Notes on a Guild and my (often ham-fisted) leadership thereof

I've been with my guild 5 of its 6 years (we turned 6 on Christmas); an officer for 4.5 years; GM for 1.3 years.

I don't come to leadership naturally (I make decisions slowly - or rather, I admit my decisions slowly), so I don't think I've done the best job of it. On the other hand, we're still here, so I haven't entirely botched it yet.

Problems I've generally handled badly:

• Intra-officer conflict. It tends to happen in whispers and private messages, so I haven't really found out about it until someone is on the verge of quitting. This is very frustrating, and officers who are all buddy-buddy aren't necessarily the best thing in a guild of 150 people. I don't expect everyone to be best friends, but we all have common goals, and I'd think we could all be at least collegial about it. On top of it, it's very difficult for me to watch two people I like argue. Sometimes there are no ready or obvious solutions. (Sometimes the solution is so foreign to your mindset that it doesn't occur to you that it was obvious until about 6 months too late.)
  
• Personality conflicts. These tend to show up blatantly in guild chat, but again, we're a large guild, and they're going to happen. They can be difficult to deal with when, say, the humor is a matter of taste, and someone refuses to believe that while the subject probably shouldn't be in guild chat, it's not a reason to boot someone. (Some things are just flat out, though - racial/ethnic slurs, casual use of 'gay' or 'rape' - not everything is a matter of taste.) I generally handle them badly mostly because I'm not easily offended. (I am sometimes disappointed in how people react to being offended, but it's their loss.)
  
• Dealing with the trigger points I do have. There are some things that will set me off. They're generally narrow, specific, and involve raiding. If someone's in the guild, I'm of the opinion that they have equal access to all our amenities (at least on their mains; alts have different privileges so as not to edge out other people's mains). I mean, hell, that's written into our charter. If someone is capable of the content, I think they should be eligible for our raids. Sometimes the metrics for determining "capable" seem arbitrary or capricious. (16 hit rating gem versus 20 hit rating gem, when you only need 12 more hit rating (prior to reforging existing), but our raid requirements would have made you buy the epic. That's a "WTF?" moment for me.) So suggestions of set raiding teams or other methods that would pare our raiding pool of ~45 people down to ~15 irritate me, and I don't always manage to be civil about it.

Things my guild did well in Wrath while I mostly stood by and organized the bank:

• Raid progression. Oh. My. God. We got past the first tier of Wrath raiding. In Vanilla WoW, we raided Molten Core, Ahn'Qiraj 20, and Zul'Gurub. We took shots at the first boss in Blackwing Lair, but we never got anywhere. In Burning Crusade, we cleared Karazhan and Zul'Aman, and with the lovely Daughters of the Horde, took on Gruul and Magtheridon. Later we managed to kill the Lurker Below and Hydross, as well. That was the extent of our progression, however. In Wrath, we killed everything, most of it on both 10 and 25. (What's missing on 25: Thorim, Freya, Mimiron, Vezax, Yogg-Saron, and Algalon from Uldamon; Sindragosa and the Lich King from Icecrown Citadel; and Halion from the Ruby Sanctum.) We didn't do the hard modes for everything, but some were done.
• Kept calm and carried on. Even when raid leaders or officers or guild members were leaving (it wasn't often, but it did happen), the guild kept going. Someone always stepped up to help out. Raids happened, bosses died, and we eventually saw the Lich King die. Heroic dungeon drakes were obtained. Alliance faction leaders were slain. Old raids and reputations incomplete were organized and finished.
  

Cataclysm brings some logistical problems to our raiding - specifically, the 10 vs. 25 debate in that the loot is the same; and single-boss lockouts regardless of raid size, so that if you go to a raid Tuesday, you can't help with the guild's scheduled raid of the other size Thursday. Given what I've seen out of the guild in five years, this is mostly a headache for the raid schedulers, and not the end of the world. I do have constant concern about burnout for those who organize and run our raids; we lost four officers in Wrath after I became GM, and we have, besides me, four left. Only one of those actively works on raid organization, and we have one designated official raid leader outside the officer corps. I think there is room for growth there, but it's unlikely I'll know who will fill those shoes, or even if there are indeed some sitting empty, until we've gotten back into raiding.

There are aspects of Cataclysm I'm curious to see how they work out - rated battlegrounds, later guild levels, longer-term guild achievements, and so forth. Being as old as we are, it's a little bit of an affront that we have to do the guild leveling from the beginning, but really, it'll be done in a couple months, and the real benefit will be for the long haul. Of the large Vanilla Horde guilds on Bronzebeard, we are one of the last handful remaining. Going into the next expansion, probably two years down the road, I would guess there may very well be another 5 guild levels, which we will be poised to start as soon as it launches. Some people, I suppose, would be surprised by an online gaming social group lasting so long, but really, it's no different than a bridge club meeting for years. We're just location-independent.

So... Lessons I learned from...

• 5 years as a Pirate: Pirates are awesome! I play WoW with some of the best people out there. Even though I have neurotic fits and normally push me away from online social groups after about a year, somehow this group has managed to get around that.
• 4.5 years as an officer among Pirates: There's always someone who can step in to help, even if you haven't realized it yet. The vast majority of the people who get into the guild are awesome, and the bad apples either disappear quickly on their own or find that they can't really be a bad apple if they want to stay a Pirate.
  
• 1.3 years as the guild master of Pirates: I'm not used to overseeing other people with authority. Everyone has different standards for other people, and mine are stricter than some's and laxer than others'. Still learning how to balance that. I think, overall, I've learned that some people I like are going to disappoint me. I won't babysit adults; I will help mediate problems, but people have to let me know there's a problem first.

I decided a while back, when we were going through one of those "where's our raiding going" rough patches, that the one thing I would be stubborn about is that I'm not going to get bullied out of my own guild. (One person in particular tried it.) There are very few points of policy that I'm adamant about; the rest don't affect the flavor we've developed. I could probably better communicate which are the "this is how we are" things and which are the "just my opinion, but I don't really care which way we decide, because it'll all work out in the end" things. There are quite a few of the latter. For the most part, the guild works, and my biggest goal is to not break that.

Oh, God, I've been writing on this too long; I'm starting to edit for grammar and style. Enough navel gazing for now. ;)