In my guild, we have a long-time mem­ber, I’ll call him Mark. He’s a good and friendly per­son, but he’s def­i­nitely not offi­cer mate­r­ial. Passive-aggressive, flaky, self-centered. Mark’s been pin­ing for offi­cer­ship for years.

I haven’t been in offi­cer­ship for a while (because I’ve been raid­ing more dia­pers than instances), but I was sur­prised to learn of Mark’s recent pro­mo­tion to officer.

An offi­cer friend chat­ted me up:

“Hey, how you doing?”

“Good. So what hap­pened with Mark?”

<pause>

“What do you mean?”

“I couldn’t help but notice that he’s an offi­cer now.”

“Yeah.”

“So, what happened?”

<pause>

“Well, he’s been here forever…”

Oh… crap.

You might think that say­ing that some­one is flaky and self-centered is harsh. It isn’t. We’re not talk­ing about how he is in guild chat, how fun he is to play with, or how much he loves his mother. We’re talk­ing about his lead­er­ship abilities.

Does this make me a jerk? Eh, prob­a­bly. It’d be nicer to just focus on why we like hav­ing him around and why every­one greets him when he logs on.

But lead­ing a guild isn’t hang­ing out with some­one, or rem­i­nisc­ing over the good times. It’s very much like run­ning a business–it’s just that your guild’s busi­ness is Fun. You have to make sure that the lead­ers of the orga­ni­za­tion are actively ped­al­ing the orga­ni­za­tion in the direc­tion of that goal. If your goal was to make money, would you hire some­one who caused you to lose money? If your goal was to hand out toys to kids, would you hire some­one who broke half the toys?

What­ever the goal of your guild, whether it’s raid­ing, pvping, lev­el­ing, role­play­ing, or any­thing else, being an offi­cer is shar­ing the mechan­i­cal and social bur­den of run­ning the guild. Noth­ing else. Being an offi­cer is not a reward and it is not a way to retain guild mem­bers. Offi­cers exist for no rea­son other than to help run the guild. Strong friend­ships often do grow from peo­ple shar­ing offi­cer duties, but you can’t con­fuse this with the work that needs to be done. Two offi­cers might end up being good friends, but two friends might not end up being good officers.

But what’s the down­side? Sure, Mark might not really help that much, but what does it hurt to have him there?

If some­one is an offi­cer and does not reduce the amount of work, or worse, adds to the amount of work, then the even­tual reac­tion of every­one actu­ally doing the work is, and I quote:

“What the $#%@?”

Hav­ing Mark there means that the other offi­cers are doing every­thing they had to do before while car­ry­ing Mark’s dead weight, and he hap­pens to be run­ning around with the same title that they are. Mark gets all of the pride of “being part” of run­ning a suc­cess­ful guild and isn’t doing any of the work! This low­ers morale for the work­ing offi­cers, whether they’re aware of this fact or not.

It might feel good or noble to ignore Mark’s down­side as you pro­mote him, but it’s choices like this that sub­tly weaken a guild and make it less resilient to the entropy and drama that is a long-term guild’s con­stant companion.

So when you think of adding to the guild lead­er­ship, ask the other offi­cers: “What exactly will this per­son help us with? How is hav­ing this per­son pro­moted going to make us stronger as a group?” List those rea­sons. Be fair, be impar­tial, but be hon­est. Make sure that your prospec­tive offi­cer brings enough sub­stance to the role.

Being in the guild forever?

Not even close.