Quote:
Originally Posted by KathieK
The most undervalued person on a team? The one who makes sure the team is fed.
And the one who arranges the travel plans so that the bus arrives on time, the hotel is selected, the airline tickets are all set to go with everyone's correct legal names on them.
And the ones who get up at 3:30 in the morning in order to get you to your facility to make the 4:30 a.m. bus that is taking you to a competition.
And the one who puts together the hospitality baskets and places them in the restrooms so we all don't stink at regionals.
It's the wife/husband/family of the mentor who acknowledges that this program is making changes in people's lives, so they let them go to work on the robot program for hundreds of hours a year.
It's the employee at some big corporation that writes the check that is mailed to your team leader that gets deposited into your team bank account before you even see it. It's the school secretary that writes the check to FIRST so that you get your kit of parts. It's the custodian that makes sure you can stay late and work on the bot during build season. It's the family that reads about your pasta dinner in the paper and decides to support your fundraising efforts.
And the people who are there working/volunteering in the background YEAR-ROUND to ensure that the four FIRST programs and their competitions will be of the best quality that we can make them. And taking all of their vacation days to go to training, and give presentations and demos, and staff the events. And are volunteering to come in the Wednesday before to help set up, and are staying long past everyone has vacated the pits on Saturday to break the field down.
The "team" is not just the students and the mentors. They are the tip of the iceberg. Acknowledge your "undervalued" team members and say thank you. Write a personal letter to your sponsor and tell them what being in FIRST means to you. Say thank you to your school administration, treat your custodians to dinner. Find out who is on your Regional Planning Committee and let them know how much you appreciate what they do.
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I agree - the most undervalued people are hard to name because you don't know their name.
(Warning elow may be a little bias - I did not see it from the builders point of view)
The main section during the build season is the Build team - this year they gave the programmers maybe an hour with the robot before it shipped. They pushed out latecomers to the entire team because "they don't know enough of what was going on with the robot"
They then called over all other parts of the team to tighten screws...
so... I also agree that each team thinks their work is the most important... they are only important when it works together with what the other parts of the team can do