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Originally Posted by Devastator
5. Promises. Never try to promise anything unless you feel sure that you can pull through with it, sure enough to the possibility of knowing you will pull through. If you can't keep your promises, something's bound to happen that won't normally be in your favour. Losing staff members, having fights break out which can lead to sour relations and then losing staff, eventual loss of trust and then loss of staff, etc.
Obviously, you should consult your staff before making big decisions. Picking up any more than one project at a time while working on others without consideration of the workload it builds on members is a definite no. Doing so has a tendancy to draw older or even current projects to absolute zero and the fans will scream at you for it. Even the larger groups don't normally go beyond 3 or 4 series at any point in time unless they feel sure they can keep things moving.
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I don't know why people are getting so tied up with 'leadership'; the leader doesn't even have the power to make decisions, at best he can 'speak for the group'. He can formalize a decision that's already been made (de-facto / unspoken) by the members. But if he tries to 'make' a decision, esp. an unpopular one, he won't get very far. A leader can't much affect the decision to start a project or continue it, that's up to the individuals who associate with that project. If a leader tries to refuse a project that motivated individuals want to do, those individuals find a way to participate in that project anyways.
I don't completely disagree with everything that has been said. But the importance of leadership is really just partly what has already been said, communication, someone with a fair repuation who can try to maintain group harmony and resolve any arguments that start between own group members, someone who can formalize decisions and handle any 'grunt work' that no one else wants to, or cares to do. To say that leadership includes things like 'making decisions' makes it sound like it's some kind of sought-after position and that people are living in the past. The problem that causes is these frequent people who try to start and lead their 'own group' with no idea of how a volunteer-type group functions and then these nonfunctional groups where everyone wants to lead and order others around but no one wants to actually do any work.
And not to say that good leadership is unimportant, esp. if the group is to be around a long time. Good, effective leadership may prevent stagnation, it can prevent group breakups or schisms, and the like. And bad leadership (or leadership that tries to force / make decisions) is almost gauranteed to cause problems. A-keep / Conclave would be the most prominent and publically-known example of how project decisions are really made, and more importantly where a schism and breakoff was caused by a 'leader' trying to 'make (alter) a decision' he couldn't effectively make, ie. that wasn't really his own to make (if anyone remembers that thread which described it in detail).