Meeting Schedule

Hello Chief,

So, I've created this account as to not reveal the identity of my team & myself. I know that these accounts are typically frowned upon but I hope you can look past that for a brief moment.

This is the second year of myself being on my robotics team and I was recently promoted to a leadership position. Every week, the leadership team meets with our mentors for a call to discuss business. One thing that has come up is the question of our meeting schedule. Now, we are not affiliated with a school, and our head mentors have requested that we don't meet every day because that has typically not worked in the past. In addition, they have requested that we don't meet until 11:00 at night.

Our main robot builders recently requested to meet every day which led to an extremely long debate on the subject that got a little heated. On our secret group chat, they were mostly adopting the position of "Screw them, they don't know anything about building robots." Now, as I was listening to the debate, I noticed that the mentors were bringing up valid positions. These revolved around extra commitments as well as finding parents to be there with us. However, the position of the head robot builders remained the same, with the same intensity. Even after the call, they were saying "its easier to ask for forgiveness than permission."

I believe that this position mainly came from the fact that we had to meet every day at the last minute for our fall competition (where we placed last) because we didn't effectively plan. Even though we have created a plan for this FRC Season (that is documented), I still fear that the main robot builders will completely disregard that. In the past, we have advanced to the World Champs (mainly off marketing) despite the fact that we have built the robot completely at the last minute.

Now, I'm all for adopting the position of working smarter not harder, but I don't know how to convince that of my teammates. I feel like I'm in the minority here, but I don't want to risk my position. How can I make sure we don't start the year off on the wrong foot? Any advice would greatly be appreciated, as I want to make sure that we an operate like a real-world company.

Thanks,

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