Quote:
Originally Posted by unpopularideas
...snip... Everyone on my team knows who the favorites are. Everyone on my team knows that the 3-4 favorites can (and have) kick people off of the team for disagreeing with them. There are too many cliches to count. ...snip...
Another thing I've noticed on my own team, and I wanted to see if you guys have noticed anything similar on your own teams - girls run the show. They can easily knock anyone on the team off of it. In addition, they are in charge of programming, engineering, scouting, leadership, drive team and safety. ...snip...If FIRST is really about letting the next generation get a hands on experience in STEM, then why are we sitting here trying so desperately to help, only to be shot down by the favorites.
Just my take on it.
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I work with a lot of teams (100+ teams each year), and while favoritism or perceived favoritism is often found, having exclusively female leadership on a mixed team is still fairly rare, and having that exclusively female leadership being that controlling/punitive as you describe would be an even rarer subset.
Female leadership on teams though is much less rare now than it was just a decade ago so I suspect this will be a more frequent occurrence.
As far as ideas getting shot down by "the leaders", that happens all the time. Even really good ideas may be shot down because they would require more resources than leadership can offer, or the strategy may be deemed lower value, or the group generating the idea did a really bad job explaining it. I too had thought of a Batman/Robin style approach in 2015, and my presentation was so unremarkable to the group choosing design direction that they didn't even remember when 148s video was shown. I did not push it hard as I did not think the team had the design resources to pull it off that year. We discussed this briefly after 148s reveal came out, but regrouped to focus on the teams robot.
Inner groups and favoritism do often form and cause problems. Sometimes this is because the "favorites" spend the most time. Sometimes it is because they behave the best. Sometimes there are other forms of favoritism (nepotism, sexism, cronyism) at play. Most mentors try not to play favorites, but it happens similarly to HS sports teams. Unfortunately, this is a real occurrence.
I am not trying to "blame the victim", but it is often worthwhile to do a self assessment to ensure you are not doing a lot of off-putting behaviors. If you come up with some, work on those. Also, ask if you can have a discussion with mentors about taking a larger/more important role with the team. Ask what they are looking for in their leaders and how you could demonstrate. You could try to have a conversation about favoritism, but often this can lead to confrontational discussion that may not be beneficial.