How to choose team captain
 

Hey everyone just wondering how different teams elect their team captain and why you chose that way. Thanks

Re: How to choose team captain
 

Ours is usually done based on how much experience a candidate has, and then a vote takes place. This doesn't always work, though. I would recommend looking for leadership capabilities over technical experience.

Re: How to choose team captain
 

Went to Team 1511's conference on student leadership at the championship. They have a really unique and successful leadership structure, all the way down to how they are chosen. Really cool, and a model I would love to see my team emulate in the near future. Check it out here.

Re: How to choose team captain
 

For our team the captains must meet the our teams lettering requirements, and then there is a poll of the student body to nominate candidates. The top candidates all interview with our executive board and then the board discuses the candidates and chooses who will be the captains for the following season.

Re: How to choose team captain
 

Team 1619 chooses its President, Vice President, Secretary, and Safety Officer by elections in the fall. Each prospective candidate prepares a speech that is given to the rest of the students, who then vote based on the speeches given. It's great fun and usually ends up with bribery in the form of candy being passed out by all the candidates. When everyone does it, however, it becomes a level playing ground for all and it still won't make up for an exceptionally poor speech.

Re: How to choose team captain
 

Sorry if this derails from the main topic, I just want to put out there that having a president/ captain isn’t exactly obligatory.

Some teams have leadership boards made out of department heads, which may be independent or headed by mentors. Some have several co-captains. Every team has little nuances depending on where they’re based/ their mentor: student ratio/ or their size that may affect what works best for their own dynamic. For example, our team gets most of our students out of a two year school, so our high turnover (in combination with our larger size and unfortunately low mentor: student ratio) means a student board works better for introducing/ cultivating new leadership. Remember to evaluate your team’s personnel and existing structure to determine what’s the best fit.

From the board perspective (sorry I can’t speak from the single captain perspective), we get the luxury of leadership sort of “falling into place”. For our team, weekly leadership meetings are an hour before Saturday meetings start and are open to all students to attend/ provide perspective. The new leadership becomes pretty apparent from their attendance at these meetings and their involvement/ownership of tasks in their departments. We “assign” titles at the end of the season, but that’s really just a formality. It’s nice that, as a board, we get to reward those who put in the effort and allow for more targeted training of successors for vacating positions.

I apologize if this isn't relevant to what you're looking for; I just thought it was an interesting case study of how different factors can affect leadership structure.

Re: How to choose team captain
 

We have (based off memory, I didn't get to really work with 3173 this year) 3 "captains" that are elected every year. They are usually just called team leads instead of captain. Traditionally, at least 1 has been an underclassmen to ensure someone with leadership experience has been in the position the next year.

It is strictly a vote with a select mentor panel that have the power to veto on the off chance that who the students choose in their opinion wouldn't be a good representative for the team.

Re: How to choose team captain
 

popular election: every team member gets a vote. the Executive board from the previous year (President, vice president, secretary and the 2 lead mentors) interviews candidates beforehand to make sure they're ready for the workload.. . or at least I think they do... it's a good idea anyways

Re: How to choose team captain
 

Unless its unanimous (in the case of our team captain this year), we ask who wants to run. Then whoever wants to run gives a short speech and we vote. For smaller positions like our main administrative role (attendance, etc) we may not do speeches. For safety captain we choose a group of people who work together on safety during build season and they usually end up naturally choosing a leader.

Re: How to choose team captain
 

Our team elects a Captain by popular vote.

In Early May, any Grade 11/12 Students (Juniors & Seniors for our American Friends) can be nominaed by other members.

Once all of the candidates have been nominated, we hold a vote at our next meeting. Each of the candidates gets 5 minutes to speak about why they would make the best Captain. Everyone present (and those who couldn't attend vote via a proxy) then get to vote.

In our 15 years, the majority of Captains have been in 12th grade, with maybe one or two being in 11th.

Re: How to choose team captain
 

First off, one of our captain's is always a junior - assuming they do well, they then serve again as a senior. This helps to ensure continuity for the team from one year to the next, and make sure nothing gets dropped in the transition.

The junior captain goes around and talks with anyone eligible to be captain the next year. You could consider this an interview, but it's really a two way street - we want to know who will make the best captain's, but we also want those captain's to have an infra of what they are getting themselves into. Being a captain on our team requires a lot of time and effort, much more than being a captain on any of the sports teams at the school.

The junior captain then feeds information to the mentors - who has ideas to grow the team, who has dedication, who has potential scheduling conflicts. They also tell us their personal opinions - who they think they can work the best with moving forward.

