Quote:
Originally Posted by Conor Ryan
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. |
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.