Leadership, Management, & Command
Aspects of Judging
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Hello there!
Welcome to the Aspects of Judging lessons. As always, I’m your host Jonah, and this elective lesson series is going to cover the Aspects of Judging - just like it says on the box.
We’re now going to tackle Leadership, Management, & Command, which is an aspect that scales in importance and magnitude as you advance, but still has importance to judges working at the store level. Being a successful leader in a judging context brings together many of the sub-aspects that we’ve discussed, but applies them in different ways, so you’re going to see a lot of overlap in these sections.
Leadership, Management, & Command is about making sure the people at your event have a good time. As an L1, you’re usually just telling players what to do, but as you advance, you begin to have judges under your authority, and providing guidance, structure, and mentorship results in a better experience as well as a sturdier judge program.
We’ll go over each of the sub-categories and the details within them, discuss what they mean, talk about how you can improve them in a broad sense of the skill, and outline the expectations for judge levels one, two, and three.
Leadership
Leadership is, well, a measure of how effectively you can lead people - do people listen to you when you give them tasks? Do they follow through and accomplish the goals you give them?
Someone who struggles in leadership positions is more likely to be questioned and have their commands disregarded. Part of leadership in judging is also ensuring that judges have a good time - this is predominantly a hobby, and while we’re professional, we’re here because we enjoy the game and want to support it. If we’re not enjoying the experience as judges, our leadership is failing us.
Motivation
That brings us to motivation - what do you do as a leader to get people to want to do the tasks you assign them? Oftentimes, the motivation is easy - you’re asking people to do what they want to do - watch games, handle logistics, or help players directly.
However, there are always tasks that need to get done that some people don’t like or are more mundane. Collecting garbage left behind by players and straightening chairs are a never-ending task.
When you ask, do judges follow through because of your role? Because you were able to make a game out of it? Because they respect you individually? Understanding what gets judges to do the work is an important of leadership.
Management
Another key element is balancing work assignments. This ties into building team schedules and logistics, but knowing who you can assign to what task, who you can lean on, and how you communicate those responsibilities is key.
If your assignments are good, but you don’t explain the expectations of the tasks well, you’ve failed in your management. If you explain the tasks well, but don’t clearly have people responsible for executing on them, you’ve failed in your management. Of course, there poor approaches to management that aren’t explicit failures, but demonstrating favoritism or overloading your strongest judge all are signs of poor management.
Delegation
Part of leadership and managing your resources is knowing when you can’t (or shouldn’t) do the work yourself. Often times it feels easier to just handle it yourself, as opposed to communicate expectations, needs, time frame and assigning it to someone, but just as often, your job is to be available in case something bigger comes up that needs you in particular to handle directly.
Knowing what to hand off is important. Equally important, however, is making sure that you’re appropriately involved. Either being involved to have an understanding of what’s happening in your domain or simply doing some of the work so it doesn’t look like you’re sitting around doing nothing all day helps connect you to your team.
Level One
At level one, you’re not expected to lead any other judges, but you are expected to be able to get players to do as you require. Generally, your requests are “play the game” or maybe “build a deck so you can play the game”, and most of the time players are willing to play the game. However, there are other tasks (“wait to open your packs” or “queue up nicely for prizes”) that require a bit more direction.
Level Two
At level two, you’re generally expected to lead one or maybe two other judges. Most of the time you’re going to be able to directly oversee the execution of their tasks, and will frequently be handling a portion of the responsibility directly yourself.
Level Three
At level three, you’re expected to directly lead up to five or six other judges. Oftentimes, judges will be complete their tasks without your oversight, and your responsibility will be more managerial and you’ll be delegating most of the work and not completing any tasks directly yourself.
How to Improve Your Leadership
It’s that time of the lesson where I say practical experience is the best teaching tool! However, you can watch leaders to see who is effective and pick apart what they like.
I have a mentor who strongly recommends watching Ted Lasso (yes, the TV show about a football coach) as a tool to become a better leader. I played D&D to get better at becoming comfortable in telling people what to do. There are books on leadership and many, many online courses and videos - leadership and command are important aspects in many ways, so you can find resources that fit your needs.
Presence
We talked about presence previously in Interpersonal Skills & Communication, but that was in the broader sense of how you fit into the community. Here, it’s more of a question of what type of leader are you?
Aura
There are some people who can give commands and have them followed. A way to evaluate your aura or presence is by asking folks to complete a simple task. The more pushback you get, the weaker your aura of command.
