This is a story about the best piece of advice anyone ever gave me.

It was from one of my first mentors, Scott Shapiro-Neiwert, and is nearly as true in life as it is in judging.

I was certified as a judge at a conference when Scott and a bunch of other judges traveled quite a ways to help jumpstart a community, as Montana didn’t have a single certified judge at the time. We stayed in touch afterward – throughout my first year or two judging, he became my go-to. I scrolled way back in our message history, out of idle curiosity, and it looks like my first couple of questions were about CDAs tracking in all zones, running events with WotC approval, and Hunting Wilds’ interaction with Blood Moon.

(Can you guess the question? Do you know the answer?)

While many judges I met at the conference made me feel silly for not knowing something or like it was a real imposition to answer my questions, Scott never did. He did a great job modeling the qualities of an old-world L3 – what we’d call an L5, today. Later on, as I started working large events, we got the chance to work together several times and he continued to be a mentor. When I first started working toward old L3/today’s L5, he gave me a lot of advice and wrote me one of my recommendation reviews.

At some event or other, I was up to something I probably shouldn’t have been up to. Maybe I made an off-color joke, maybe I was goofing off on the event floor…regardless, some buffoonery was afoot, and Scott asked me, pointedly, “Do you think an L3 would do that?”

I, thinking I was slick, retorted, “Well, I’m not L3 yet. I’ll get L3, then I’ll stop doing that.”

Scott took a beat, then asked me the question that’s stuck with me since: “Have you ever heard the saying, ‘levels are a lagging indicator’ before?”

That was closer to a decade ago than I care to consider, but it’s stayed with me.

So what is “levels are a lagging indicator” supposed to mean?

It means the best person to promote to L1 is the person at FNM who has already been answering rules questions; and the best person to promote to L2 is the L1 who has been helping run the LGS’s RCQs.

It means the best person to make a team lead for an event is the person who has already been leading/mentoring others, and has already shown they know how to do the team’s tasks.

It means you don’t get promoted up a level and then start acting the way people of that level do; you get promoted up a level because your behavior has already demonstrated you’re there.

A professional, an expert…someone trained

One place this often comes up, in my view, is in differing ideas of how serious or goofy judges should behave while on the event floor. When it comes to professionalism, everyone has their own line – and that’s fine. It’s great that some judges enjoy LGS prerelease events, where they show up in cosplay and give the announcements in a character voice and all that, and other judges enjoy the more straitlaced events.

I generally err toward trying to behave more professionally – but I recognize that means different things in different circumstances, and part of the job is often to crack a joke or relax a bit. Sometimes the TO specifically asks you to make a meme for a nametag and act a goofball, even though you’re the HJ and would never normally consider doing such a thing.

When the TO specifically demands it, I am capable of having fun

Whatever degree of professionalism someone chooses to embrace, my advice is this: recognize a choice is being made. There’s no way to avoid it. “Everything is political,” etc. Just as there’s no simple “right” or “wrong” answer for how much money to request to work an RCQ, there’s no way to draw a simple line on behaviors, and say everything above is acceptable and professional and everything below the line is to be reprimanded.

That said, I’ve known of a lot judges who hurt their reputation by being unprofessional – and relatively few who were hurt by being too focused on the job.

If someone wants to show up for work unshowered, unprepared, unetcetera’d, that’s their business. Not every tournament organizer is going to care. If a judge’s perspective is ~”I don’t care if the TO doesn’t like me in fun mode and doesn’t staff me again; I only want to work for fun TOs anyway,” well, so be it. But again, they should recognize they’re making a choice, and there might be some people on staff that day who do care.

And if a judge is showing up to events, wondering why they aren’t getting promoted in various ways, perhaps they would do well looking at the judges already in that position and trying to emulate them. Because levels are a lagging indicator.