Behind Every Guild Leader …

January 13, 2009 at 9:04 am (Meanderings)
Tags: Family, Guild Drama, Guild Leadership, Guild Stress, Raiding, Relationships

So, being a guild leader is a lot like being an actor. Or maybe a politician. (Insert “is there really a difference?” joke here.)

It’s a good thing that Ventrilo has a push-to-talk button. Because it’s convenient for me to yell and scream and swear and call the raid and the boss every name under the sun and curse all the powers that be for making people so collectively stupid and lazy … and then push the magic left-control key, and in a calm, soothing, encouraging voice tell everyone to take a deep breath, step back, and we’ll rez, regroup and try the boss again.

As with any team, politicking in-guild is important. That co-worker in the cubicle next to you with the hacking cough and who insists on making every call on speaker phone and goes out at lunch and smokes really foul cigars and stinks all afternoon … yeah, he’s much more senior in the company than you are and you could never in a million years tell him that he’s the most annoying human being ever. Likewise, the enhancement shaman with the lousy spell rotation, the weirdly gemmed gear, the half-resto spec and the nails-on-the-chalkboard irritating voice comes to every raid, donates a metric assload of mats to the guild bank every week and brings some pretty sweet caster buff totems, and is not actually a bad guy, just an annoying one. You’ll never tell him either that his laugh makes you think of cats fighting in a dark alley or that his cloth warlock gear is absolutely pathetic. Sometimes, you just have to put on a nice face and smile politely.

That goes double for guild leadership. Or any leadership position.

When we talk to someone, we’re always in the spotlight. When I need to have a “hey maybe you need to shape it up a bit” talk with someone, it has to be done in the politest, most compassionate, politically correct ‘it’s not you, it’s the guild’ way possible. And it’s not always easy, but I do think that I manage it most of the time. I’m only human and it’s difficult sometimes to seperate my personal feelings about a player from my WoW-professional feeling about their raid performance.

All this niceness leaves me with a churning, burbling, seething excess of bile, however.

When I’m not online, I can sometimes be found stomping up and down the house raging about how X player did Y stupid thing in the raid last night and how I wish I could just reach through the screen and slap some sense into them. Or how badly I want to tell Joepaladin that he’s a useless drama whore and I wish I didn’t need his worthless Holy-spec carcass in the raid so damn badly.

Sometimes, it’s just me and the critters at home. The dog doesn’t have a clue what all the yelling is about, but he’s getting out of the line of fire just in case and vanishes under the couch like a shadow, the cats shrug and exchange knowing ‘oh aren’t these humans excitable creatures’ sort of looks and go back to thinking their inscrutable cat-thoughts and the parrot thinks it’s time to have a Loudest Animal in the House Contest.

Mostly though, it’s my better half who takes the brunt of my WoW-rage. He at least is a sympathetic listener, being a casual (though Horde-side) player himself. He understands concepts like gear suitability and spell rotation and aggro management and can nod sympathetically when I ramapge around the kitchen with eyes bloodshot raving about the rampant failure all around me. When I need someone to nod and go “mmm-hmm, oh, really?” in all the right places, he’s there. When I need someone to be with after crying all afternoon about someof the hateful comments that drama inevitably brings, he’s there. But, when I’m so worked up and tense and have myself wound into a right fury over some little thing and I’m just looking for any excuse to tear someone’s head off for no reason, he’s also there.

There’s a reason I call him ‘long-suffering’. When I went away two years ago for the summer and lived in a plywood shack in the arctic with another geologist, a geographer and a bear for company with 5 minutes of conversation via satphone every two weeks or so, he was patient and understanding. And this summer while I was away again living in a tar-stained, smoke-filled, 46 degree Centigrade hell, he was always there, keeping the home fires burning and giving me a home I was grateful to come back to. And almost since I started playing the game he has dealth with the abandonment by a video-game addict (me) and the stress that guild leading can lay on a person who maybe isn’t all that socially adept in the first place.

And I know it’s a lizard brain type response. If I took even two seconds to use my calm, rational forebrain, I’d see how I let the stress get to me when I shouldn’t. I’d notice that my guild is actually full of capable, competant peeople who just happen to be regular human beings who make mistakes from time to time. I’d see that I’m snarling at snapping at my better half because he’s there and I have to play nice with the guild. I’d realize that all too often I neglect our time for guild time.

We’re two individuals from a race of passionate people and that passion, that emotional fervor, extends up and down the emotional scale. Joys are more joyful, but rages are more intense, too. He’s a litte more level-headed and easygoing than I am, but we can set each other off at the worst of times. I know that my stress and emotional turmoil that can result from guild or raid issues, can easily spill over into a full-blown yelling and screaming match because he left a soggy, balled-up dishtowel on the kitchen counter.

All the enforced niceness that I have to undergo in guild (and at work too!) is an act, something that I – and all of us at times – must perform in order to keep our teams and our guilds and our society moving along properly. What that doesn’t do, however, is give me the excuse when I’m ‘offstage’as it were to act like a raging prima donna. Dealing with life’s frustrations without taking it out on the people around you is not a skill that comes easy to me, and it’s certainlysomething I need to work on. I need to be much more aware of when I’m letting guild issues put me under too much pressure and I need to be much much more aware of where and how I’m releasing that pressure.

Even I need to find time to take a deep breath, step back, rez, regroup and try the boss again.