Aura is made up of so much. Your explicit role at an event, your place within the program are two objective measures, but there are many subjective measures as well. How comfortable are you being the center of attention and giving commands? How relaxed are you? What does your body language say? Someone who is crisp and professional is going to get more crisp and professional responses than someone who is very laid back and lackadaisical.
Reputation
Likewise, your reputation plays into your presence. Are you the type of leader who supports your team or the type that gets frustrated when things go wrong and take it out on the people you assigned the tasks to? Are you laid back all the time, even when things need more attention, or are you able to adjust to the tenor of the event. Do people come to an event thinking that they’ll have a good time following your commands or are they dreading your micromanagement?
As you develop your reputation, people will have a different reaction to being on your team, and to your authority.
Level One
An L1 should be approachable by the members of their local community - that means that they should be known and seen as reliable and trustworthy. There isn’t a huge expectation for being known within the judge community, but it is a valuable addition.
Level Two
Level Two judges should generally present as a bit more professional than L1 judges are expected to, particularly in the context of competitive events. They should also be known and generally trusted by their local judge community.
Level Three
While level three judges are expected to be able to have the authority to lead a team of two to four other judges, they’re not expected to do so through sheer force of aura. They should be known by their local judge community, and if they judge locally, known and respected by many of the local grinders.
On a broader scale, at destination events, most L3 judges should be easily recognized by most of the other judges who regularly attend such events.
How to Improve Your Presence
The first step to improving your presence is understanding your presence - and that’s not something you can do on your own. You won’t know how other people perceive you if you don’t ask, and gaining that understanding is fundamental.
If people already respect your authority, but feel you can be too relaxed, you know that you shouldn’t focus on becoming even more relaxed, even if you feel stressed internally. Realizing how people perceive you and your actions will give you the foundation from which you can grow.
Charisma
As a leader, you’re often going to be the go-to person for other members of the community - judges who have less experience in the community and players who don’t already have connections will turn to someone who is present and welcoming.
Being Supportive
There’s more to being charismatic that just being supportive and welcoming, but if you listen to people and help them with what they need help with, you’ve already made great strides towards being liked by them.
Being supportive allows for folks to feel connected with the community, which is a key role of leadership - getting people to want to work with you again and to return to the community as a whole.
Level One
At level one, being ready to point out good resources to new players, and supporting their enthusiasm (even if all they want to do is play kinda bad decks) is the general expectation. There’s also some expectation to support the enthusiasm of judge candidates, even if you don’t feel comfortable providing mentorship.
Level Two
For level two, there’s a bit more expectation that you’re able to provide further resources or connections to the community if you’re not the right person.
Level Three
By level three, judges are expected to be a bit more proactive in engaging with newer folks, whether it’s a judge on your team or a new player in your store.
How to Improve Your Charisma
If there was a quick and easy way to get people to like you, I’d be rich selling self-help modules. However, listening patiently and engaging people with the topics they’re excited about are critical. Understanding where they’re coming from and what’s useful to them is so much better than using catch-all generalities.
Teamwork
Like we discussed in Interpersonal Skills & Communication, you can’t be an event on your own - there have to be at least players and often there are other staff, even if they’re store employees who aren’t directly engaged with the event.
Working with players and other members of staff is important for a smooth event. In the context of leadership, you have to manage the mantle of authority and take ownership of the appropriate parts of the event without stepping on anyone’s toes.
Supervisory
Some of your leadership is going to come from a supervisory position - this is acting as a team lead or any other role where you’re giving instructions to others. A lot of this ties into leadership above, but a key element is making sure that you’re providing a more cooperative framework as opposed to authoritative. If you’re a heavy bludgeon, people are going to have less fun, and step away from the community, because they aren’t locked into being there.
You’ll sometimes be somewhat less efficient when working with a more collective approach, but in the big picture it results in a more cohesive community.
Peer-to-Peer
Of course, you’re also going to be working with peers, whether they’re judges for other games who are running events in the store at the same time, store employees who are managing several discreet tasks or other team leads at a destination event. When you’re working with other people in leadership positions, regular communication is key.
You want to make sure that you’re aware of their tasks and responsibilities for two major reasons. First, you don’t want to accidentally step on their toes and take tasks away from them, or to duplicate efforts unnecessarily. Second, flipping things around, you do want to be able to step in a provide support should they need extra hands. If one of your peers begins to flounder, it will impact the whole of the event, including your works.
