This article was originally published on GameSpot's sister site onGamers.com, which was dedicated to esports coverage.

　　FLUFFNSTUFF was the original captain of Team Liquid Dota 2, although he gave up the position early on.Earlier this week Brian ‘FLUFFNSTUFF’ Lee of Team Liquid’s Dota 2 team wrote a blog post about his frustrations regarding the leadership issues faced by the team through the past year. While he spoke from a very personal place as he tends to do, it touched upon many issues which academics within the fields of management and organization have studied. As this provides an interesting starting point for a discussion about what leadership looks like within an esports context this article will strive to share some of those insights and to apply them to some of the problems raised in the blog.

　　While the original posting is about Dota 2, these concerns are largely the same for League of Legends or even Counter-Strike teams, and for that reason as well as because I do not want to single people from real teams out or make examples of them I’m going to generally write in a neutral tone throughout this article. If you’re the leader of a team some of these things may help you make sense of what you’re experiencing. If you’re a member of a team you might cut your captain some slack after having read this. And if you’re a fan of these teams you’ll hopefully gain more insight into why these teams sometimes struggle to live up to the potential of their combined names.

　　

Seven Surprises

Leadership isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. We have a lot of expectations both of what our leaders should be able to do and what we’ll be able to do once we become the leader, largely informed by various tv shows and movies depicting the all-knowing boss or military commander who drives through decisions and leads by example. The reality is quite different, with tradeoffs and limitations and feelings of a loss of control, something which became quite clear from Fluff’s blog. The basic outline of this problem has been touched upon most influentially in the “Seven Surprises for New CEOs”, which are as follows:

　　You can’t run the companyGiving orders is very costlyIt is hard to know what is really going onYou are always sending a messageYou are not the bossPleasing shareholders is not the goalYou are still only humanWhile that list is imposing in itself and the obvious implications of it for our preconceived notions of leadership are already rather devastating, the question is how do we relate this to leading esports teams. Obviously the scale we’re working with is very different from a multinational corporation, but other things tend to make up for what is lost. Consider the third point, “It is hard to know what is really going on”. Within a corporation this means that a CEO will struggle to stay fully aware of the troubles facing different parts of the company, different teams within the company and specific people. For an esports team we naturally don’t have the same amount of scope, but the intimate nature of the project means that each player's personal life becomes a part of the equation and may impact how your team performs. Fluff expressed his frustration at attempting to initiate internal dialogue about his teammates lives and finding that they weren’t willing to engage with him about these things. It’s also not uncommon for problems to be left to fester because members of the team would rather vent to their friends than discuss things openly. Even with a group of only five people, the truth is that it is still hard to know everything that you might want to, and this is something you need to tirelessly work to try and remedy by encouraging people to open up about issues both within the game and outside of it.

　　Team FIRE was the team Fluff put together that brought him to the attention of the Dota 2 world.

　　Another interesting aspect is the idea that giving orders is costly. This may be surprising, as we imagine leaders doing precisely that; leading. Yet when you give an order you’re overruling another person's judgement and self-determination. A leader is able to do so because of his authority, but each time he does so he spends a bit of that capital that he has with that person. If he picks between two ideas proposed by his players he’s picking sides, if he chooses his own way over that suggested by the group he’s seen as autocratic. As long as those decisions are the right ones his team will tolerate them, but if mistakes happen (and they will), he’ll quickly lose the confidence of his team and lose his ability to push through his ideas. If the team captain is already working from a position where he doesn’t feel he has the full support of his team, it becomes increasingly hard to justify taking risks or fully committing to his own vision of the game. In political terms, the leader has lost his mandate to lead and is little more than at the mercy of the whims of the group.

　　Continuing on from this thought, we can consider the fact that for all that we think of the captain of a team as the person with the final say, this isn’t generally the case. For any sponsored team, if the captain loses the confidence of his players he is at the mercy of the CEO of the sponsoring organization. He may be replaced or players from his team may be replaced with limited input from the team captain. Even when the captain has the loyalty of his players his authority is still limited. For all that he may think he is the boss, the feelings of a loss of control that Fluff describes in the article are far from an oddity, neither in the corporate world or within an esports team. And since we’re on the subject of authority, let’s talk a bit more about what authority really is.