After all of that, the team votes via ballot at the end of the year banquet. The mentors get together to evaluate the vote totals, discuss the situation, and then choose the captains.

All of this is designed around a simple statement in the team handbook: captain's are chosen by the team mentors, utilizing student input. In other words, the student vote and returning captain's opinions are usually enough to make the decision, but sometimes the mentors need to step in to choose between two close candidates or (not used yet, but possible) to veto a popular choice. We don't want to go with just a student vote system - the popular student on the team won't always make the best leader, and while our team has always done a really good job ignoring popularity in the vote, we don't want to risk that situation.

We changed the way we do it this year.

Basically in the beginning on the year we would do voted elections. It got out of hand this year a bit with people bringing their friends, people who have never showed up running for positions, and people who have never came voting.

We are going to do a vote but the voters have to be real members and the people running have to had spent a large amount of time at the club

Re: How to choose team captain
 

I've said this before and I'll say it again.
Rookies are some of the best examples on how to identify leadership talent.

I've worked with at least 3 rookie teams now, and some of the best student leaders I have seen come from rookies.

What is different about rookies? They don't care how old or experienced you are. They don't care how senior you are. All they care about is that you are committed and will do whatever it takes to make your team better. Having 3 years of experience means you know what to expect, but that is no indication of future performance.

If you or somebody on your team is expecting to be captain next year because of their tenure, you may want to take a queue from the business world here and rethink that. Sometimes companies promote from within, sometimes they take a bold move and hire an outside candidate. Make sure that you have quorum and a vote of confidence if a team goes that route.

A smart captain will recognize their own personal limits, and be able to ask for help as needed. Communication is fundamental, mass communication and day to day communication are a must. A brilliant captain will know to work on the items nobody else is working on.

Here is an awesome thread on the role of the team captain. I'll make a few updates on my opinion and underline them.

I'd love to see a thread in the future about the pros/cons of picking 2 captains. I've often pondered if it is better or worse. I've got evidence of both, but its all about the size of your team.

Re: How to choose team captain
 

Its like every other team uses elections!

Here is what happens if you force your group to elect a leader: Narcissistic Personalities Tend to Emerge as Leaders. That is a good and a bad thing, you just need to make sure the right qualities emerge, and make sure you have the right support organization in place.

The Harvard Business Review points out that there are two types of Narcissists, Productive ones, and Unproductive ones. Embrace the strengths by quickly developing the following upon the election of your leader.

1) A Team Vision (there are plenty of docs in the CD-Media library to surf through, HBR has some great tips too. What you want is a macro-strategy document to say this is what we are going to do and your short term action plan for how to do it ("Create the best STEM team ever", something like that). Make it a powerpoint! Or find an innovative way to do this.

2) Make your team loud. Narcissistic leaders are often skillful orators, and this is one of the talents that makes them so charismatic. Do fun things to grow your team, and grow your resources, let your leaders sell the vision you just created. If you want to do well you need the 5 M's. Money, Machinery, Materials, Mentors and Masses. Start small, recruit more students, then build up to mentors, then materials, then machinery, then money.

HBR highlighted there are downsides to this, so the rest of the teamneeds to make sure the team ensures success
3) Develop a leadership council early to make sure you outline the path to success for the team. You want major stakeholders in the team to advise your team captain on future endeavors.

4) Read the rest of this https://hbr.org/2004/01/narcissistic...nevitable-cons
To make sure you minimize the inevitable cons.

Re: How to choose team captain
 

Our team captain (or co-captains in some years) is selected by the head coach, usually in consultation with the regular mentors. Selection is based on leadership ability and dedication far more than on technical merit. Selection of co-captains is very much picking alliance partners - select people whose skills and talents complement each other. The amount of responsibility delegated to the captain(s) begins at a modest level and builds as they grow into the role.

Re: How to choose team captain
 

I don't think this is necessarily true in this kind of situation. My main experience with elected student leadership is my Boy Scout troop, and our last couple senior patrol leaders (most important non-adult leader) were pretty much the opposite of narcissistic: humble and relatively introverted. (Of course I will make no public commentary on whether the opposing candidates were "narcissistic.")