Building Team Schedules
As a team lead, figuring out how to balance a schedule is critical - this is part management of resources, part evaluation and mentorship of judges, but really it comes down to having a cohesive team, understanding who works well together and who doesn’t.
Level One
At level one, you should be able to work within the framework of an LGS - you report to the Tournament Organizer/Store Owner/Events Manager, and you provide instruction to the players. You’re able to both provide and receive feedback.
Level Two
At level two, you’re expected to be able to provide a small amount of leadership to one other judge, usually for small tasks, as well as be a part of a team of 2-5 judges.
Level Three
At level three, you should be able to work within part of a larger team structure, with 2-5 other judges under your authority, as well as 2-5 other judges acting as team leads in similar roles, while following the leadership of a head judge.
How to Improve Your Teamwork
To improve your teamwork, start by identifying where the commands are breaking down. Are people not listening to you? Are you not listening to others? Why is there a failure in communication?
Once you’re able to identify the weak point in the chain of command, you can begin to address it. If people aren’t listening to you, figure out why. Is it that they feel your commands aren’t worthwhile? Are you off-base or micromanaging? Taking time to listen and observe other judges or the players who you are giving instructions to will help clarify what part of the process could be improved.
Evaluation of other Judges
While we’ve talked about building teams in the context of mentorship, it’s also important to understand the values of mentorship in completing logistical tasks.
Being able to know who is going to be able to accomplish tasks and how much instruction you’re going to have to give them will make you a better manager. If there’s a large and complex task, assigning a rockstar to handle it who has done so before means that you’ll have more bandwidth to help a newer judge tackle their own task so that they can grow and develop.
Accurate Understanding
Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the people you’re working with is fundamental to this trait. Of course, it’s not just strengths and weaknesses, but preferences as well. You might assign one of your strongest judges to the feature matches, but it could be a mistake because they really don’t enjoy that responsibility and consequently won’t be as engaged as someone who does care about the task and is nearly as strong.
Level One
At level one, simply having some relative understanding of ability is useful - are the judges around me more or less experienced than I am? While this isn’t going to be comprehensive, it’s generally enough to know who to approach and get feedback and advice from.
Level Two
At level two, you aren’t expected to be able to identify the strengths and weaknesses of judges you work with, but are expected to be able to assign people to tasks appropriately, based on the knowledge you do gain - generally by asking them what their strengths are.
Level Three
For level three judges, you should begin to be able to evaluate judges loosely on the aspects, and understand which areas are good for them and which are areas of improvement. With that data, you’re also expected to be able to find appropriate assignments. You’re not expected to have off-the-cuff full evaluations of candidates.
How to Improve Your Evaluation of Judges
The answer to how you improve this skill is more talking! Talk with other judges and see if your evaluation of them lines up with their evaluation of themselves. Talk with your peers about each other (not in a gossipy way, but in a collaborative way), and see if your understanding lines up with other perspectives. However, evaluation is relatively subjective, and just because you may have a different perception than your peers, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you’re wrong or that this skill is a weakness - it might just mean you’ve seen something they haven’t, or the inverse.
Leadership Logistics
Logistics is an expansion of management discussed above, but beyond just managing your people, but managing the resources that you have and the communication necessary to be effective at getting things done. You won’t be able to run a limited event if you run out of product before the event starts. You won’t have a good tournament if you’re not able to communicate what you need with your scorekeeper.
Balancing Resources
Know what resources you have and how much you’re going to spend. There are a lot of concrete resources, and most of the time you don’t have to worry about them in the moment of judging an event because you (or someone else) did appropriate pre-event planning, but there are times when you need to be conscious of them.
This list includes things like the time you have the venue, the number of seats available for players, the amount of booster packs you have available for limited events and prizes. There’s a lot going on and knowing what you have can allow you to figure out where you can make sacrifices.
If there’s a scorekeeping issue, and your options are something time-consuming that will definitely work or a quick hack that might fall apart and is difficult to recover from, identify where your pressure points are.
Triage & Priority
A lot of what was discussed regarding triage and priority in the lesson on Tournament Operations & Logistics can be applied here - however, in a leadership role you’re going to have more authority and more exposure to the resources, so you should be in a better place to make fully informed decisions.
It’s also important when you’re in a leadership role to be able to step back and delegate handling critical situations to other judges, so that you can remain flexible. There will be some situations that you have to get involved in, but identifying and triaging emergencies is a part of the leadership role.