　　

Sources of authority and their shortcomings

Effective leadership is the result of authority to do what is needed in order for the team to succeed. Authority is the capital we spoke of earlier which allows us to overrule other peoples opinions, and every leader has this capital in different measures regarding different subjects, and originating from different sources. As a starting point, every person is going to have their strengths and weaknesses, and this leads into how we regard them as authority figures. A person who is more skilled at a certain thing is proportionately an authority figure within this field in relation to another person, and as they use this authority to make decisions this authority grows or is eroded by the outcome of those decisions.

　　Team Fire was picked up by Complexity, with whom they attended TI2.Now while we may think of a leader as one entity, his authority is likely to be more complex than that. He may be a great strategian, in which case he has considerably authority concerning the creation of strategies for the team. However, his in-game decision making and general awareness may not be as strong, in which case he’s going to have considerably less authority in this respect. This can be solved by a team having different in-game leaders from their strategic leader. Some teams may even have a third person who tries to look after the personal relationships of the members of the team. All these different aspects and their combinations lead to very different faces of leadership, often times with different combinations of formal and informal authority involved.

　　The divide between formal and informal authority is another interesting subject. Formal authority is the kind of authority which comes with a title attached. There are set expectations and limitations to this kind of authority. Fluff talks in his blog about the difference he felt between the team he formed himself when he first came on to the scene and being recruited to lead a group of players for a major organization like Team Liquid. He talks a lot about friendships and trust, but there’s a deeper truth behind this as well. When a leader creates a team himself and is the person who everyone sees as responsible for bringing them onto the team, he’s generally invested with more authority from the start. The players naturally have a certain amount of faith in their leader as they otherwise would not have agreed to join. When you are instead given a team to lead, be it one that has already been together for some time or which has been newly brought together by the sponsor, the appointed captain naturally starts off from a position of having to prove themselves worthy of the formal authority they’ve been given. In contrast to this informal authority is about the ability to influence without needing to give orders and has to be earned tacitly. It’s about personal relationships and communication. While the captain of a team may hold considerable informal authority, this is not necessarily the case as exercising formal authority can counteract ones informal authority.

　　

The difference between leading and managing

As Fluff mentions in his blog, when he gave over leadership of Team Liquid he came to realize that his successor Tyler ‘TC’ Cook had a considerably different approach to leading the team, which caused him to question his own leadership style. From Fluff’s description of his own leadership in FIRE, we can deduce that he is what academics would refer to as a leader, with the implication then being that TC may have been more of a manager. These are the two archetypes of leadership, with most persons in leadership roles embodying some measure of both categories.

　　Team Liquid achieved a top 8 finish at TI3 under the leadership of TC.A leader is the traditional type that we tend to imagine when we think of leadership, a visionary who inspires people to follow him. Leaders are likened to artists, responsible for inspiring people to see the world as they do. They are more inclined to embrace chaos and more prone to taking risks, or as Fluff puts it, he knows he needs the space to fail in order to be able to lead. Leaders are attracted to ideas and seek to create new ways of doing things and forging a brand new direction for the team. They also tend to relate to others more directly, forming more personal bonds and convincing people to buy into their vision, all the while tending to feel separate from the rest of the group.

　　Managers are quite the opposite. They tend towards balancing out opposing views and negotiating compromises. They tend to be risk averse and focus a lot on processes which provide stability and safety. They work more closely with people, even though there is less emotional involvement than with a leader personality. They are very much a part of the organization and find fulfillment in perpetuating the organization. Managers tend to be more reactionary and act out of necessity rather than forging ahead on their own path and hoping that others will follow. Management style of leadership is generally associated with increasing bureaucracy in larger organizations, but can be seen as more consensus decision making within a small team context, with the downside that decisions can be relatively slower and more difficult to make.

