How to Be a Good Leader

[SwiftSmoky 8,445]

How to Be a Good Leader

 

I'm the founder of the parkour club Fight & Flight, all the guidelines in this topic are implemented in my club for a long time. F&F's great success is a live evidence to the effectiveness of these tips, many of which are based not on just things we do in F&F, but on decisions that improved the club a lot and solved big problems.

 

I tried to make it as short as possible, so some things might not be explained properly. If you have any questions (or think I should add something), feel free to send me a private message.

 

Note that every club is different, and for some clubs the leader's best choice will be different from what I recommend in this guide, so don't take these tips as a way that is guaranteed to improve the situation in every single club. As a leader you have to look at the club, think about what improved in it lately and what is still a problem and needs a different approach to solve it. For this reason, I included some "second best options" that might be the best for some clubs.

 

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Getting started - creating a club

 

Gather a team

• Find a few friends from the game that want to be in your team.
• If you don't have parkourist friends, try meeting some in public parkour battles.
• You can keep searching for recorders and editors after the club is created, so for the start just get some parkourists.

 

Create a Skype group

• Create a Skype group with all the club members.
• You'll need it to stay in touch with the team and have an easy way to ask everyone together if they can come to do parkour now.
• Also, having a Skype group for chatting (and maybe voice calls too) makes it more fun and helps creating friendship in the club.

 

Create a forum topic

 

Required:

• Before you start working on the topic - read these short rules about club topic requirements.
• Make a members list, and keep it updated.

 

Recommended:

• Club logo (you can ask someone in creativity topic to design it for you)
• Short description (what is your goal, what is the club doing - just parkour for fun? or creating videos? what type of videos?)
• Link to the club's YouTube channel (or better - small thumbnails with links to the videos)
• Application form - instructions on how to join your club (more info on that later in this guide)
• Keep the topic compact with minimal content, don't add too much stuff, make everything short so people can see everything without having to scroll much or open lots of spoilers.

 

Not recommended:

• Too many screenshots (if you want to put screenshots in the first post, choose just the best ones and keep them in a spoiler, too many screenshot will cause slow loading for some people and nobody will really want to go through 100 screenshots)
• Rules (why not - explained later in this guide)
• Big titles (especially images) and spoilers in members list.

 

Example of a good club topic design: [F&F] Fight & Flight

 

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Managing the club

 

Applicants

 

Step 1: ways of learning about the applicant

• Interview - when someone says he wants to join, just chat with him in PM or on Skype to get knowing him better. (this is what we do in Fight & Flight)
• Application form - a list of questions players have to answer when they want to join the club.

 

Step 2: testing the applicant

• The best way to really get to know a player is to let him play like he's a member of the club for a while (at least a few days) and then decide if you like him as a part of the club or not.
• Another way some people use is testing them in a parkour battle and seeing how they perform certain tricks. This way is worse because you don't really get to know his personality much, and you don't know if he fails because he's just bad at parkour or because he got an unlucky day. I highly recommend using the first way instead.

 

Rules

• Don't write them, just decide for yourself what matters.
• If someone does something bad - explain him that he shouldn't do it (and explain why if it's not obvious).
• Don't kick players for not obeying the rules, instead let them learn through experience and see if they can naturally behave in a good way for the club. If they naturally keep making problems, not learning from their mistakes even when you explain it to them, and it's getting annoying to play with them - then it is time to kick them. But don't hesitate to kick someone quickly if he causes really big problems.
• The reason this is better than having a list of rules is that way helps you select players that naturally behave in a way that is good for the club, and teaching the rules through explanations of their mistakes instead of by threats.
   
• Some clubs prefer to keep the rules list around, I don't know much about what happens inside most of them so I can't tell you for sure that a list of rules can't still be useful in some cases. But as far as I know, clubs work better when managed in the way described above.

 

Conflicts between members

• If it bothers the club in some way (which it probably does if you are aware of the conflict), tell them to solve it without involving the club in it, explain them that the club shouldn't suffer from their personal conflict.
• If they don't solve the conflict and keep affecting negatively in ways such as fighting during parkour, trolling each other or arguing in the chat / Skype group, you might want to kick at least one of them. It's better to keep the club peaceful without any conflicts between members even at the cost of kicking one of them, otherwise they will keep damaging the club and might get other members involved in the conflict.

 

Promoting members

• Promote those who do more for the club than just doing parkour. Roles like leader and co-leader should be given to players not just for being good parkourists but for helping in leading the club and organizing parkour sessions.

 

Communication

• Calls are fun, but not required for parkour. All you really need in parkour is the game chat, but if you want calls then why not.
• Skype is great for being able to chat without having to log into the game, and to call players to come online for parkour.

 

When to parkour

• No scheduled training time - just see who's online or ask on Skype who can come to do parkour now. That way players will get to do parkour whenever they want instead of waiting for a planned training date, that means a lot more activity.

 

Make it home

• The club members are your friends, so treat them like friends.
• Respect them, without them the club would get nowhere.
• If something's wrong talk to them about it to try to solve the problem instead of immediately kicking them.
• Don't be too harsh during parkour - try to be nice as much as possible and not get too angry because of fails (even though it can be very hard when dealing with big tricks that take a lot of time).