Communication
In leadership roles, steady communication is always the answer. When you have a task that needs doing, you need to be able to communicate the job to others. When you have a surplus or deficiency of resources, you need to be able to communicate with other members of the team where you’re operating from.
An important part of communication is knowing who to communicate with. Letting the deck checks team lead know that there’s a long-time extension isn’t really going to impact their day. However, overcommunication is better than undercommunication.
Being Understood & Understanding
When you’re discussing your plans, especially as you’re issuing commands to judges, it’s important to make sure everyone is on the same page. When two parts of a team begin to handle a task in different ways, it can result in confusion or errors - and that can be headed off by the person in charge of overseeing the whole operation by getting confirmation on their communication.
Demonstrations or asking folks to repeat the instructions back to you are both great ways to confirm understanding. Likewise, repeating the information you’ve been given back to the messenger helps you confirm that you’ve received the message that they wanted to pass along to you, which means you won’t have to backtrack and revise your actions or get clarification.
Level One
In general, an L1 should be able to run an in-store relaxed-tier event, and manage the common issues that come up. Most of the communication should be directly with players, as opposed to being channeled through other judges.
Level Two
At level two, a judge should be prepared to have a mid-sized event of up to sixty players and should be confident that their instructions can go from them to another judge and then to players. They should be aware of the resources and limitations that they have at the event.
Level Three
Level three judges should be able to communicate to players through two steps of judges (for example: Head Judge to Team Lead to Floor Judge to player). They should also be very comfortable dealing with the common situations of LGS level play, at both relaxed and competitive tiers, and be prepared to handle more complex scenarios.
How to Improve Your Leadership Logistics
To get better with managing logistics, take on new roles. The more experience you have with each task or responsibility at an event, the better you’ll be able to grasp the whole. As you advance to more leadership positions, you’ll find yourself interacting with more and more of the event. If you already have experience helping with prize distribution or managing deck checks or running end of round, you’ll have a better chance to identify issues before they occur and to provide the structure needed to prevent errors or mishaps.
Community Leadership
In other roles, we talk a bit about how you as a judge impact your community, but some folks choose to take on more of a leadership role within the community. There isn’t an explicit expectation of judges in the community to take on particular tasks, so this is more of a set of guidelines for those who do choose to engage in this way.
Local
At the local level, leadership looks like helping organize events and learn to play days, encouraging folks to become judges, and generally being an ambassador. This is generally where L1 judges who choose to become deeply engaged in their community shine.
Regional
At a regional level, you’re interacting with other judges and helping them develop their own network, so that they can continue to grow and develop their own community. Regionally based community leadership is where both L2 and L3 judges shine, as they’re connected closely enough to the region through the events they work and the people they know, but also have more connection to the global community so they can bring in external resources and knowledge.
Global
At a global level, it means connecting regional communities and bringing together the best and brightest minds of the judge program to help share their knowledge and experiences. Anyone can participate in the global community, and judges of all levels are recognized as important members - not just through skill of ruling, but by their commitment to the community and helping others.
How to Improve Your Community Leadership
It’s important to be aware that no matter where you’re interacting with others, you are setting a precedent for how people perceive you. The larger or more public the stage, the more important it is to make sure that you’re behaving in a way that is consistent with the underlying philosophy of the judge program.
If you want to be a leader in your community, no matter the scale, just start! Figure out what you can contribute and begin to offer that. If it’s judge classes, offer judge classes. If it’s help on specific questions or an area of the rules or policy, you can do that. If you have graphic design skills you can help people create banners and ads for their stores and local play.
There are a lot of ways that you can contribute, and by being foremost in an area, you become the defacto leader of that subdivision of the community.
Doing so will not only help you find more opportunities, but it will allow you to give back to the community and help elevate others!
And that’s Leadership, Management, & Command. It’s the last of the six core aspects, and so with that you should ideally have a strong understanding of the breadth of skills and qualities that judging can help you develop, and the traits that will be looked at when you seek advancement.
Of course, this isn’t the end of the story for Aspects - as the program continues to grow and develop, there will be more lessons and content diving into more specifics of sub-aspects, how to improve on particular pillars more specifically and what the expectations are for each level in more detail.
If you’re watching this on YouTube, and you want more lessons in your feed, go ahead and subscribe. Join us after new lessons 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.
Until next time, good luck and have fun!