Last week, the Washington Post published a video interview with me discussing how games build leaders.  I received a very thoughtful response from one viewer, Matt Lincoln, and would like to share it with you here:

You hit the nail on the head: the complex challenges inherent in a game like WoW put a premium on both individual skill and cooperation, but harnessing the best out of 25 people (most of whom have never met, are wildly different ages and from different backgrounds, and are scattered across the globe) takes real leadership. On a personal level, I’ve been invested with a mantle of responsibility and authority in my virtual “guild” that, so far anyway, eclipses what I’ve been exposed to at the professional level. But over the course of many, many raids, in weekly officer meetings, and on our heavily populated guild forums, WoW has offered me a crucible for the development of my leadership skills. As a result, I’m now confident that (1) I truly love to lead and to mentor, and (2) when I’m eventually given the chance to do so in a professional setting, I’ll have the confidence to lead with conviction and humility.

I’ve always been curious what sets apart good guilds from the great ones, and I suspect much of it comes in how raid leaders handle all that instant feedback you talked about in the video clip (in other words, the strength of their leadership).

One final anecdote … about two and a half years ago we had a young man in our guild describe how he’d recently been on a job interview in the IT field. He was a new college graduate without a lot of work experience. He got the job. But he told us that his interviewer later made it known to him that one of the things that made him attractive was that he was an officer in a successful raiding guild. To them that demonstrated both teamwork and leadership skills. That was when I began to wonder, not for the last time … how long will it take before that kind of recognition arrives in the mainstream?

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