Level Two - Lesson 22

Leadership

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Hello there!

Welcome back to the level two lessons for the Star Wars™: Unlimited Judge Program!

As always, I’m your host Jonah, and this lesson is going to be the first lesson in leadership. As a level two judge, you’ll begin to get some of your first leadership roles at events, usually with one or two judges under your authority, until you get a bit more experience.

This can sometimes be as head judge of a small event with under a hundred players, or it can be as a team lead, acting as a lieutenant for the head judge of a larger event.

As someone in a position of explicit leadership, you have two key responsibilities: support your team and ensure that your task is completed.

We’re going to talk about some strategies that you can use to make accomplishing those responsibilities more smoothly. This lesson isn’t intended to cover roles of implicit leadership, like having authority or a public reputation within the judge community.

Pre-Event Preparation

There are a few things that you can do even before you arrive at the event, both for task management and for team building.

For both, having a plan makes your day easier. While they say “no plan survives contact with the players”, and this is true, having a foundation to build off of is better than going in with no expectations for yourself.

For your tasks, make sure you know everything you’re responsible for - if you’re leading a team, ask the Head Judge. If you’re the Head Judge... well, it’s pretty much everything. Once you know your sphere of responsibility, you can figure out how you want to delegate those responsibilities.

Some things can’t be delegated - as Head Judge, you’re the one who has to make the final call on rulings and investigations - that can’t be delegated. However, you can put other people in charge of specific tasks. You can assign someone to be entirely in charge of deck checks, so that you don’t have to think about them while you’re running the rest of the event - at a larger scale event, you’re not going to have the bandwidth to directly manage everything, much less be involved on a personal level with everything.

If you have opening announcements, figure out what key points you want to make in those announcements and write them down. If you’re running deck checks or another logistically focused team, figure out how you want to approach it and what your measures of success are - is it the number of decks checked? The speed at which you check them? The number of issues discovered?

You also want to prepare your team - once you know what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, it’s best practice to message your team, either through email or a chat. Emails are better for sending longer briefings, but if you want to begin some team building and introductions, a chat can be more casual and folks may feel a bit more relaxed and comfortable. However, keep in mind that not everyone is an active user of various chat platforms, but everyone has an email.

In your communication, it’s important to convey key information, which can vary a bit depending on your role:

For Head Judges:

For Team Leads:

This is your first interaction with your team, and if you haven’t worked with them before (or even if you have), it’s important to present a good first impression. While some judges are very experienced or are ready to go with the flow and adapt constantly, having a solid foundation that everyone is aware of makes the event stronger and a smoother experience for many.

Adaptation and Improvisation

You also want to be prepared to adapt and deviate from your plan if necessary. Frequently you’ll arrive at the event and something will have changed - an additional prize needs to be distributed or the player cap has changed or the layout of the room isn’t what you expected. It may be minor, it may be major, but your plan probably won’t work without some adaptation.

Being prepared to change plans is important. However, you don’t want to stray too far afield - if you stay more closely aligned to your original plan, when things get back on track, it will be easier to return to it. If you start flying by the seat of your pants, without an eye on your original track, it’ll be nearly impossible to return to it.

However, when you start leading, you’ll often get caught up in solving the ongoing challenges that arise, and won’t be able to take a step back and examine the whole situation. You’ll be on the front lines fighting the fires, and while you’re able handle the issue in front of you, you won’t be able to prevent other issues from cropping up.

Taking a moment to step back and allow the problem to continue to exist can give you time to take a look at the bigger picture and identify if there’s something of higher priority.

Delegation and Leading

As we mentioned before, when you’re in a leadership role, it’s important to be able to delegate some of your responsibilities. While, for example, you may be the lead of the deck checks team and you’re responsible for ensuring that the deck checks get done, you’re obviously not expected to swoop and pick up all the decks, perform all the deck checks yourself and return them to the players if you have judges assigned to your team.

