I've run a fantasy football league for twenty years, all as commissioner, and I've learned more about leadership from it than I could ever have anticipated. Leadership skills are unusual, in that anyone can develop them by going to school or finding a mentor or reading stacks of business bro books, but from my experience nothing beats actual leadership roles, even if said role is within the nonsensical context of a fantasy football league.
It's been an interesting year for our league so far thanks to COVID and its effect on the NFL schedule - fantasy football is a weekly pursuit, which means the NFL's containment "strategy" of rescheduling games at a fart's notice isn't doing us any favors. Of course, we did nothing to prepare, agreeing in the offseason to deal with issues as they arose, so when the first rescheduling happened three weeks ago we had to respond in real-time. I ended up exercising a little executive power - I imposed some basic rules for COVID-related substitutions, suggested using total points for at least one playoff position, and buffered the fragile structure with a "no assholery" policy to deal with unforeseen circumstances. Over the ensuing two weeks, we clarified the latter policy, detailing that "no assholery" means "anything goes if you and your opponent agree", which I guaranteed by offering to serve as a tiebreaker, if necessary.
The leadership lesson of the past three weeks isn't directly related to any of the above - rather, it's that cultivating a high level of trust is often the most valuable leadership skill. When we decided in the summer to deal with problems as they arose, we were essentially saying that even in the middle of a competitive season we felt capable of placing the good of the league ahead of selfish concerns. We were saying that we had twelve members of a group rather than twelve individual contractors. Most importantly, we were confirming trust, both throughout the league and at the very top of the power structure.
Trust doesn't happen overnight, and it definitely doesn't emerge naturally just because of a crisis. My hunch is that many leagues crumbled this fall as COVID exposed each league's lack of unity, compromise, and sharing, all of which result from trust. Trust is earned, and it is earned over a period of time defined by consistently trustworthy decisions. The leaders who dedicated themselves each morning to the goal of accumulating trustworthy decisions had the trust they and their organizations needed when this crisis hit; the rest learned the reality that leadership without trust is nothing more than a fantasy.
