Making Leaders and Teamers in FIRST

[nathan_hui]

FIRST is about inspiring people to be interested in science and technology. It's about teaching people how to work together as a team, as leaders, as mentors, and as learners.

One of the most important skills students can learn through FIRST is leadership/teamwork (I'm going to treat them as the same, even though they are somewhat different). One of the problems I've seen in four years of FIRST (FRC and FTC) and a year of university projects is a general lacking of people with leadership skills.

What are ways of teaching people how to be leaders, especially in groups with very high turnover rates? How do you find leaders and potential leaders, and how do we help them along their path?

[bardd]

The way we go about it is we give the younger members responsibilities and opportunities to lead. Now subteams, but little projects. For example, say we want to build and test three prototypes, instead of having the team leaders supervise the build, we let sophomores or juniors lead the build (there are usually 3-4 people on each project), and the team and subteam leaders just move between the groups and look to make sure it's done properly, give advice and correct when something is done wrong. This way they all get experience in leading. We try to give everyone the opportunity to lead.