The role of hierarchy in events is one of support. Floor judges support their team lead, so that their team lead can focus on tasks that they can’t delegate. The team leads support the head judge so that the head judge is available for their tasks that they can’t delegate. And the head judge ensures that the tournament organizer doesn’t have to get involved. In the other direction, the tournament organizer ensures that the head judge has the resources for success, the head judge gives guidance and mentorship and support to the team leads, and the leads offer the same to the floor judges.

Some may glibly say that it’s the job of the floor judges to ensure that the Head Judge doesn’t have to do any work - but it’s more accurate to say that it’s their job to ensure that the Head Judge is available for the high priority work that necessitates their experience.

However, this doesn’t mean that when there isn’t an investigation, appeal or a logistical challenge that the head judge or team lead does nothing. Instead, that’s a great opportunity for them to actually lead their team.

Seeing a Head Judge or Team Lead taking calls, performing a deck check, posting pairings, picking up trash, pushing in chairs, shadowing calls should be something you expect. While at some events the judges in leadership positions will be busy and not able to do so, when things are calmer it’s important to be an active participant in your event, and judge it along side everyone else, and to take on the tasks that you ask others to assist you with.

Task Completion and Mentorship

As we mentioned at the start of the lesson, leaders have two major goals - completing the task and supporting their team.

The first is very obvious, and often has clear markers for success. Did end of round complete without any missing results? Did you complete a thorough deck check in a timely manner? Were pairings posted and taken down appropriately?

Because it’s easy to measure, task completion is what most leads focus on. Not only is it clear when you succeed, but it’s also clear when you fail. Furthermore, it’s often the area where new leads get the most feedback - it’s easy to provide actionable feedback on task completion. On top of that, screwing up task completion has a direct impact on the player experience - end of round being slow exhausts players, poor deck checks can confuse or frustrate them... This all creates an environment where judges who are new to leadership positions focus almost solely on task completion, and don’t address the team aspect of the role outside of a perfunctory introduction at the beginning of the day.

However, judges are also participants in the event, and it’s important that judges have a positive experience as well! I often say that we’re not judging for the money or the glory - it’s for the sheer love of the game and the community. If you keep your team separated and never bring them together, or never try to connect with them, you’re failing in some ways.

For some folks, big team meetings and rallying cries is effective. For others, who may be quieter or more introverted, having one-on-one conversations, and encouraging judges on your team to speak to each other and shadow eachother can help develop those connections.

You’re not only in a position of authority, but you’re in a position of leadership.

Imposter Syndrome

Many people, especially in their first few leadership positions feel like they don’t belong there - that there are other more qualified judges who could take their spot and do better.

Being in a leadership role means that someone, whether it’s the head judge or the tournament organizer, or whoever made the schedule, someone believes that this is a good fit for you.

They might not think you’re the best judge for the job, but they believe you have potential and want to foster that growth. They may even assign a more experienced judge to be on your team to help support and mentor you - but that doesn’t mean that the other judge should have your role.

If schedule makers only put the best people in leadership roles constantly, it would stifle the growth of the community, and when a person in that hypothetical elite left, it would leave a gap that’s hard to fill. Instead, sharing our knowledge with our peers and lifting each other up means that the community grows stronger.

Final Advice

There’s a lot more advice to give on being an effective leader - there’s a lot of literature on the subject, and you can find many books that provide guidance. Here are a few points to keep in mind:

That about wraps us up for this one - our next lesson covers the specific topic of setting up a top eight, and the procedures and things to look out for. Later lessons that expand on the content in this lesson include the L2 lesson on Large Event Structure and the one on Delivery Feedback, which also expands on what was covered in the L1 lesson on feedback. If you’re watching this on YouTube, and you want more level two lessons in your feed, go ahead and subscribe. Join us Tuesdays and Fridays on twitch.tv/swu_judges for live broadcasts covering the content of these lessons as they are released, and join the Star Wars: Unlimited Judge Program Discord to join the community in discussion of this and much, much more.

As always, good luck, and have fun.

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