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Hello there!
Welcome back to the level three lessons for the Star Wars™: Unlimited Judge Program!
As always, I’m your host Jonah, and today I’ll be continuing to talk about leadership, this time getting into some of the practicalities and what distinguishes genuine leadership from simply managing tasks.
Your responsibility as a leader goes beyond simply making sure that your assigned task is completed, and so we’ll be talking about mastery, management, mentorship, motivation, and communication as elements of leadership.
This lesson is aimed at folks who are leading between one and four other judges. There’s going to be a difference in management with one person versus several, as you’re going to either be spending more time doing the work or more time delegating, depending on the scale of your team, and the amount of guidance and mentorship that can be provided will also change.
Let’s dive in!
Mastery
Let’s start off by talking about Mastery. When you’re leading a team or responsible for managing a task, there’s an implicit expectation of mastery - you’re the person who knows what’s going on, what needs to be done, and what the priorities of your team should be.
Now, it’s important to recognize that while there is an implicit expectation of mastery, you’re not going to be a master of the role when you first step up to it. So if you’re expected to be a master, but not expected to be a master when you first get started, what does this mean for you practically?
There are a few things at play here. First, you should be prepared to be treated as the expert on the team - you should expect that people will ask you questions about the execution of your tasks and your priorities. It’s challenging to predict what you won’t be able to answer, but being prepared to say “I’ll figure that out!” is a great way to get started.
Another tool in your toolbox towards mastery is being on the team and executing the task as someone outside of a leadership role. You’re not going to have the full scope of the needs, and you might not have the communication that a leader would have from the rest of the leadership team, but it provides a lot of context and helps you handle the task directly.
In fact, one of the things that makes a good leader stand out, as opposed to someone just acting as a director is showing that you know how to do what you’re asking the rest of your team to do. This ties a bit into the other categories, but if your team sees that you have an understanding of the job, they’re going to be more comfortable following you. If you demonstrate uncertainty, they’ll mirror that feeling as well.
Management
The obvious responsibility of a team lead is getting the task done - doing the job you were assigned. Managing your team and directing them to complete the task effectively is a large part of how you should evaluate your success.
However, to be successful, you need to understand how you need to manage your team - what does your leadership style look like? There are many axes on which you ca evaluate your leadership style, but we’re going to briefly cover three of them - how much direction you provide, how much oversight you provide, and how involved you are.
Direction
The first question to ask is how much direction you’re providing. Are you laying out every step with precise timing for each individual, or are you saying “and then we’ll do deck checks”?
More detail is valuable with tasks that are more complicated, to ensure that they’re executed in an optimized manner, as it’s possible for things to fall out of sync and really become gummed up. It’s also valuable to provide additional instruction for tasks that are less common - explaining the specifics of a deck check is going to be less critical than explaining the process for setting up a top-eight draft - one of these is much more frequent, and it’s likely that folks have more exposure and reps with it, and so don’t need that additional detail. The third consideration is the overall experience with your team. While some things are generally intuitive (like “check the deck”), there are definitely ways to optimize picking up the decks, communicating with the players, sorting the deck and verifying it against the deck list.
The risk here is micromanaging - with more experienced teams, a level of specific instruction can be overwhelming. Furthermore, if your team already understands the task, further explaining the process is just wasting time. If you are concerned that you’re running the risk of micromanaging, but still want to provide the guidance, it’s helpful to explain your process. Something like “I know we’re all experienced and can run deck checks, but I want to make sure that we don’t miss anything - I had some issues the last time I was doing checks, and don’t want y’all to make the same silly mistakes I did.”
There are also some tasks that have enough complexity and your team has enough experience that you can trust them to find their own ideal solutions, and working through the steps you would take will take just as long (or longer!) than completing the task - as long as the task isn’t something that is going to be interacting with other parts of the event, it’s okay to give more flexibility in executing the task.
Of course, the cost of more flexibility and freedom is that you may lose sight of what’s happening with the task and consequently might not be able to answer questions about it, which brings us to our next subsection.
Oversight
When tasks are occurring, how much are you supervising them? How much oversight you’re providing asks similar questions to how much direction you provide - more complicated tasks, unusual responsibilities and less experienced team members, are all reasons to provide more oversight. Furthermore, less direction is a reason to provide more oversight as well. If you just asked your team to “perform end-of-round”, it’s critical that you actually check in on them so you know what information you need to have mastery of the task. If you laid out a very detailed plan that includes their steps of communication with you, you don’t need to hover over their shoulder as much.
A common phrase that’s used is “trust, but verify”. You can trust your team to do the task as assigned, but it doesn’t hurt to confirm that it’s going according to plan - and it certainly doesn’t hurt to verify that nothing unexpected has come up. You can know that your team is following your instructions perfectly, but you can’t predict what the players might do, and so checking in to see that nothing has thrown an obstacle in the way of your team is a great process. You don’t need a comprehensive report, but a quick “everything going smoothly?” can highlight where you may need to pay more attention.
Like with direction, more oversight can lead to members of your team feeling like you don’t trust them, especially if you combine oversight with extended direction. A way to mitigate these concerns is by setting yourself up as an equal to the rest of the team.
