Could playing among the exploding space stations, monsters and spiky-armoured warriors of online games such as Eve Online, EverQuest and World of Warcraft (pictured) offer leaders a useful chance to hone real-world leadership skills?

The organisational and strategic challenges facing players who serve as game leaders on MMORPGs – massively multiplayer online role-playing games – are familiar ones: making sense of ambiguous situations, transforming strategy into action, managing diverse teams collaboratively, etc. But these challenges are heightened in gaming because the organisation is built and sustained with a volunteer workforce.

An eight-month study on leadership in games, commissioned by IBM, found that online games can be informal but realistic simulators for contemporary leadership training, helping to teach “soft” aspects of leadership. For example, the pace of games means that leaders often have to make hundreds of strategic decisions in an hour of game play. The relatively mild consequences of failure allow players to test out a variety of leadership techniques and the temporary nature of many roles in games provides people who are followers in the real world with opportunities to lead.

Our study found that adopting distinctive aspects of the gaming environment could actually make it easier to lead people in the real world. We pinpointed at least two properties of games that we believe facilitate and enhance leadership: nonmonetary incentives; and transparency of a wide range of information, including individual players’ capabilities and performance.

Online players are rewarded for their efforts immediately after a quest is completed, creating a strong connection between effort and reward. Companies might devise schemes – instead of an end-of-year bonus, for example – to reward people for their contributions as soon as a project is completed. Synthetic currencies have tremendous value to game players: the fact that people care a great deal about virtual gains and losses could change business incentives. In gaming, data about individual players is constantly updated and on display to the entire team, allowing leaders to quickly locate players with useful skills and weapons.

To a leader who is assembling a team in an evolving business environment, a real-time composite view of a person – their skills, and passions – is likely to be more relevant than a static personnel file.

This is an edited extract from Leadership’s Online Labs, by Byron Reeves, Thomas W. Malone, and Tony O’Driscoll, published in Harvard Business Review (May). See hbr.org for more.

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