My last column dealt with what it means to be a community leader. Leadership is the cornerstone of any community. Without it, communities crumble. And if you want your store to grow, you can't do it alone.

When you view your staff or volunteers through the lens of leadership, things can get scary. Leaders are the face, the identity of your community and your store. They're as responsible as you are in many ways. So how do you choose them right? How do you find (or make) good leaders?

A little background about me is in order. I've worn many hats before game store owner, perhaps the msot interesting being church transformation apprentice. It sounds far more glamorous than it should. I was on staff at a mid-sized Presbyterian church while we worked with a consultant, and for a while I apprenticed under him to engage with the process more fully and help more churches in our area. Needless to say, a lot of my views about community come from this background.

This column will deal with two key facets to sharing leadership with others. One will primarily be your work, articulating key elements of your store's mission (oh yes, we're talking mission statements, but don't worry, we'll steer clear of hollow jargon). Once you have that, you'll have a framework to base evaluation on for staff and volunteers. This will help you picking the right people, and also help them know what you want and what matters.

Values and Mission

I know, I know, it sounds jargon-y already. Bear with me.

I used the word "articulate" earlier for a very important reason. You probably know instinctively what your business is about, what you hope to accomplish, all that good stuff. But you need some way to pass that on clearly to your would-be co-workers, so they can share your intuitions and represent your store properly. That's what this is about. You will get back from this as much as you put in.

Values

Put simply, values are what you do when nobody's looking. Less simply, values are the attitudes and actions you take, intentionally or instinctively. These are what defines you and your store.

I noted three things in my last column that fall under Values: generosity at the gaming table, openness to new players, and positive social behaviors. Obviously, I strongly recommend these three. The truth is of course that you need to define your own values.

The first step is honestly evaluating yourself. We all want to say we value good customer service or a welcoming community, but frankly those are meaningless. What does "good customer service" mean to you? Does it mean saying hello? Smiling? Engaging customers, or not bothering them? Giving them what they want, or making suggestions? A good rule of thumb is, if you can't point to the action specifically, it's probably not really a value.

Here's a few areas you should consider as to how your values impact them:

• What games you choose to stock, or not to stock
• When is it okay to play a game at work, if ever?
• Do you have a customer loyalty/rewards program, and how does it work?
• How do you set your tournament prizes?
• How handicapped accessible is your store? Shopping area? Gaming area?
• How do you feel about kids in the store?
• What kind of seats does your gaming area have?
• Do you require a deposit for special orders?

There are literally hundreds of questions I could ask. My point is, your unconscious values are how you base your decisions throughout the store's operation. Ferret them out. Figure out why you do all that stuff, so you can pass it on.

An ideal list of Values is in the neighborhood of half a dozen to ten. Less than 6 is probably too few. Double digits is probably too many to remember and effectively use. If you find you have too few, see if you can drill down deeper. Keep asking "why does this matter?" If you have too many, look for similarities and see if there's a root value behind two or more of them.

Mission

How will the world be different because your store exists? That's your mission. It's really that simple.

But let's spell it out anyway, because your mission is quite frankly of absolute importance. It's the entire point for your store existing. Without it, you have no reason to do what you're doing.

First off, your mission is not to make money, or play games on the clock, or be your own boss. Okay, it could be, but in all seriousness if it is you might want to skip this column. It really isn't for that.

We're talking communities. People's lives and relationships. What Starbuck's called the "third place" after home and work. So how are you making any of that better?

We'll dig deeper into mission planning in a future article. For now, nail down a fundamental change you hope your store will cause. Don't worry, once you have some good people you can work together to re-evaluate and re-write. You'll tweak all of this periodically over the life of your store.

How to Hire Someone

First off, I'm going to use the words "hire" and "staff" and all that to refer to actual paid staff and volunteer help. You should think of your volunteers are seriously as you think of staff. You'll see why soon.

Hiring staff is all about picking the right people. So how do you do that? There's four criteria I recommend.

1. Mission Attitude - They have to share a passion for your store's mission, plain and simple.
2. High Integrity - They have to be a person of strong character, able to handle conflict or tense situations without falling into destructive habits. This one's harder to evaluate without knowing a person. It helps to simply ask around. Rarely will a person come out of nowhere; you probably know people who know them. Google them, too. Find their Facebook profile. See what's out there.
3. Skills Competency - They have to know their stuff! For paid staff that means running a register, customer service, manual labor like sweeping and taking out the trash... all that good stuff you wish you didn't have to do, as well as product knowledge and being able to teach and sell a game. For event organizers, that means knowing their game's rules, how to run an event, and for tournaments how to adjucate rulings, handle pairings, etc. Can they do the job?
4. Teamwork - To cut past the fancy buzzword, can they put the mission and any co-workers above their own personal gain? A good team worker is someone who doesn't try to dodge hard work, pass blame, or claim recognition. They can also trust others to handle difficult jobs, and can work past failures.

No matter what the position is, you can use these four criteria to evaluate someone. Don't make a secret of it, either. If you let people know these are the four things that matter, they'll know exactly where they stand. You'll protect them and yourself from petty squabbles, fears of personal problems, and give them license to take some initiative and get work done.

