WoW!

It is not a tremendous stretch of imagination to see that…

My previous entry on this blog brought forth a lot of interest, most of it focusing on the real-world practicality of using a game environment such as World of Warcraft (WoW) for the assessment or training of corporate leadership. There are only a few people with experience in both building guilds to achieve WoW objectives and recruiting teams to achieve business objectives, but those few will easily recognize the commonalities of the efforts. It is not a tremendous stretch of imagination to see that the relatively risk free environment of WoW can be used to prepare for similar business situations with real lives and money at risk.

Can leadership skills be developed in a WoW environment? Certainly examples can be found of good leadership and management skills in the players’ actions. Many times, guild leaders will turn over the reins of the guild during a raid to others in order to train them so that the guild can function more efficiently even if the leader can’t be present. The experience of trying to coordinate dozens of people and multiple lines of communication in a time pressure situation without making enemies of allies can be truly enlightening. Just as in an academic environment, there is no better arena in which to make mistakes, where there are no financial assets on the line.

Weaknesses in communication skills can become more evident when the pressure is intense…

Can leadership skills be assessed in a game environment? I believe that they can in several ways. Weaknesses in communication skills can become more evident when the pressure is intense. The ability to “think on your feet” and improvise has long been known to be a valuable skill for managers and sales staff alike. Problems requiring quick thinking are different than those requiring coordination, planning, and team building, but both are abundant in this game environment and translate directly into many business situations.

As is true with virtually any simulation or academic safe haven, one can spend all one’s time in the classroom and never take those skills into the real world. But suppose that a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game is approached as just that, a classroom for practicing communication and organization skills. It could be a valuable, effective, and fun way to learn just where those skills reach their limits.

The whole experience is not for the faint of heart…

WoW requires the cooperation of a small army of real life players to combat other guilds and computer generated monsters alike. Some of the competitions and tasks (called “quests”) can require days of in depth planning and coordination to prepare, no less intense than many high level sales efforts in traditional corporations.

Execution of these plans is often a demanding communication task including several levels of command hierarchy needed to implement both attack strategies and defensive positions involving dozens of players. Lines of communication can multifaceted involving auditory channels, with the latest web conferencing platforms, or text channels, with multiple threads and text windows all happening simultaneously. The whole experience is not for the faint of heart, but neither is the coordination of the legal department, sales department, contract negotiation team, and production lines in a fast paced corporate environment.

“Communication skills” and “Leadership skills”

Two broad categories of skills seem to form natural groupings in WoW that could be useful for assessing skills or developing them. Let’s call these categories “Communication skills” and “Leadership skills”. Communication skills are much faster to evaluate and easier to develop in WoW than leadership skills, just as they are in real world situations. Invariably, communication skills are a necessary prerequisite to leadership skills, though the reasons are not so obvious. There are far more people with communication skills, helpful in lower and middle management positions, than there are people with leadership skills seen in middle and upper management.

Leadership skills encompass both the knowledge of what character traits would be most useful to put together and the ability to recruit players and characters with those traits. In a business environment, this skill is the ability to build teams knowing both what skill and experience is required in each team member and what personality traits will build a compatible corporate culture. Leadership skills include not only the ability to identify people with the needed qualities, but to present them with a vision compelling and convincing enough that they desire to throw their lot in with the rest of the group and follow the direction of the leader. Leadership skills are more difficult and time consuming to assess, however, the act of assessing these skills can often develop them as well.

Even without standardizing modifications…

There are a couple of obstacles to using the game to evaluate management skills, one of which can be overcome easily by Blizzard making adjustments to the game on a specific server to allow the creation of a set of standardized characters. This would be helpful to minimize the effort required to make a situation repeatable for comparison between one approach and another. Even without standardizing modifications, using the game as it exists, it is usually possible to observe the different skill levels in potential management candidates, but standardization would allow a training regimen to be developed around a predictable game situation. The other obstacle is the acquisition of enough volunteers to give the practicing leaders someone to lead. This, too, is a solvable problem.