What Makes A Good Leader?

[HannahF]

Originally Posted by davidthefat

I think the major thing I lack is the ability to teach and patience. I sometimes even freak out (not literally) just a major facepalm moment when guys use too many if statements to do something. Yes, I need to mature on that part if I want to be a leader



edit: Would you find it rude if a Junior ran against you for a leadership position if you were a Senior? I am not sure if this guy is going to run again, but he was the programming leader this year, but I pretty ended up being "the" programmer...

I really just wanted to address a couple of the points you made and offer my $.02:

In regards to your worries about seniority issues, In my opinion before you nominated yourself for a leadership position I think you should have a long a good talk with the person who held the job this year. Even if you feel you did most of the coding on your own this year, talk to him because there may be more to the position then you realize. He may explain to you why he is more qualified for the job or he might surprise you by telling you he wants you to run. I however do not think it is a good Idea to run without talking it out with him. He will most likely respect you more if you tell him your plans to run ahead of time. In my own personal experience, the leader should be the most qualified person for a job, and a good true leader recognizes when they are no longer the most qualified and steps down allowing someone better to rise up to take their job.

Also would you be willing to make a compromise? You mentioned that you want to take on leadership positions but it would appear that you are not comfortable teaching yet. Take it from someone who has been both the director (captain) of programming and the Vice President of a team, teaching is one of the most important and most fulfilling parts of being a leader on a team and patience is not something you can try to get by without especially in a position like programming where it often takes time for a new person to understand. Your code "hogging" most likely directly stems from your lack of patience and this is not cool in a programming leader. Perhaps you need to take another year to become more comfortable and confident in your abilities and your relationships on the team before you consider leading. You could consider "shadowing" the programming leader from this year, next year learning what it's like to hold the position, and practicing your teaching skills before people begin looking up to you, then next year when he graduates you will be ready to confidently take his place.

Again these are just suggestions, I am not trying to say that you would not be a good leader next year (because I have never met you before, and therefore honestly don't know), I am only trying to convey that there is a lot to think about before you become a leader. As I said before I was the director of programming for my team this year and sometimes that jobs means more than just writing code. I was in charge of showing new members Labview, making sure vi's were written on time(delegation is key), planning out autonomous, writing autonomous(sometimes its ok to have a piece of code thats mostly yours), setting up the classmate's wireless for drive practices, fixing signal problems, dealing with complaints from builders and the drivers(once again patience is key), building projects, and making the majority of code changes at competitions. But I loved every minute of it because at that point I had been programming for almost two years and I really enjoy teaching people about programming. Next year however, I will be passing my title to an underclassman because I want her to have the opportunity to be a leader; I have watched her grow to love programming this year as much as I do, and because as a Senior and the Vice President of the team, I know that I unfortunately will not be able to devote all the time that is necessary to be the director of programming next year. This does not mean I won't program as much as I can next year, because I love programming and so i guess my parting thought is;

if you truly love writing code don't allow a title to affect how much time you spend programming

So you know just some things to consider

~Hannah