Quote:
Originally Posted by cameron.lynn
This bring up a bit of a touchy subject. I was told to organize a meeting for team leaders, and I made a list of who I had seen leading intro precious season and had it triple checked, and invited any of the people included to tell me if I forgot someone. My former head mentor disagreed and invited so many people that roughly half our team was invited. How do we go about defining positions when even team leaders aren't clear?
|
You have stumbled upon one of the great mysteries of FIRST, congrats on encountering it so early on in your tenure as a team
My best advice is split your team in general into groups, how many groups depend on the size of your team but for now lets call it 2 groups; Engineering and Non-engineering. Hold a general election for the students(I would recommend only letting returning students run and vote as new students don't really know what these entail yet), and let the mentors hold a meeting and the students will elect 1 student lead for each group and the mentors will decide on who is the lead mentor for the two groups.
Your head/main mentor can not be the one in charge of either group, as he/she will be the one settling disputes.
The new student leads (or team captains) sit down with their opposite on the mentor side and decide what student leadership is needed down the line and what mentors are best suited to lead the groups. For Engineering: A mechanical, programming, field construction lead might be needed. For non-engineering: multimedia(pictures, reveal videos, etc), writing, and art leads might be needed.
These will be different for each team but having a clear hierarchy accomplishes two big things besides what was stated previously: The 2 lead students can help out everywhere needed while trusting there is somebody in charge of each smaller group should they get tied up. It also gives clear titles for college applications, or Honor Society requirements.
I have a large back log of team hierarchy stuff if you would like to continue the conversation via PM and get into more specifics about your team and how to solve issues if you don't want them published for all of FIRST to see