The reason I use that as an example is that our robotics team doesn't use elections to determine leadership at all. We have a group of student leaders (~2 per subteam), who are essentially self-selected: the people who are most interested in taking a part in decision-making and putting in lots of time, naturally become leaders. In principle I think it's up to the mentors to select leaders and to make sure they're meeting standards, but as far as I know there's never been any drama about who gets to be a leader. In our case I think elections and a hierarchical student leadership would just create conflict--right now conflict between the leaders, when it pops up, is smoothed over by the fact that we have distinct areas of responsibility, and aren't telling each other what to do. I can easily imagine how elections might work well for another team, as long as everyone voting is familiar with the candidates as leaders and workers. In practice high school students are surprisingly good at separating real strong leaders from kids who can spin a good speech but aren't serious about leading.

Re: How to choose team captain
 

Our team also elects student leaders to a five-person student management team consisting of a president, vice president of internal affairs, vice president of public relations, secretary, and treasurer. We go through the entire process from nomination (self-nomination is allowed, but people rarely actually do it) to platform speeches to debate to voting. This all occurs during the spring offseason, and the new officers are announced at the team banquet usually held in June. The new management spends the summer getting used to their new roles and adapting to their responsibilities.

This has worked pretty well for us, though on the downside it does tend to be a bit of a popularity contest. Something that we really like about the system, though, is attendance requirements. In order to run, a candidate must have an attendance of 85%, or else be excused by current management. This weeds out the kids that just want the title and don't want to do the work. We also don't usually have kids with attendance below 60% vote in the elections, as we figure they don't really have a full understanding of our system and what's going on during meetings.

Re: How to choose team captain
 

When 3946 has two captains, it's because neither of them has all of the tools to be captain. In particular, our third year, our two most viable candidates both had gaps. For example, one was too likely to not delegate or micromanage, the other to "fire and forget" when delegating. By the end of the year, both had improved markedly - with a bit of head coaching, they had each learned a lot from the other.

Re: How to choose team captain
 

We hold "elections" a few weeks after build season for 4 positions: President, VP of Public Relations, VP of Outreach, and VP of Organization. The new board takes power one week after the conclusion of our FRC season (either our last regional, or if we make it to champs it is after champs) however they are expected to work under the current board to learn everything they can.

The board is actually selected by a committee of mentors who interview each candidate, and the elections have no actual decision making power as they are simply a recommendation to a committee of mentors. For example if two people are running for president and one gets more votes than the other (student 1), but the board views the candidate with the lower amount of votes (student 2) as better suited for the position, student 2 would be selected.

Re: How to choose team captain
 

I certainly hope that you keep the "poplular vote count" secret, and I would recommend destroying the ballots and any records of it after the decision is made. With a setup like this, it would make more sense to me to simply encourage nominations by team members (perhaps by petition, where multiple students may "sign" the same nomination), as the selection will be made by a board of mentors in any case.

Re: How to choose team captain
 

Our team has 3 Captains; Marketing Captain, Engineering Captain, and Team Captain. Our mentors and teachers decide if they allowed to run based on experience and capability. Once all the candidates have been selected, at a Spring meeting allow everyone to give a speech. From their all team members are allowed to vote, however they are allowed not to vote if they choose. During our team's short existence, we have always had the higher grade, 2014 all tenth graders and 2015 all eleventh graders as the captains. (Side note our school is only in it's third year. we started with 7th-9th graders and having been adding a grade each year). We are however expecting a variety in grades of leadership this year, as the popular candidates are a 12th grader for team captain, an 11th grader for marketing captain, and a 10th grader for engineering captain.

Re: How to choose team captain
 

The votes are sent via e-mail to the head mentor. Voting is also mandatory, and since we have a list of everyone's email we can easily verify who voted.

Re: How to choose team captain
 

We start the process of choosing our co-presidents by having each candidate give a 3-5 minute speech about why they'd be a good co-president. The entire team then fills out a survey, rating each candidate as 'excellent/good/fair/poor as a co-president' or something along those lines. Some years we'll break it down further into leadership skills, commitment to the team, etc.

The graduating co-presidents then meet with the mentors and use the survey as input as to where the team's leaning. The survey numbers are (of course) kept confidential, so the group is able to use their judgement along with the team's input to choose the next set of co-presidents.

The only strict requirement is that the candidates be rising juniors or seniors. Experience as a student manager makes you a more attractive candidate, as does more experience on the team, but neither of those has been the case for all of our co-presidents. Public speaking skills count for a lot, so that's something that the outgoing presidents and mentors take into account, but we don't have a requirement that one technical and one non-technical student be co-presidents. (It often ends up that way, but it's not required.)

We also use this process for other decisions - for example, our drive coach this year was decided in this manner, and we'll probably use this to choose our driver for this year.