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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 we’ll be starting our conversation about mentorship. As you advance in the program, more and more judges will come to you asking for advice and guidance. Some things can be easy to teach, like rules and policy, but there’s a much broader scope to mentorship than just that.
One of the first steps in being an effective mentor is understanding your mentee, where they are, and where they’re going. This lesson is going to be about setting up that framework and developing effective tools for accurate evaluation.
Let’s dive in!
Creating Context
Before you can accurately evaluate someone, you need to make sure that you’re evaluating them in the appropriate context and understand what your goals are. Some of what we’re going to talk about today are things that we’ve covered before, so there won’t be quite as much detail as in previous lessons.
Timing and Framework
One of the first things that matters is understanding the appropriate timing for both giving and receiving feedback. Ideally, a candidate asks you for feedback in advance of you working together so that you can focus on them throughout the day, rather than relying on your memory.
It’s also important to deliver the feedback at the appropriate time. You want to ensure that it’s delivered in a timely manner so that the recipient remembers the details of what you’re giving them feedback on, but you also want to avoid overloading them. The best time to provide feedback is before they do the same thing again. If it’s something like feedback on a call, you want to deliver that feedback pretty quickly. If it’s feedback on how they did their morning briefing, that can actually wait for later in the day, because it’s not going to be something that’s likely going to occur again. Of course, if you want to have a longer conversation, starting that earlier as opposed to later is helpful.
This also ties into the format of your feedback. Is it a quick objective observation like “You said Open Card Manipulation Error, but it was a Hidden Card Manipulation Error, and you treated it like an HCME.” Is it a lengthier evaluation of their performance? Is it socratic and filled with leading questions to get them to reach your conclusion independently? Each of these needs to be approached differently.
Goals and Targets
When you’re evaluating a judge, it’s important to understand the context in which you’re evaluating them, and particularly the context in which they want feedback. If you’re working with a judge at a Planetary Qualifier, you may compare their performance to that of what is expected from an L2. If they’re a new L1 just working their first event and trying to figure out if Competitive Judging is interesting to them, this is a pretty high benchmark. If they’re an experienced hand and are actively pursuing L3, this may feel dismissive and irrelevant.
Knowing what your candidate is working on, whether the short term (success at a new task at today’s event) or long term (Head Judge of a Regional Championship) allows you to calibrate a bit more effectively and give the appropriate kind of feedback.
Appreciation, Coaching, Evaluation
This ties into three flavors or approaches in feedback. Appreciation is pretty distinctly praise - its purpose is to build up and motivate the recipient. Coaching provides guidance and next steps, which is where a lot of mentorship falls.
Evaluation is the focus of the bulk of today’s lesson and is about correctly identifying the subject’s skill set and how it compares to various expectations.
The Aspects of Judging
Speaking of expectations, there are a lot of expectations for various levels laid out in the Aspects of Judging lessons for L1, L2, and L3, covering many sub-aspects and ways of thinking about judging. Rather than trying to holistically evaluate a candidate on all fronts simultaneously, it can be helpful to pick one or two Aspects, or to pick a similarly small number of sub-aspects to focus on. This allows you to be a lot more precise in your feedback, and can be more helpful - guidance on how to make a small change for a small improvement is easier to follow than a big change that alters your personality dramatically.
Program Benchmarks
The aspects tie into Program Benchmarks. What I mean by that is that there are various ways to evaluate a judge and compare them to various metersticks as provided by the program. These have various utilities, advantages, and disadvantages, and it’s important to make sure that you and the judge you’re talking with are in the same ballpark. You could be comparing someone to the expectations for their certification level, to their experience, to their role, and to the best.
Certification
Comparison or evaluation against a certification is generally the easiest. Each certification has extensive education and documentation (although at times it can be hard to find some specifics), but the Aspects of a Judge lessons are pretty explicit, and the lessons can provide further context. However, while it’s easy to compare someone to their certification, certification requirements are floors. If you compare an L2 to the expectations of an L2, they’re likely going to meet or exceed most of them, which isn’t super helpful.
It is a bit more helpful in aspirational evaluation. For example, if an L1 is interested in pursuing L2, looking at each of their skills and comparing them to the expectation for an L2 allows them to identify which areas could use additional attention and where they can afford to relax a bit.
Role
Comparing a candidate against a role is also relatively easy to do - you’re looking at what success for the task looks like, and weather or not the judge in question met those expectations.
The challenge here is that often a role isn’t perfectly matched to a candidate’s experience or ability - they’ll either be challenged or it won’t be difficult for them at all. If someone with many years of experience and who has been HJ of large events is told they’re a superb floor judge, it won’t be particularly helpful; conversely, telling a first-time team lead they have a lot of room to grow won’t shock them.
However, evaluating someone against their role is a generally reliable benchmark to compare someone to, because they’ll usually be in roles that are appropriate for them.
Experience
Comparing someone to their experience is a harder task, as it is much more subjective. Judges’ experience levels aren’t something that goes up concretely, and there aren’t benchmarks published. However, you can compare a judge’s performance to that of their peers and see what stands out.
This is often used to highlight exceptional behavior (either positive or negative), but it has a lot more flexibility. This is one of the more subjective approaches to evaluation, but it’s still critically important, especially if you’ve just finished telling someone that they aren’t living up to the benchmark of the role they had; you can counterbalance that by showing them how they’re still doing well above what would be expected of someone with their experience level.
The Best
This last category is a tough one to execute. Not only is it subjective, but by its nature, it’s aspirational, and the subject likely won’t live up to the benchmarks set forth. However, comparing a judge to someone else who excels in a particular area. There are ways to do it that are a bit more manageable than comparing a judge to a single rockstar - but it can be combined with other metrics.
For example, you can take someone who is interested in becoming a Sector Qualifier Appeals Judge, and provide them feedback, and look at the best performance of someone who had the same role that the subject had. Comparing someone to another judge without purpose can be exceptionally demotivating, but if you frame it as a challenge, use this approach sparing, and with great intention, you can help provide important context to the judge who is learning from you or set them up to take explicit steps to improve and reach their own goals.
Personal Benchmarks
When you’re evaluating a judge, you’re always going to have some amount of personal bias baked in. You’re going to have expectations for your head judges based on your experiences with head judges before them, when a player says that they’re interested in certification and want to become a judge, you’re going to evaluate them based on your very subjective opinion - and that’s okay.
Having Higher Standards
There are standards set by the judge program, and if someone asks you for an endorsement for a certification or a recommendation to a Tournament Organizer for an event, you can say no, even if they meet the letter of the requirements for the role that they’re interested in.
When you give someone your endorsement or recommendation, their performance reflects on you. It’s very natural and common to be careful with distributing your support. If someone you recommended to a Tournament Organizer does poorly it can reflect on you.
Many judges, and I include myself in this, will have higher standards for endorsing someone for a level than the program requires. I wrote the requirements and still have a higher personal standard. This is because I want to work with candidates who want to excel and who exceed the minimums.
When you’re evaluating other judges, make sure that you’re taking into account your personal perspective. You should continue to provide feedback based on your opinion, and not just the more objective benchmarks of the program. Personal feedback is more likely to make someone strive to improve than clinical analysis.
That’s all we have for this lesson! Join us next time as we continue to discuss mentorship and begin the discussion of giving and receiving critical feedback!
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!