This article is part of the series “How To Win /friends and Influence /guildies”. See the introduction for more.
If you’re reading the original book alongside, this corresponds to Part 1, Chapter 3: “He Who Can Do This Has the Whole World with Him. He Who Cannot Walks a Lonely Way”
If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.
Henry Ford
The principle behind this rather long-named chapter is really quite simple, and eloquently summed up in the above quote. There is only one way to get someone to do something, and that is to make them want to do it.
To do that, you have to talk about what they want, and not about what you want. For a raid or guild leader, these should nominally be the same thing, at least at a high level. Whatever your guild’s purpose is, that’s what everyone is showing up for – PvE progression, PvP dominance, or clean hard mode execution for example.
I won’t go into the examples that Carnegie uses in this chapter, as they’re all very business-oriented and somewhat dated. Instead, let’s look at some situations in which you might be trying to win your members or an individual member to your side.
In a Raid
An impassioned plea for people to focus on the next boss attempt usually come after the basic “here’s how the fight goes, let’s give it a try” approach has failed. You’re pretty sure that everyone understands the mechanics, but the execution is just going awry at some point. You may even understand who’s going off the rails first, but know that calling them out won’t make things any better.
In this context, you probably are going to be talking to your raid as a whole or to roles within the raid. What wants can you appeal to? The most obvious are the material rewards from the boss, but this only works if the boss has intrinsic value to the raid. Sometimes you get unexpectedly blocked by a boss that you’ve had on farm for a while. The loot is no longer appealing, at least not to most of the raid. You can appeal to everyone’s desire to just be done with the fight – perhaps asking certain roles to double-up and keep an eye out for people who you suspect are not focusing closely enough.
If the boss is linked to trash that is particularly annoying to clear, you can appeal to everyone’s desire to not repeat that the next night. This is effective when people are requesting to move to another boss in a non-linear dungeon. Do you remember pushing extra hard for a Shade of Aran kill in the early days of TBC just because of how painful it was to clear the trash after Curator?
If none of these seem appropriate or are having effect, you can drop one level lower and appeal to people’s desire for loot in the future (assuming you have a loot system that can offer bonuses). It may seem cheap or compromising to have to offer bonus DKP or EP to get people to do what they should have been doing all through the raid. Ideally, this is a last resort offered to encourage people to stay beyond a posted raid end or to go all-out on consumables in order to push progression. Offering strictly material bonuses regularly dilutes their value.
I know we’re all fed up of this boss, especially since he went down so easily the last few weeks. It’s late, and we all want to wrap up. But I’m sure nobody wants to spend an extra 20 minutes slogging through that trash again tomorrow night.
I know we can do this, and I’m sure you all do too. Let’s take five minutes to clear our heads, then come back and take him down. 1000 bonus EP if we do it without anyone dying in phase 2.