Hiring Volunteers

Someone comes to you and wants to run events for their favorite game at your store. Great! Right?

All our volunteer organizers get what I call "the talk." I set a meeting when we can sit down for about half an hour together. Setting a future time is important, to test their commitment and reliability.

My first question is always "why do you want to do this?" Their answer should match our Mission. It's that simple. They may not know exactly, so it's okay to help a little, but you should get a red flag if it's anything like "so me and my friends can have more people to play with," or heaven forbid "so I can win prizes" or "I heard you give store credit to people who run stuff."

After question 1, I'll do some talking for a bit. First up is always the store's Mission and Values. I spell it out and gauge their reaction. The good ones are really glad we make those things such a priority. The bad ones blow it all off. That shows their integrity.

Quite frankly, if they pass the first two tests, I'm usually happy to give them a try. Skills competency and even teamwork can be taught. Mission attitude and integrity can't. But I'll press on through the rest. Simple questions about game experience, work experience, etc. will fill in the rest.

If they made it that far, the next most crucial step is to set an evaluation period. Most games are friendly to weekly events, so shoot for something about 4-6 weeks long. Around the last week or two, talk to them again about how it's going and go back over the four evaluation points.

Evaluating Existing Staff

Let's say your store is already up and running, and you're trying to implement these methods. How do you approach it?

First of all, people need some fair notice. Like I said, don't make these things a secret. Develop your Values and Mission, perferrably in collaboration with trusted staffers. Getting other people's input can reveal hidden biases you wouldn't have seen on your own. Once it's all established, give it to everyone in writing (seriously, write it down!), and set an evaluation period. I'd suggest six months to a year, though if you're in some kind of a crisis situation feel free to step things up.

The evaluation process is very simple, and can even be shared if it makes sense for your staff culture. You can go through the four criteria and rate them. I say keep the scale small, like 1-5. 5 is above and beyond expectation; 4 is where people should be; 3 is on the fence; 2 is bad with time to improve; 1 is destructively bad. An average score of 4 is the target for everyone; an average of 2-3 means they need to shape up by next evaluation. Someone who scores a 1 in more than one category might not be worth keeping around at all.

If you have staff you trust, get them in on it. You can set up a quick Google Form with the four big questions and a comments field, and have the results emailed to you. Don't make it anonymous, but do make the results private so only you see them. You want to be able to follow up privately about any results you didn't expect. When you talk with each staffer about their evaluations, stick to the average numbers and your own comments. Don't quote anyone or bring up others' opinions.

And I repeat, only try this if you have a staff culture of trust! If you have any reason to think it could stir bad blood, just do things yourself privately. You're the boss!

Firing Staff (Including Volunteers)

Nobody wants to fire anyone, especially not a volunteer. Let's take a simple example and say your Magic: the Gathering judge has been phoning it in lately, ignoring his friends' rules violations, or even fixing the pairings. You do your first evaluation and it doesn't go well. He loudly reminds you how big Magic is, how his friends play at your store because of him judging, how much money you're making, etc.

Let's up the ante here and say he's absolutely right about all of it. Half your Magic attendance are his friends, and they alone spend enough to make you think twice. What do you do?

Here's where this whole process really pays off. You have a clear mission statement now, and you mean it. He's shown he doesn't care about the store's mission, which means he's a bad representation of your store, and you don't want him in a position to represent you. Let him get mad, let him make threats, let him do whatever he wants.

You have a mission, and the bottom line is he's standing in your way. You are protecting far more than your store now; you're protecting all the people who aren't coming to your tournaments because this guy is driving them away. Trust me on this! I've met countless people running our store who, for one reason or another, had a problem with stores gone by in our town, and refused to go to them.

Furthermore, you're able to provide clear criteria long before taking drastic actions. You can show him months ahead of time exactly what you're looking for, and what it takes to run events at your store. It won't be a surprise, it won't be your personal opinions.

At my store we're on our third Yu-Gi-Oh! judge. Each one gets "the talk" before we start. When a problem comes up, we can point specifically at why it's a problem. Because of this process, the first two are still happy customers, and even help out if the main judge can't make it one week. We were able to let them go without hard feelings because we were clear at all times what we were looking for.

Leaders Training Leaders

The last part of "the talk" I didn't mention is that we urge all our organizers to find help. It doesn't have to be right away, but we want every organizer to have a partner. People burn out, even doing things they love. Having someone else ready to take up the slack, or help plan, or even just commiserate with, is a massive boon. If you picked them right, they will - consciously or unconsciously - pass on your store's Mission and Values to their helper. You should still give the new one "the talk" yourself of course, but it'll be far easier.

The Magic judge stuff was purely hypothetical. Our Magic judges have been a Godsend, quite frankly. We lucked into an excellent judge starting off when we opened, and within the first year he recruited two more judges, both L1 certified. One moved away, but the other recruited yet another judge.

It doesn't always work. I'm still running our Warhammer 40,000 events myself, but for those games with excellent volunteers, I know I don't have to watch over anyone's shoulder. We check in from time to time, make sure everything's running smoothly, and trust each other to go about our business of making ours the best store we possibly can. Waiting for the right people is worth far more.

If you have any questions, feedback or topic requests, please email me at jeremy@plu1sgaming.com! Thanks.