Six Styles of Leadership in Esports
Time and time again organizations have invested in coaches who fail to understand how to be leaders. Coaching a team is more than just identifying goals or improving player mechanics. Teams need to be organized, motivated, and led to victory. Each team is unique in its players, owners, and culture, making it hard to have one universal leadership style. Organizations like TSM and CLG operate very differently from one another, and when a coach steps in to lead a team they need to adjust accordingly. A coach entering into a new team has to learn how to adjust their leadership style to meet the needs of their team.
Daniel Goleman’s Styles of Leadership
Flexibility is the key to being an effective leader. Leaders need to understand how to deal with teams and adjust their style of leadership to accomplish their goals. To help us define different styles of leadership, I am going to reference Daniel Goleman’s “6 Leadership Styles.” Mr. Goleman outlined these styles in an attempt to answer the age old question, “What do effective leaders do?” While Mr. Goleman writes a great deal about these leadership styles, we are going to briefly introduce his six types to help us analyze coaching in esports.
Lets start by categorizing the six styles into positive and negative cultural impact:
Negative Cultural Impact:
When used alone these styles have a negative impact on team culture. However, they are still efficient styles for leaders to use and should be carefully paired with a style that has a positive cultural impact.
Coercive – Coercive style of leadership revolves around authority figures demanding teams to follow orders while forcing restructuring and cultural change. This style is often viewed by employees as “being talked at.”
Pacesetting – A leader that implements high standards for performance, while meeting or exceeding these standards in the workplace, is often following the Pacesetting style. This is often implemented when a leader wants, or needs, a higher level of performance regardless of employee morale.
Positive Cultural Impact:
Authoritative – The most effective and widely used style, authoritative leaders are those who set new goals and standards while giving the team room to achieve them. This style focuses on change within the team or organization, and can often breathe new life into a struggling situation.
Affiliative – These are the types of leaders who are flexible, happy, and great at bringing teammates together. This style focuses on positive reinforcement and encouragement of team members. Affiliative leaders accomplish goals by focusing on team member’s emotional state.
Democratic – The democratic style focuses on involvement and participation from the team working under the leader. It is best employed when the leader needs to build a team identity or needs the team to buy into an idea he wants to implement.
Coaching – The last style focuses on an individual’s personal development over team focused goals. The coaching style of leadership is when a leader is willing to work on a one-on-one base with a team member, and the team member, or members, is willing to listen.
It is important to note that no style should be used by itself. The strength of these styles is the ability for them to be mixed and matched. This allows for leaders to adopt multiple styles to address team needs, or to be able to switch to an entirely new style if they feel it is needed. After all, a good leader is not defined by the style of leadership he or she uses, but by how many styles of leadership they are able to use.
Leadership in Esports
Leadership in esports, specifically from a coaching perspective, has grown exponentially over the past year. Organizations now realize that the structure a coach brings is an invaluable resource, and leagues are now allowing coaches to be present on stage with the players. However, organizations struggle to find qualified coaches for their teams. Let’s take a look at some League of Legends teams and the challenges their coaches had to face.
CLG
North America’s CLG is the reigning North American LCS champion and currently vying for the top spot in the league. However, before last split (2015 summer) the team struggled to even make playoffs, often ending the season in the relegation tournament. A large part of the team’s success was due to coaching decisions CLG made in the off season when they brought in Coach Chris “BlurredLimes” Ehrenreich.
Before Coach Chris was brought on to CLG, the team struggled with synergy between its primary personalities. Previous coaches failed to build a positive team culture to fuel the players drive to win. However, when Coach Chris joined CLG as the head coach, and Tony “Zikz” Gray moving to strategic coach, CLG would take the North American LCS by storm with a 13-6 season, eventually winning the LCS Playoffs for the first time in the organizations history.
Coach Chris accomplished this feat by being an authoritative leader. He saw a new way to build CLG and he pushed the team to accomplish it with him. In an interview with Riot Games he talks about how he is introducing new techniques to help the player’s combat nerves while building a better atmosphere. When CLG’s star player, Peter “Doublelift” Yang, approached Coach Chris on retiring before the split started, he would adopt the affiliative style, convincing Doublift to stay. He would continue with this combination of authoritative and affiliative styles to build CLG into a team hungry for success.
Coach Chris was not afraid to draw the line when it came to personal relationships with his team. As shown in the Uncut CLG Insight video, provided by Razer, he uses Coersive leadership through a speech to draw the professional line between the players and the coaches. This speech shows that Coach Chris was able to move freely between leadership styles. It also shows how Coach Chris helped to teach and develop Coach Zikz, who would eventually fill his role when CLG and Coach Chris parted ways at the end of 2015.
TSM
North American juggernaut TSM has had its fair shares of trouble regarding coaching and leadership. The team consists of superstars in almost every position and has historically struggled to give coaches the respect and authority they need to control the players. In the 2015 summer split, TSM owner Andy “Reginald” Dihn would step in and implement a pacesetting leadership style over his coaching team. With playoffs and the World Championship on the line, he would push the team to match his work ethic as they prepared for playoffs. While TSM finished runner up in playoffs and made it to the World Championships, the staff and players were burnt out, contributing to a major organization shuffle.
In 2016 TSM would rebuild their coaching team and League of Legends team all together. Now the team consists of international superstars in almost any position. To support this new roster, TSM brought on KC “Woodbuck” Woods as Head Coach and former Fnatic analyst Josh “Jarge” Smith as the Strategic Coach. While this staffing lineup would mimic what CLG had done in the previous split, it would not meet the same success.
It is evident through social media comments and episodes of TSM Legends that Coach KC failed to captivate the team in the same way Coach Chris did with CLG. Coach KC’s strict attitude would eventually cause him to lose the trust of the players and the organization. Coach KC wanted to move TSM in a new structural direction, while being demanding with the players. This shows that he was trying to implement authoritative and coercive styles of leadership. This was not what the team needed as the players were driven and talented but lacked a team culture and strong relationships among one other.
As TSM struggled to find its identity, upper management looked to bring in sports psychologist Weldon Green. In TSM’s weekly show, TSM Legends, Weldon is shown on screen working with the team as he creates a new team atmosphere. Weldon style of leadership is heavily contrasted from what Coach KC has shown. Instead of long speeches he introduced team meditation and promoted team discussion that involved each player’s opinion. By gaining the trust of his team, and moving the team in a new direction with him, Weldon demonstrated an outstanding combination of authoritative and democratic leadership. This resulted in the team responded with going undefeated the following weekend, and with Weldon joining TSM for the teams playoff run.
Coaches as Leaders
The success of a coach is not based on game knowledge or experience working with athletes. It is determined on how well they understand how to lead a team. It has been proven that a coach’s leadership style should never remain static. Being able to identify and adapt one of Goleman's six styles of leadership is a crucial skill to have as a head coach.
Coach Chris and Weldon Green have shown the importance of flexibility in leaders. Through adapting their style of leadership to fit the attitudes of the players and the culture of the team they led the teams to enormous success. They were able to lean on the gaming experts in their team to help them understand the mechanics of the game, while focusing on improving team atmosphere, drive, and synergy.
Goleman's Six Styles of Leadership are a part of every accomplished leader. Yet teams continue to struggle to find coaches who properly understand how to implement these styles. Until organizations are willing to look past game knowledge and coaching degrees to recruit coaches who are experienced in leadership, teams will continue to watch teams struggle to bring out the potential in their players.
Photo Via Riot Games/Flickr