Important Question - Leadership

[artdutra04]

Originally Posted by BARKer

...For now, who they know (and the only one 90% of them know,) is ME. So as much as it matters to the mentors, it's me or nada. While on the other hand, I am not even sure whether I should want to be a captain.

I never really quite understood what a captain\leadership job is, in the progress. I think that in general, if a person is efficient in the field - let him stay in the field. According of what I've heard from you and others, of the expectation from the captain or his vice, it's way too much to handle, and it probably doesn't leave much time for real-work. Why not to pass the org issues to someone else, which is not as hardworking or dedicated?

Part of being an effictive leader is knowing your own personal limits. As much as a lot of us would like to try to do as much as possible for our teams, we learn that there is a limit to how much work a single person can do. We cannot clone ourselves. We cannot freeze time. We cannot travel back in time in order to get more things done. We are human, and we all have limits to how much each of us can accomplish.

And that is why we everything in life needs effective leaders - people who can just get things done. Sure, you may be able to machine a part twice as fast as one of the "newbies" on the team, but that is because you have a few extra years of experience. Which is all the more reason to use your knowledge to teach the new students what you know. You will not be a student forever, and if you do not pass all your knowledge onto the next wave of participants in your FIRST team, it will be lost forever. (Or at least until a lot of painful and possibly expensive trial-and-error relearns it all.)

If you'd like my advice, it's go for it. Take the lead, and steer your team in a new and more positive direction. Use the mistakes of the previous team captain to your advantage, in the fact that you know what happened and how to avoid situations like that in the future. The failures of yesterday form the cornerstone for the successes of tomorrow.

Good luck,
- Art