How to lead a raid?

I expected that "natural leaders will emerge" and no need for dedicated raid leaders. Whenever in a farm raid I'm not needed, I skip it to allow others to lead. There is some progress on this field, but limited. What I missed is the real world problem "structural unemployment". There are unemployed people, there are open jobs but the two can't meet since the job needs education and no matter how motivated the unemployed guy is, he can't make himself able to do the job.

I watched a raid silently sitting behind my girlfriend who attended as a simple raiders. I've seen several leading mistakes that were responsible for low raid performance. I realized that while there are lot of raiding sources about how to spec, how to glyph, how to move at Magmaw, there are absolutely no raid leader sources. The reason is that the most important thing according to socials is "leadership" that cannot be taught. That is only true if you are leading socials and the job is to manipulate their feelings to do what you want them to do.

Leading in an a-social environment needs no "leadership", it is highly technical job, that's why "total jerk" (socially inept) people can lead HC guild raids very effectively. So behold the skills needed to be a good raid leader.

• Know the encounter and the available class abilities! It does not mean you should know everything. You can ask. I often ask "who can give 5% crit" and such. If you doubt, read or ask.
• There is no luck, besides putting 3 non-hitcapped interrupters to a target and all miss. Every single wipe should be analyzed. Wipe can be because of bad strategy or personal failure. The personal failures should be identified and punished. Unpunished failure demotivates the others, even to the point of "DC". Ignoring fails also signals the failer that his performance is OK while it's absolutely not. It was weird that on a raid, which was lead by someone else nothing was killed in the first half (1:30). I joined in the break and asked instantly: how much fail money was collected? 1 * 300G! On the next try alone I collected 4 * 300. The try after that the boss died.
• If you can't punish anyone, change the strategy! If a fined person keeps arguing that it wasn't his fault, maybe he is right. On Magmaw I was watching my girlfriends' monitor. Wipe after wipe because of parasites. She kept telling that they are cornered but the raid leader did not listen. The problem was that the guy with the mark just backed from the parasites until they reached the corner. The underlying (untold) strategy was: "stand on A. Pillar comes to A, run to B. While parasites go from A to B, kill them. Now pillar comes to B, run to A". It did not work due to low DPS. The parasites reached B alive, forcing the team back to the wall, the next pillar cornered them. The boss died when my girlfriend got enough, openly ignored the strategy and started running in circles. While the DPS became even lower and there were 2-3 bunch of parasites in the middle, they couldn't reach anyone because they were circle-kited. Of course the RL should have recognized that the original strat is not working.
• Using different setup, replacing someone who does not fit to the encounter is another form of strategy change. The worst thing a RL can do is "you saw X guild video, we'll do that". You are not leading X guild's raid. You have different setups, different weaknesses and strengths. I often brute-force 5/6 BWD with 4 healers. No guide told me that. I simply saw that heal is low, people get avoidable damage, but we are ages from the enrage. Also when we had 2 healers on Conclave, I sent a retripala to Rohash to heal a single warlock (while DPSing on Nezir in jump phase). No guide told me that either. On Halfus firstkill we use 3 tanks every time when available. On Maloriak when we had 3 healers, 2 tanks, I sent a holypala to set RF on and tank 2 adds, so only 7 go to the offtank. You must design your own strategy on the fly. This has nothing to do with leadership. It is simply boss theorycrafting.
• There must be no downtime. Don't use whisper because the others just see you AFK. Discuss everything in /raid. Ready check often. Fine AFK guy. If you have not written anything to chat in the last min out of combat, you are doing it wrong. Update people what's going on, even with a "sec talking to X".
• Differentiate "practice" try and "kill" try. No point wasting potions or +90 food when you know you'll wipe. Tell the people that now we are practicing, focus on movement. Feel free to use extra healers on practice, even if it makes the boss unkillable due to enrage. It's not only save you some consumables but also change the attitude of the players. "It was a pretty good P1, no one failed" instead of "damn we wiped again (now in P2)".

I really hope this guide increase raid leading effectivity in the guild. Outside the guild I doubt it's too useful. HC RLs don't need my advice, in social guilds several steps (like punishing or even identifying failers) is impossible.

PS: this question is no longer theoretical. We went to Al'Akir and it became clear that I won't be around on the firstkill. So if the guild ever want to kill him, must do so without me.