The Leadership Setup of your Team

[Schuller11]

Originally Posted by Billfred

Just for a frame of reference, how many kids are on the Thunderchickens this year? (The concept makes sense for a team of 20 or 30, but it doesn't work as well in my head for a team of 10.)

Sorry about that...we had 43 students on the team this year.

[Lisa Perez]

On 830, we basically have it set up so that the students are placed in charge of different projects through the season. For example, there will be the group that will always be working on build, and will take other students and show them what to do. Of the students working on the nonbuild projects, each person is held responsible for organizing something different, be it a bake sale, communication with the sponsors, scouting, etc.

It is a little less formal in that students are not exactly defined as leaders at the beginning of the season. But it also gives each and every single one of the students the opportunity to step up and be a leader while getting advice from the mentors.

If you are looking for something more formal (and something that would probably work better with a larger group), when I was on 573, we had set student leaders for the various subgroups, who would be responsible for communicating with their mentors to create a plan for said subgroups. We had a student project manager, who was in charge of making sure all of the plans were compatible and feasible and served as the main representative for the team.

[team 1094]

team 1094 learership lies with the oldest member on are team. this year we chose a team capataion which is usually the oldest member on the team or some that everyone ageers on. For our drive team it is teh person's who have to best drive time/ recation time. Coach gose to the person who was 3rd in reaction time/drive time.

[Vashts6583]

Over the past two or three years, we've altered our hierarchy depending on our student involvement.

Last year, do to our large size, we had a President (Senior) and 2 Vice Presidents (Also Seniors), one for mechanical, and one for business. From that, both auxiliary and drive were under the first VP, and operated seperately from each other. Our business/non-engineering department worked under our other VP. Sadly, our electrical and software group (mainly myself and one or two others) had no representation in the higher ups (but i still made my voice heard).

This year, however, due to our much smaller size, we had one president (Senior with most experience), and then a group-specific leadership based on team experience. This format allowed for less conflict among groups, and also for our new freshmen to learn alot from their older peers. Also, because we were so small, our mentors helped us out alot.

Really, you should base your student leadership around your team size, your subsections, and how you want it to function. If you want, you could even do a Knights of the Round format, where the President just helps get things started, but has equal say with the leaders of each subsection of your team, which I really wish we could implement in our team, but we're just too small as it is.

I hope this helped you out a little.

[KF987]

Team 987 has officers and leads.
Officers consist of:

President- keeps everything together/paper work
Vice President helps out president
VP of Build-responsible for timelines during the build, managing build
Secretary-spornsors/letters
Historain- takes pics of everything/ records events
Treausrer- keeps our budget.
those are our officers in a nut shell

Then after the kickoff (or before) we will have Leads for certain aspects of the robot. Ex this year we had a lead for the Arm, Claw, DT, Electronics, Pneumatics, and Progamming. We only have about 20 kids in our club (about 15 who are dedicated) so the officers will sometimes become Leads as well.

Keaton

[SPurekar]

226 has about 50 students, 18 engineers, 2 teachers, and 3 parents that help regularly.

This year we had 2 co-presidents who were the main link between the students and adults. The presidents led the meetings and anything to the team had to go through the two of us (I’d recommend having 2 presidents over 1, because of the workload and availability issues)

Under the presidents were the 4 workgroup leaders (Management, PR, Robot, Digital). We gave the group leaders a to-do list at the beginning of the season, and they had to create their own timelines to accomplish the tasks. The Robotics workgroup was further split according to the assembly of the robot and the Digital workgroup was divided into web, CAD, and animation. The rest of the students were split into workgroups under the 4 leaders, according to their interests.

One thing 226 has had problems with in the past has been communication within the team. This year, the presidents were the only ones who could email the entire team and all information to the team was communicated in person at team meetings, then emailed out as soon as possible. This gave us two ways to present the information and even those who missed meetings knew what was going on.

We had (and still have) full team meetings once a week where workgroup leaders gave updates on what was happening and asked for any help they needed. Every week, we had leadership meetings with the presidents, workgroup leaders, teacher sponsors, the lead engineers and a few parents where we discussed our progress and set goals for the week.

We had one parent who kept the rest of the parents updated. To get anything to the team, the parents could email only the parent lead, who then told the presidents. The presidents also had to go through the parent lead to get anything to the parents.

For those teams that complain about not having enough student involvement in leadership: The 2 presidents found this year that we were given a lot more responsibility and trust simply because we were assertive at the beginning of the season. We drafted a set of rules both the students and adults were comfortable with and made sure everyone followed them. When anyone stepped over the line, we weren’t hesitant to tell them we could handle the situation. (Don't get me wrong, we love the adults and we know we can't function without them) By giving the adults periodic emails on what we were doing (especially at the beginning), we kept them in the loop and they began to trust us to make the right decisions.

All of the students on leadership are juniors right now, so next year, we’ll each have one person under us to train for the year we graduate. What really helps is if the new leadership steps in during the summer, when the old students can guide them for the first month or so.

This sounds like a lot on paper, but it worked wonderfully this year. Feel free to email/pm me with any questions!

Hope this helps! (wow this is a long post)
~Smita

[Simon Strauss]

At the end of last season we too found ourselfs at crossroads at the Sciborgs. With the only remaining origional member graduating and team dynamics shiffting we last summer wrote this constitution to reorganize the team. http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/search/results/50959 its been working very well so far and if you have any questions about it feel free to PM me.

-Simon