Adventures in guild management

Been a long time since my last post, and that one looked pretty bad. I was pretty bored at the time, having just leveled my 'last' (haha) toon. Things change. I was laid off 3 weeks ago, and I had alot of time on my hands. So i started playing WoW during the day while waiting for school to start up. At some point, not recently but not so long ago, my best friend stopped playing, got burn out. So he gave me the reins of the guild. However, given the high relapase rate, he came back, just in time! I'm handing the reins back to him.

What did I do? Well, I didn't make any sweeping changes to the guild. We had a pretty solid core and everyone was more or less happy and drama free. I did keep the recruitment thread up to date. I did outline my vision of the guild as far as raids go. I organized some retro-raids as before. I took care of the guild bank but elected some people to take care of it. I promoted some people who were officer material.

What did I learn?

1) Deligate. If you have a large 100+ member guild, you arent going to be able to do everything for everyone. Yes, as an officer I feel i have a duty to help people with heroics and the like, but I will almost never do run-throughs for someone unless they are a friend (and side note - most adult players will never beg or ask for run-throughs). But I added some officers to handle the duties I used to have.

2) Backup. Its not a bad thing to have two people do a task. They can divide the task however they want, but as long as it gets done, it's fine. I gave the bank job to the new, eager officer and an old hand who doesn't play much any more. That way both have a role in the job and it gets done smoothly (sometimes too many people is bad though).

3) Continuity. It's hugely upsetting as a guild member to find your friend the GL has just gquit (effectively). It's not you, its them (well its proably not you). Burnout is natural and expected, nobody likes doing the same thing forever. It helped alot I think that I was pretty involved in teh guild as the GL was stepping down, thus not too much changed. People got used to seeing my face and having me handle the issues that crop up.

4) Vision. For 3.2 I knew we were going to have a huge bolus of people and raiding was going to get alot easier. I implimented a no-brainer vision.

a) Get naxx over and done with, even if it requires extending raid lockouts.
b) Do TOC and hTOC every day until you got most of the gear from that place - naxx25 gear from hTOC is better than any drop we could get.
c) Start doing Ulduar as soon as possible.

I think this vision lead to us (well, the guild's raiding group) going into ulduar and doing flame lev (which is damn easy but big for confidence).

Now I gladly hand the reins back to my friend, who is much more experienced with people management than I am. I'm grateful for the opportunity to gain some experience, and I think did pretty well actually.