Power in Guilds

Many guild leaders assume that power is the ability to gkick whomever you want.

This is incorrect. Power is the control that other people give you. For example, to use (or abuse) the power to gkick, you must have people willing to stay in your guild. The natural conclusion is that members give power to the leadership by choosing to remain.

A fundamental flaw in guild management is the inability to remove the leaders through a majority vote. The guild leader watches the officers, but who watches the guild leader? I've heard horror stories of GLs passing leadership to unqualified, selfish friends without even telling anyone, much less asking the guild.

We should have a Mutiny button. Like the French, we should be able to lop off the heads of despotic leaders. Hold them accountable. We should be able to stop people who take the cream of the guild's effort and leave members the bare bones, people who lead by fear and threats and selfish, unjust methods. A guild should always be open to reasonable demands and principles but should never put up with threats or pressure.

Members of a guild do have significant power as a community, though less as individuals. What can a leader do if everyone decides to protest unreasonable decisions or boycott raids or deny the leadership free materials and services in the interest of enacting change?

The worst that can happen is everyone gets gkicked and you form a new guild together with the rules you wanted in the first place. And the old guild leader must start his guild again from scratch -- begging players to join a team or community that no longer exists.

You should make sure your guild has a procedure in place to make decisions and sticks to it -- a basic tenent of conflict management is that the method is more important than the outcome. As long as everyone agrees that the decision will be made a certain way, no one should then protest the final decision.

Now, this does not mean the guild needs to be in on every single administrative decision. That would slow decision-making to a crawl. I'm talking about controversial matters that people in the guild care about and that need to be addressed, not the day-to-day shlub of ideas.

Officers and Guild Leaders should work out the exact extent of their individual authority in each of their areas and pass it by the guild for inspection. How far can an officer go? Can a bank officer deny a member access to the bank because he suspects they're using the materials for an unapproved purpose? Can a recruitment officer deny an application based on a bad feeling about the applicant? Can a raid leader leave someone out of a raid because he thought (but was not certain) they were the cause of two wipes last time?

Clear criteria for officers is imperative if you don't want them overstepping their bounds. People are capable of doing things in the interest of the guild that the guild would not approve of. When I rejected the real life friend of a member, at least one officer and probably several members at that time thought I didn't have the authority to do so. I assumed I had the authority to protect the integrity of the application process by enforcing the rules I had put in ("Blank questions equal auto-no"), but others assumed that "real life friend" overruled everything else.

This is why you must be clear with each other. The officers should feel free to create their own limitations and guidelines, but the guild should always be asked to approve those limitations. At the end of the day, it is the guild that the leadership serves. The populace should have the opportunity to accept or reject the power level of leaders. And this hearkens back to decision-making methods. The simplest way to approve or reject the powers given an officer is a poll, but it also doesn't allow for feedback or bias.

With bias, some members are naturally more powerful than others. This is often a form of reputation, where the member has proven him or herself to be a leader or thinker. Some people's opinions, for good or bad, matter more than others. This is a distribution of power in the membership that arises naturally, often by a member proving him or herself to be of value in various ways -- in this case, having helpful problem-solving ideas for leadership. (Unfortunately, having an opinion does not automatically make feedback useful -- such as the Compromiser who wanted random rolls for very rare novelty loot and ignored the issue being discussed: that rare status pieces should go to someone IVV trusted not to gquit the next day.)

On Monday, I'll cover empowerment, disempowerment, and how you can force unwilling leaders to change the way a guild is run.

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Beth Blevins is a former officer in In Vino Veritas.

She's a writer, artist and avid blogger.

Beth's been married since her junior year of college.