　　Within an esports context, most teams have an outside manager, meaning that the team captain is often seen as being responsible for taking on more of the leader role, especially as teams generally don't have the coaches of traditional sports teams who could help carry the burden of setting strategies and the direction of the team. The downside of a manager style captain can be that the organization is relatively slow to react to changing circumstances and outside threats, while a lack of management may lead to a very chaotic environment. Generally the academic view is that both are needed for an organization to function properly, be it as a combination of the captain of the team and his co-captain, the captain and the manager or some other solution. The ideal mix of the two is also generally considered to depend on the challenges that the team faces. No one style is right for every situation.

　　

Leading change

Change is something that every organization has to deal with over time, especially when it is engaged in competitive pursuits. Ideally change should be incremental and persistent, as organizations should constantly evaluate their processes and strategies, feeding back any new insights into the process and constantly updating itself. This is a cyclical view of change, where the organization proactively deals with problems before they become systemic. It treats strategies as living things which once implemented not only should be revisited over time but will naturally shift and change on their own as the people who execute the strategy learn more about it through their constant exposure to it. Relating this back to the previous topic, this can often be seen as bottom up strategic change, where the leader is in more of a managerial role.

　　While a continuously changing organization tends to weather small storms fairly effectively and tends to deal with a lot of minor issues before they get out of hand, it's generally very difficult to implement consistently and any lapses in diligence will cause problems to pile up (not to speak of major disruptive changes in the environment such as a sudden shift in the meta brought on by a new patch). This leads to the rather common bursts of disruption and change which characterizes most organizations. The most controversial statement Fluff made in his blog was admitting to wishing that the team would fail and hit rock bottom so as to allow him to step in and pick up the pieces. This may sound highly extreme, but in reality organizational change can be very hard to enact without a sense of urgency. While hitting rock bottom is devastating for the team it is effective in terms of generating that sense of urgency, it is the sudden disruption of the status quo which forces the organization to confront a change in their reality.

　　Internal strife lead Team Liquid to exchange two players after Ti3.Leading change is about manufacturing that sense of urgency which enables the leader to step in and present a solution, but without having to hit rock bottom first. Generally this is done by identifying roadblocks to change and working to counteract them, such as for example certain players on the team who may be concerned about having to change their role within the team. These can be dealt with either by placating them or convincing them that they'll have the support needed for them to get accustomed to their new role. Another key part of the process is creating buy-in; selling the members of the team on the new direction and on committing to seeing through the change process. This really is just about leveraging those relationships as well as possible and spending that authority capital in order to convince people that you have a plan and that it's going to be the right one for the team.

　　Radical change can take place in two ways, the less severe being by working within the existing strategic framework and updating it while staying true to the essential nature of the team as it has been. An aggressive team remains an aggressive team, and so on. On the other hand there is what has become known as the "burning platform", after a famous speech given by former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop. The burning platform is the idea that the existing strategy and the existing conception of what the team should aim to be is so damaged and so dated that it can't be rebuilt or updated. A complete break has to be made with the previous identity of the team, replacing it instead with an entirely new vision for the future. I end on this because in more ways than one, Fluff's blog reads as his own burning platform speech. He spoke not just to his team but to the fans and laid out a call to action, painting a grim circle of failure if the team did not make the change. The burning platform is a subject of heated debate among academics, mostly because many believe it is often resorted to with reckless abandon.

　　The question then that stands before Fluff and his team is whether they believe this dark outlook. The answer to that question is what should inform their path forward.

　　

Key background reading for those who want it:

Michael E. Porter, Jay W. Lorsch & Nithin Nohria (2004): "Seven Surprises for New CEOs". Harvard Business Review, October 2004.

　　Abraham Zaleznik (1977): "Managers and Leaders: Are they different?". Harvard Business Review Classics, reprinted March-April 1992.

　　Stephen Elop (2011): "The Burning Platform". Memo reprinted online by Wall Street Journal, available here.