Involvement
If you’re involved in the task itself, it is shows that you’re actually leading the team, not simply directing it from the backlines. When you change your directions, if you’ve been handling the task with the team, they know it’s because of your direct experience with the task - with your mastery of it. If you’re changing your directions and you’re not involved, it feels a lot more arbitrary, and based on a guess, rather than actual experience.
Furthermore, if you’re helping to perform the task, you can include your observation alongside task completion, and because you’re working and not just observing, it doesn’t feel like you’re judging their performance, it feels like you’re part of the team.
However, sometimes you need to remain uninvolved - a critical part of being a team lead is being available for calls or situations that only you can handle. If there’s a question about the team’s entire plan for the day, that’s not something that can be easily delegated at the drop of the hat. If there’s an emergency and you as HJ need to triage and provide prioritization for your event, it’s easier to do that if you’re not involved in a deck check or a lengthy but straightforward rules call that any member of your team could have been handling.
Balancing your involvement is not a simple task, and especially among new leaders, it’s very easy to want to do everything yourself because you can do the task faster than it would take to find someone, explain the task to them, and then have them do it. However, the locks you up and takes away from the experience from your team getting the opportunity to do it.
Of course, there’s the balance of you, as the master, demonstrating how you want things done, or just the best practices that you embody, so as with everything, it’s a balancing act.
Mentorship
The third leg in this five-legged monstrosity is Mentorship. While leading, part of your responsibility is helping your team learn. The scope of this mentorship can vary, but at a minimum, you need to make sure that your team is prepared to complete the tasks assigned to them.
This means that you need to be able to provide necessary directions while also being able to answer the questions that they may have about their responsibilities.
However, mentorship doesn’t just stop there. When you’re in a leadership role whether explicit (like Head Judge or Team Lead) or implicit (like being an L3), people who don’t have that leadership position will look up to you as a source of wisdom and guidance. I want to stress that there is no requirement that anyone provide long-term mentorship or guidance for specific individuals - that even applies to me (our job is to teach the community, not individuals, although that doesn’t stop us from providing one-on-one mentorship). Despite it not being a requirement, there are long-term personal benefits, and there is certainly a social expectation.
If you’re able to provide fundamental feedback that helps a judge grow over the course of many events, it means that the next time you work with them, your job as a leader will be easier - you won’t have to provide as much detailed instruction, and it’s very possible, if not likely, that they’ll be able to catch issues that you missed, and provide you support.
Furthermore, mentorship is a great way to build bonds of trust and respect. If the members of your team believe that you care about them, about their personal success and growth, they’re going to be much more motivated to work for you - they’ll be willing to take bigger risks or handle more responsibility for someone that they know is invested in them than they would for someone who only sees them as tools to get more judge calls answered.
Motivation
And that brings us neatly into motivation - part of your job as a leader is to provide the energy and verve for your team. If you’re quiet and dour, your team will pick up on that energy. If you get your team excited for your task, they’re going to both do better and have a better time - and that means you’ll also have a better time!
While judging, especially for larger events, is work and you are compensated for it, very few judges are in the field because of the money - we do it because it’s fun and it brings us joy. Maintaining that joy is part of your responsibility.
There are many ways to engage your team, from having personal conversations to gamifying your task. If you gamify your task, make sure that it supports the completion of the task, and not undermines it. Also, don’t force participation - some people enjoy judging because they want to just watch games and they don’t want to have social interactions with pseudo-strangers.
However, coming into your day and your briefing with your team with the right energy, with enthusiasm, and an excitement to work with your team and on your task sets you up for success.
It’s also a distinguishing factor between someone who is simply managing the task and someone who is actually leading the team. Furthermore, as mentioned above, teams that are excited and motivated are more likely to push themselves - they’ll grow, they’ll give you feedback, and everyone will benefit.
Communication
I’m sure you’re shocked to hear that communication (breaking the trend of M’s) is important to your success as a leader. We talked about how to communicate effectively with the rest of the leadership structure in the previous lesson (Beginning to Lead), I’m going to emphasize it and repeat myself.
As an aspirational goal, check in with everyone else in a leadership role every round - you may not meet that goal, but it will help you in making sure everything is on track.
You’ll also want to regularly check in with your team. There’s the straightforward communication of verifying task completion and comprehension, but there’s a lot more that you can do.
You can check in on their morale - how are they feeling about the day? Is there anything you can do to make their day better? This can sometimes be as simple as grabbing them a water or having a chat about an interaction that they had earlier that destabilized them. You can check in on how they feel you’re doing as a leader - this ties together the sub-aspects of management. You get feedback on how your directions have been understood and executed, and you’re involving the team in the decision making process that makes you feel like a more cohesive unit, rather than a lord and your minions.
Checking in with your team regularly helps you establish those connections, and it means that you have a better sense of who you’re working with, their limits as well as the limits of your leadership, and that in turn helps you develop your skills or bring your insights to a mentor to refine your abilities further.
That’s all we have for this lesson! Join us next time as we branch off from explicit leadership and begin to discuss mentorship and the evaluation of other judges!
If you’re watching this on YouTube, and you want more level three lessons in your feed, go ahead and subscribe. Join us 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!