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Originally Posted by nathan_hui
After talking with my mentors, and some people who specialize in forming teams, it seems pretty clear why teams fall apart. The one biggest challenge to having a successful team is finding a really good leader. .... Why do teams fall apart? One way is failure in the leadership.
... a strong group of student leaders who can work as a team, backed by a group of very motivated and involved mentors, working with a motivated group of students.
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Nathan makes many good points in his post... I boiled it down to a few that began to align with some of my thoughts when I first read the OP.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jimwick
In our experience it has been the adult mentors who have sustained the team over time. ... In my experience the kids have too many other interests to be able to the necessary effort to sustain the team. Committed adults are more able to do so.
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Bingo...
While an amazing group of student leaders will bring a team to its biggest successes, teams need a very strong mentor backbone to not only mentor the students, but to support and sustain the team in years where the student leadership may not be able to be as strong.... and to support eachother from year to year. In my now 17 years and 3 teams in FIRST, I have come to realize that each team may only have one incredibly capable, incredibly strong, self motivated and independent student leader come along maybe once every 10 years IF they are lucky. There are some phenomenal students in FIRST, but those that are capable and motivated enough to really drive a team toward elite style success... those that would be able to immediately go on and build a new team, are much much more rare than I once expected.
Thus, every team needs a strong mentor backbone. And I would argue that 1-5 mentors is not enough. In 90% of teams, a lone mentor will be burnt out in 2-3 years. 5 continuous mentors will be burnt out in 5 years. You need a good solid lead mentor, a lead mentor sidekick, 3-5 incredibly dedicated mentors (/parents), and another 5 or so that can fill in when things get really busy. That means every team with ~30 students need 10 mentors to really have a strong team.
Can you work with less? Of course. And there are models that do. Some of the more curriculum based ones are probably ok, but even if you look at the model referenced earlier (1717) they were more capable and better off when they brought in more mentors.
This type of backbone is exactly the reason so many of the college teams struggle. I watch Clarkson every couple of years go in waves, because they are forced to rely on mentors that turn over at least every 4 years. They have built some amazing robots, and some not so amazing robots, have run some amazing programs, and had some off years. Teams like WPI are much more sustainable because they have non-college leads like Colleen and Ken and Francis that can help keep consistency and form a backbone year after year.
Plus these mentors help students learn how to be leaders, they help push the students outside their comfort zone. If you have a 1/20 mentor/student ratio, that mentor is not going to be able to spend enough time to really grow and develop each kid individually. The closer you get to a 1/1 ratio, the stronger your students can grow (assuming you have mentors with the correct mindset).
You want a more sustainable team? Find and recruit more dedicated and passionate mentors... and have them help you grow your student base.