Team 4565 needs leadership help!!!!!

[bludeath]

Hello-- I'm Gabe representing Team 4565 the coyotes out of Mesa Arizona

This year will mark my third year on a FIRST team. I have good and bad things to say about my experience on my team.(Just as i'm sure anyone would) My team is in its fourth year we started our first year off with ultimate assent (the year right before i joined) So far we haven't seen much improvement as far as organization, robot construction, team effort and are lacking just the basic fundamentals in how a FIRST team should operate.

Now with that said this year i was given the position to finally turn our selves around.(basically starting from the ground up with a 3 year team) this is where i'm the most hesitant at this point. My plan is still in the works but i can pitch the basic concept. I believe strongly in we are building and inspiring future engineers of tomorrow. I have always preached that FRC is a high school level program so high school students should be participating. I understand that's not always the case with every team as some have a reputation to keep within the FIRST community to be a "power house team" and have actual engineers come in a basically build the bot for the students. Which is somewhat understandable. But my long term goal for this team is to keep it classy as far as strong team effort and student participation goes.

My biggest thing is mentoring future team members. I for one came onto my team with some big ideas and aspirations for what i wanted to do. Thankfully i had a mentor who was a senior and was nice enough to help me complete some of those goals and trial and error at a lot of the things i wanted to accomplish. But thanks to him i am now team caption and lead programmer and i most likely wouldn't have stayed on the team if he wasn't there keeping me in line .

Another area i wanted to clarify was individual departments within the team. When i made fliers i divided it into departments for ex. strategist/programming, Mechanical and build, Business and finance/Human resources and website management and design(and possibly management of social media as well) at least what i thought the basic jobs on the team would be. Now this is where i couldn't make up my mind on what to do. Basically this is where i guess you would get into workshops on off season. But lets just say for example that John Doe and Bob Smith both want to go for the same position and that position only really needs one person to specialize in it how would you go about giving them both a equal chance to excel in what they want to do and if Bob is better at website design than John how do i say hey John i know you really wanted to work on our website but here is a list of other jobs around the team you could focus on and when Bob starts to slip up you can take over??(I just need a little clarification on how to go about assigning jobs from the gecko)

One thing i was looking into was a gantt chart. A way to keep a organized workflow and time various tasks and set dead lines for various things within the project. I Just wanted to see if any other team out there was using the same method and if they found it effective or not?

put all the management out of the way one thing i mentioned at the beginning was team effort. I value being apart of a team and working unified as such but how do i bring our team closer and getting to know a little bit about one another? I understand that team bonding experiences are important but what would anyone recommend as far as effective team bonding?

I have to apologize on the length of this post as there is still a lot to be mentioned. I hope i have at least the most rudimentary concepts to pull this off and also looking forward to anyone's ideas or criticism on the matter.