Why the most valuable leadership experience often starts long before the job title
Let me paint a picture that might feel familiar.
The team was quiet, patient, and focused. We’d spent weeks preparing for this: running through plans, refining our timing, working out exactly how to operate when the pressure hit.
Now we were deep into the final stretch. One mistake had already snowballed into several more. We were off-plan, the situation was unravelling fast, and there was no time to workshop a perfect fix. I had to make a call. It needed to be quick, confident, and just enough to hold things together.
The team responded instantly. No one questioned it. We pulled it back from the brink.
As leaders, we’ve all been there: the moment where things start to slide, the plan falls apart, the pressure spikes, and you’re the one responsible for keeping the team focused and moving.
But this didn’t happen during a sprint. We weren’t leading up to a product launch, and there was no client on the other side.
This happened in an online game, during what’s known as a raid, where a team of players works together to take down a giant dragon, and it taught me more about leadership than I realised at the time.
Leadership often starts before the title
It would be easy to read that and conclude that I learned a lot from gaming. That’s true, but it’s not the point.
The point is that leadership often starts in places we don’t think to count.
Before we ever get a role with “lead” in the title, many of us have already spent years building the instincts that make us effective leaders. We just learned them somewhere less obvious: in hobbies, creative work, community spaces, volunteer groups, family responsibilities, side projects, or teams that existed entirely outside the workplace.
For me, one of those places was online raiding.
In a raid, a group of players takes on a complex, high-pressure challenge that demands precision, timing, and coordination. You’re not competing against other people, but against a brutally scripted computer-controlled opponent.
The encounter itself might only last ten or fifteen minutes, but that short window is the result of weeks of preparation: researching strategies, practising execution, analysing mistakes, refining communication, and learning how to stay calm when everything starts going wrong.
Everyone has a defined role. Everyone depends on everyone else. A single misstep can throw the entire attempt off course. You’re constantly adapting, making snap decisions, managing frustration, and keeping the team focused when success still feels just out of reach.
That might not sound like a conventional leadership environment. Strip away the dragon, though, and the mechanics start to look very familiar.
Preparation and adaptation are born in alignment
One of the first things raiding taught me was that preparation is not just about having a plan. It’s about building shared understanding.
You can have the best strategy in the world, but if everyone interprets it differently, you don’t really have a strategy at all. The real work happens before the moment of pressure: making sure people know their role, understand the intent behind the plan, and can recognise when adaptation is needed.
That still holds true in technical leadership.
A delivery plan, an architecture decision, or a roadmap only becomes useful when the team understands not just what they’re doing, but why. When people understand the shape of the problem and the reasoning behind the approach, they make better decisions in motion.
They’re not simply following instructions; they’re operating with context.
That kind of alignment creates resilience. And when things inevitably go off-plan, resilience matters more than perfection.
Under pressure, decisiveness beats elegance
Another lesson came from the moments where things started to unravel. In a raid, there you don’t have time to stop and debate the ideal response. If the plan has broken down, you need to assess the situation quickly, make a call, and give the team something clear to act on.
The perfect decision made too late is usually less useful than a good-enough decision made in time.
That doesn’t mean being reckless. It means understanding that leadership under pressure is often about reducing uncertainty.
People don’t always need flawless instructions in a difficult moment. Often, they just need clarity. They need someone to create enough stability for the team to move together again.
I’ve found the same thing to be true in technical delivery. When a release is wobbling, a dependency has failed, or a project is drifting, the team benefits less from a beautifully phrased analysis than from timely, grounded direction.
Not because one person has all the answers, but because momentum matters. In those moments, leadership is often about creating a path forward that the team can rally behind.
The most important lesson had nothing to do with strategy
The most valuable lesson I took from raiding wasn’t about planning or decision-making. It was about people.
There was a period where one of my raid teams was close to falling apart. We weren’t making progress, and every failed raid night made the atmosphere worse. Tension built quickly. Every unsuccessful attempt felt heavier than the last. Some nights, it genuinely felt uncertain whether everyone would even come back for the next session.
At that point, it would have been easy to focus even harder on performance: tighter calls, more analysis, more scrutiny, more pressure.
Instead, on the final attempt of the night, I started shot-calling in a deliberately silly voice. It was a small thing, and a very unserious one. But it changed the room.
It broke the tension. It made people laugh. It reminded everyone that we were still a team, not just a group of people quietly disappointing each other. Over time, it became a bit of a tradition. The atmosphere softened. People relaxed. We bonded more. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, once the team felt safer and more connected, we started performing better too.
That experience has stayed with me far more than any specific strategy ever did. Because if people are tense, discouraged, or bracing for failure, it becomes much harder for them to do their best work. If they feel trusted, supported, and able to recover from mistakes, everything changes.
That’s true in a raid group, and it’s just as true in a delivery team.
My approach to leadership has often been described as people-first, and I think a lot of that started there. Not in a management course or a formal framework, but in learning that morale, trust, and psychological safety are not soft extras around performance. They are part of performance.
If you take care of the people, the people take care of the work.
Leadership experience doesn’t only happen at work
I think we sometimes make leadership feel narrower than it really is. We tend to validate the experiences that look obviously professional: line management, project ownership, delivery accountability, formal mentoring. Those all matter, of course. But they’re not the only places leadership develops, and they’re often not the first.
Some of the best leadership instincts are built long before they’re recognised.
They show up in the person who has organised a chaotic volunteer team, kept a student society running, held a creative project together under pressure, supported others through uncertainty, or learned how to keep morale alive when a team is close to giving up.
Sometimes those experiences happen in places we instinctively dismiss because they don’t look “serious” enough. But the skills are still real. The stakes may be different, the setting may be unconventional, and the dragon may be literal, but the underlying human dynamics are often the same.
For me, leadership has been shaped by more than one unconventional environment. Before technical leadership, I worked in theatre. I’ve also worked in network infrastructure. Each of those spaces taught me something different about communication, pressure, teamwork, and responsibility. But the thread running through all of them has been the same: leadership is rarely something that appears the day your job title changes.
More often, it’s something you’ve been practising for years without realising.
So where did your leadership begin?
That’s the real question I keep coming back to. Not whether gaming can teach leadership lessons. Not whether my path was unusual. But whether we’re all perhaps overlooking parts of our own story that matter more than we think.
Maybe your earliest leadership experience didn’t happen at work. Maybe it happened in a rehearsal room, on a sports team, in a community group, during a side project, while caring for other people, while helping friends through something difficult, or in a hobby you never imagined belonged anywhere near your professional development. Maybe it happened somewhere you’ve never thought to count.
The point is not where it happened. The point is that it counts. In the end, the giant dragon taught me less about winning fights than it did about leading people. And I suspect most of us, if we look closely enough, have our own version of that story.
