[iyermihir]

Your team seems to have a similar structure to mine. We have 4 officers, 1 president and 3 vice-presidents. For FRC, these four people are subteam leads (we split up subteams by robot subsystem). When it comes to executive decisions, we all sit down and discuss the problem and ways to solve it. The president has the final say, only if a decision cannot be made by the four officers. Common sense must be used and the four people must be able to listen to each other and not take things too personally. We rarely have a need for the president to make a decision by himself as we go through our options logically and it is usually quite straightforward to choose to most logical option. While other members of the team are encouraged to attend these meetings and participate in the discussion, officers are required to attend the meetings. Also, we always have mentors at our meetings so that they can help us solve any problems and bring up concerns that they may have.

The president's main job is to organize the meeting and keep the others on track. The president does not really have more power than the other officers, but he is the face of the club and is in charge of organizational things such as meeting agendas.

On our team, YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BE AN ELECTED OFFICER TO HELP MAKE DECISIONS, you only need to be dedicated and willing to both present your ideas and listen to others. This makes the leadership less isolated and lets other members contribute to the decision making process.