Failures in Leadership… II (and the failures of strategy in WoT)

/grumble*

It’s been a frustrating last two hours in WoT.

It started when we had ‘practice’ for a map we’ve been struggling on recently (against a clan with players who individually are a tier below us, but this is organized play and we’re not very organized**).  This ‘practice’ (if you haven’t noticed yet, I use those quotes often for phrases that annoy me or when I’m annoyed about a subject) ended up lasting an hour long and we got all of 2 runs in.  To call it a waste of time would be an understatement.  It highlighted a huge frustration I have with bad leadership.

LEADERSHIP BY ILLY 101

As a leader/manager/NCO/coach/whatever you never just go up to someone underneath you and ask ‘are you ok in your current situation?’ or ‘do you understand the assignment/strat/plan?’  For the latter, in a military or sports environment, you run the bloody thing over… and over… and over.  In a work environment you observe what’s going on.  The result should be you making the call based on what you see.  That’s why you are in that position.  If you can’t tell or you don’t know then you shouldn’t be, plain and simple.

What happened tonight in practice was that we got all of 2 runs in in an hour.  The second run came right at the end and it didn’t go as the ‘caller’ wanted.  On top of that both runs only covered the initial placement.  We never got into “what if?” scenarios.  We called it a night after the ‘caller’ asked if everyone was ok and if they understood.  Everyone that answered said yes.  It was clear from that last run, though, that we weren’t.

Gimmicks are not strategy

When it came time for the battle the enemy didn’t do anything like our ‘caller’ had expected.  Since we hadn’t planned or even remotely trained for something like this we were caught flat-footed and they cleaned our clocks.

This has been a recurring theme from my experience in a fairly good clan on the NA server.  Instead of working on tactics and formations that are flexible we practice very specific moves (and often just opening moves) in hopes that that will be enough to catch an enemy in a bad spot and win.  Sadly, given the huge spread of player and clan skill, this often works (since most clans are just… bad). 

Why’s that sad?  The reason is we then take that same approach against clans that practice or against other clans with good players.  When tried against them said gimmicks are just a roll of the dice.  That’s not a recipe for success.

In our old clan leadership and some players had selective memory and blew such setbacks off (one infamous leader claimed we were undefeated when playing tier 10s when we… weren’t).  We recently got our rears handed to us in a war so we’re more grounded than before.  As such, and coupled with our recent frustrations, I’m hoping our leadership will be more willing into looking at a flexible approach.

 

 

* Stupid Windows Live Writer.  I made a post about an hour ago.  Just now I went to edit it but decided to write a second post instead.  I canceled pulling up the old one, made a new one with a different title, and yet it still overwrote the old one completely.

** We’re working on the organized part… sort of.  While I had seen some huge strides in the last week tonight was a huge step back to where we were before.