Leading a clan in a mobile game is like herding cats, if half the herd had crippling physical and emotion disabilities. Oh, and about a third of the herd aren’t cats, they’re kittens.

The bar to avoid getting the boot in my Clash Royale clan is laughable low. Join clan wars more often than not, and when you do, use all three collection-day battles. On war day try to have a win-rate above 20%. Yes… the bar is at 20%. The final item is a more general “don’t annoy me” rule, which includes things like don’t ask for elder, don’t spam chat, and don’t catch me on a bad day being a derp.

And yet with the bar to stay basically laying on the floor, I’m still booting 5-10 people a week. The good news is since our clan is relatively high ranking in terms of trophies, new recruits roll in as soon as the last piece of dead weight is discarded.

The key to the whole thing is having correct expectations and knowing how to manage. On the expectations front, I’m not looking for people like me, because, well, I’m here, and that means 99% of people aren’t, so if I booted everyone not on my level, I’d be in a two account clan; my main account and my alt. Plus you never know when a diamond-in-the-rough might come along; someone who starts out being terrible but actually shows improvement and has a fairly high ceiling. You need to sift through the dreck to find those people, and then to keep them the clan has to overall be worthwhile.

The only way you MIGHT find those people to begin with is by active management. If I wasn’t keeping tabs on who’s terrible, and then quickly removing them regularly, someone decent-to-great might miss us because the derp bus is currently full. On the other hand, as mentioned above, this can’t be too heavy-handed or the clan might death spiral, or decent players get depressed because management is ‘too mean’. It’s all a balancing act.

I enjoy it for two reasons. One, it adds a layer to my online gaming that I find challenging and a different ‘progression path’. I’m not just interesting in my own account climbing the ranks, I’m also invested in my clan climbing as well. Second, I’ve seen that it slowly helps build up my management skills in the real world. While I can’t boot people as easily (if only…), methods that work online to build people up and get them to succeed can also be applied at work, especially in IT when so much of the work is done via online collaboration, and the expectation is that you provide instruction and hand off the work to be done halfway across the globe.

I’ve joke in the past about this blog making me rich via Darkfall, but I’d be lying if this blog hasn’t overall helped me succeed in a roundabout way; blog readers form the core of online groups, and those online groups help develop skills that turn into promotions and opportunities in the real world. Welcome to 2018.