DIMMER VIEW Leadership qualification and selection
The Dimmer View of qualities needed for leadership is one of my recent contemplations. The thought occurred to me that leadership roles in many endeavors are based on factors that are invalid and that the very selection of leaders is also by methods that aren't so valid, too.
Since I don't wish to comment on politicians or political issues beyond stating that my belief is that all politicians are motivated by power lust and they all lie, let's not talk about the governments we all must endure, worldwide, nationally and locally.
The best way to explore the issue as chess players we can look at FIDE, USCF, chess clubs, and online chess clubs. Personally I don't know much about FIDE except to say that they seemed impotent when trying to set up a world championship match when Bobby Fischer held the title.
Not knowing the details of negotiations for that title defense won't keep me from casting an opinion that the soviets exerted pressure on FIDE leadership to ensure the match would not take place, or if it did, that the Russian player(s) would have the best advantage possible.
And I will also cast the opinion that the soviets had a tremendous influence on who ultimately led that organization and I support that opinion by pointing out that Kasparov was eager to wrestle control of the world championship away from FIDE as soon as he became world champ. I recall he formed a new group of professional chess players during that struggle.
Looking at USCF, we can see this is a business more than a governing body and they have a board and presumably their leadership is selected by and answers to the board. I'm guessing it's the same for chess.com. This, I suspect, makes their leadership more competent but maybe still subject to some amount of pressure from special interests, depending on who sits on the board.
The fact that business models require the organization to be competent (or else be replaced by some other entity that is) keeps them trying to do right by their members. Lichess is not too much competition for chess.com nor is the Continental Chess Association a formidable rival to USCF.
For this reason, I would not expect leadership of either of these organizations to be 100% grandmasters. You need high rated players on the board, but more importantly, you need some folks who have skills to make the organization competent. So really you need a mix of people competent to run things and people who can represent the elites' inerests.
And as you get down to OTB clubs and online clubs, that formula works best there too. The Sacramento Chess Club has been around forever and was named club of the year not so many years ago by USCF. They are a rarity in that they have a passel of club officers functioning not unlike a board. I wonder how many of their officers are among the top rated players. We should not use ratings as the qualifier for a person's inclusion in leadership roles.
An example of this is SCC's vice president for legal affairs. He's an attorney and a strong player, but if his rating was only 1200, he'd still be the best man for the job, as far as I know.
Looking at online clubs, the selection process for leadership roles is straight forward. If you form the club you are the Super Admin and until you die you have absolute power to select the other members who assume super admin, admin, and coordinator roles.
Why is this formula successful when it amounts to dictatorial powers for the "supreme leader" you might ask. Simple....unlike governments who can be directed by a dictator, online chess clubs (and otb ones for that matter) will simply lose their membership and close down if they aren't responsive to their membership's needs. Try quitting a chess club and you have no trouble, but try leaving an authoritative governmentally controlled country and see how easy it is to escape.
On a governmental level, poor governments have populations wanting to go someplace else but good ones have people wantng in, not out. Hence our constitutional republic, no matter what your opinion is of our present government or culture, is still the place to escape to from places under authoritarian rule.
So online clubs can have authoritarian leadership but that leadership needs to make the membership happy or they start leaving in droves. So it works. And it works best when the Super Admin/Founder of a club picks his or her co-leaders based on competency not chess rating but includes some input from high rated folks, too.
