Officers’ Quarters: Guild leaders behaving badly

This week we have two questions about guild leaders who aren’t exactly paragons of the position — one who gkicks members for a strange and personal reason and one who quits on raids when they don’t start off well. We also have a raid leader who wants to try Heroic, but a member questions whether the guild is ready.

This is bizarre to me. Why is he doing this? What does he have against players leveling alts on both factions? You get the other side of WoW‘s lore and in some zones a very different leveling experience. There’s even an achievement for it. Is it because you’re on a PVP realm? Does he just hate the other faction that much? Or is he worried they’ll join guilds with those alts and stop participating in his own guild’s events?

No matter the reason, I don’t think it quite constitutes harassment. It’s certainly a nasty thing to do, though. I assume there’s no written guild policy about his “rule,” which makes it even nastier.

Since he’s the guild leader, you can’t control his behavior. But you can tell people what he’s doing and let them decide for themselves if they want to stay in a guild run by someone like that.

I wouldn’t quite say you need better “performance” from him, just a better attitude. At least you have another guild leader to appeal to for intervention in this case, and in your place I would. Trust me — the other guild leader already knows that it’s a problem. But maybe by speaking up, you’ll spur him or her to act.

This kind of behavior is poisonous in a guild, and it’s so much worse when it’s a co-guild leader doing it. It murders morale when a leader is basically saying, “I have no faith in our members’ ability to play an offspec, and I’d rather log out than raid with them.”

Your other guild leader is the only person who can put a stop to it. He or she needs to take a firm stance and tell his or her partner that this behavior can’t continue.

If he or she can’t control the other guild leader, then the members will need to take to the guild’s forums or some other private place and tell him that you as a group won’t tolerate this behavior anymore. He seems like a person with a temper, and he probably won’t take this very well. He might even step down or quit. No matter what he contributes, I believe that your guild will be better off without him than with him as he currently behaves. Yes, recruiting is hard, as you say, but it’s even harder when raids fail because of his tantrums or when potential members see how your guild leader acts and get scared off.

I don’t think just talking is going to solve this issue. If the raid leader is determined to try, then you should probably let him try it at some point. Maybe your team will surprise you and step up to the challenge. Maybe it’ll be as bad as you say. Either way, your raid leader will know for sure where the team stands in terms of difficulty, so it’s not a complete waste of time in that sense.

The bigger problem you might face is what happens with your raid leader and main tank if the team can’t handle Heroic. Will they be content to run Normal raids forever, or will they start looking to join a different guild (or create a new one) to suit their preferred difficulty? Will they try to start recruiting Heroic players and/or edge out the raid members who don’t cut the mustard? This kind of situation can transform your alliance if you don’t take a stand against it. Be cautious moving forward. Don’t let two people change a guild alliance that’s working for 15 others.

/salute