off on doing any quests until such a time as Krystalle is available to run with me.  As she’s been crazy busy recently, that means my main character has only hit level 75.  I’m ok with that.  I figure I’m only going to get a chance to see the new stuff once with fresh eyes, and I’d like to actually do that with her so we can share the experience instead of going back and running it with her again when I’ve already blown through it.

From everything I have encountered so far, though, and from everything I’m reading online and seeing in our guild, I am severely dissapointed in how easy they have made everything as far as new content is concerned.  Yes, I realize I haven’t encountered much of it yet – but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that when one guild manages to beat the most difficult dungeon in the expansion within a week of release there really isn’t much in the way of challenge waiting for me.

I’m not the only one, either.  I’ve noticed that a lot of the formerly “hard core” raiders in our guild are in no rush to get to the current endgame and the sentiment is pretty much the same throughout – if there’s no challenge waiting for us, there’s no motivation to get back to the point where you are doing the same thing night after night.  Only two of the five officers in the guild have characters at the level cap.  Of the sub officers, of which there are four, only one is there.

Interestingly we have a good number of players in guild who HAVE hit 80.  Some of them on multiple characters.  I log into game and watch them, and other than the fact that they have gotten to experience some of the more interesting parts of the game that I haven’t gotten to yet I do not at all envy the fact that every night I see them running the same dungeons over and over again trying to get that “one drop” or grinding a faction.  Someone mentioned in guild today that we should be attempting to do a raid boss in Wintergrasp every week because it’s quick and will gear people up.

Ugh.

I just can’t find the motivation to get back into that mindset.  I want to be challenged.  I want my accomplishments in game to represent the fact that I worked hard and was dedicated to getting something done.  That’s why I’ve been spending a lot of time working on achievements.  As much as I bagged on them as being a way to get players to run content again that they have already done, I can at least take some solace that you have to either be really dedicated (or insane) to get many of them.

The hope out there among the hard core WoW players is that we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg as far as new content in the expansion and that later raids will be more challenging.  One can only hope.  Of course, when that happens I’ll be behind the curve as far as gear is concerned…but you know what?  Again, not so much with the caring.  I’ve made up my mind that if I’m not having fun doing something in game I’m simply not doing it anymore.  I spent far too long treating the game like a job, and more often than not for other people’s benefit.  I’m paying to play this game.  When someone decides they want to pay me to play I’ll re-evaluate my stance.