Hello, I’m a student in my last year of FRC and I plan on starting to engage with FIRST mentoring, once I’m done with highschool. Do you have any book recommendations that could provide some theoretical knowledge in management, leadership and technical areas?
You may have heard this before, but are you not interested in taking a year off at least, and volunteering at competitions instead?
Also with leadership, I’ve gotten way more learning experience in actually doing it then reading about it. Maybe finding a way to mentor youth in a capacity outside FIRST could be beneficial to you.
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I second this! Maybe take a year off from FRC to do privatized STEM/STEAM education like summer camps/ after school classes or try to intern in various FRC related fields to get some real world work experience and a little $ in your pocket. Learn from the management in those places and take lots of notes to bring back to FRC a year later. You’ll be much better off as would the team you end up with.
For 5 years every summer I would help do ev3, Arduino and minecraft summer camps each week and working with all age groups k-8 you learn alot that applies to managing high schoolers. Those companies have teaching techniques, documentation styles, management policies and etc that work and have been proven and tried out. By being a part of that system you can learn so much more than reading about it.
As for books though I did like this book I got.in a humble bundle: Management 101 | Book by Stephen Soundering | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster
The issue is many of the management books apply to a real world business and as much as we try to run FRC teams like a business they are not. Those books also focus on adults. Our students are not adults, they think differently, act differently and most importantly are not being paid or legally contracted to do anything they don’t want to. Many of the techniques and ideas don’t fit as well into FRC because of that.
That’s why I recommend instead working with younger students in privatized education because learning how to deal with a wide variety of young minds is what you need more than anything else.
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The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win will not provide you with specific technical knowledge but is an excellent read on leadership/management/scope within a technical context.
Surrounded by Idiots is a fun read on how to deal with different personality types in the workplace and beyond. I’m a 50/50 red-blue, maybe 60-40, in case anyone was wondering. Outside of work, I found this provided me a lot of helpful context for my role as a VC, too.
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Thank you everybody for your replies! I will take all of your advice and recommendations into consideration for my future regarding this subject
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On the topic of pop psych/personality books (like Surrounded By Idiots) when I was in university one of the classes I took on leadership was specifically going through a full gamut of these types of books, comparing and contrasting. No one of those books is a perfect portal into understanding the behaviors of others and yourself. My recommendation if you’re going to make a detour into that realm is to hit at least one book that covers Big Five (which is the most scientifically defensible personality inventory), one that hits something adjacent to Gallup’s Strengthsfinder, one that hits MBTI (almost exclusively because you’ll see that one still pop up with alarming frequency), and a four categories one like Jared mentioned. The purpose of these is less to gain some secret understanding of how people work and more to build greater empathy with various traits of people you will encounter.
In terms of more specific recommendations, I would take a look at some of the books the FIRST Mentor book club read a few years back: FIRST Mentor Book Club - #19 by Michael_Hill
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I would also recommend taken a year or two off before mentoring and doing volunteering at event(s). it’s helpful to have an age gap between your students and your self, also the first year of college is harder than most expect.
As for books, I would recommend The Goal, it talks about managing the important but is done in a novel form instead of being a reference book.
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This! A million times this. When I first started teaching during the school day I was only 4 years out of graduating highschool myself. My students could’ve been my friends younger siblings. You are too young to them to be a force they have to follow. You can set the tone early and put your foot down but you also are too much like them still. You are all young, hot headed, eager to try lots of new stuff without having learned from enough mistakes yet. If I could have done things differently I would’ve wanted maybe closer to 6 years of separation from my oldest student. By that time you’re old enough to drink (and past the early phase of young adulthood of staying up late, going out and partying, forgetting about responsibilities, you probably still live at home, etc.)
None of that helps you be an effective teacher and all of that extra early adult life stuff (house hunting, hanging out with friends, going out on dates) cuts into the time you should be grading, planning, communicating with students and parents, when you are older and past all of those life events.
FRCFIRST Robotics Competition is an after school voluntary system so the level of respect is better (everyone wants to be there and do work usually), you are not in the same situation as a class where you have discipline issues with students that shouldn’t have been in your class to begin with.
You can start mentoring younger but one year out you should absolutely NOT go back to your original team. Those people are your friends and will not treat you like a proper responsible adult. You should if anything directly with FRCFIRST Robotics Competition go spend time with others teams to see what they do differently, better and most importantly they don’t know you yet. They will see you as an incoming mentor adult and not as their friend they ate pizza with at 1:15 amAndyMark in a hotel room in Houston. You can’t just flip a switch and turn off your past history and experiences with a team. Even the parents and other mentors will still see you as a student for a long time.
Even now new parents see the other coaches and mentors first and assume they must be the head because of Age. I never left FRCFIRST Robotics Competition at all and even at 10+ years experience now and being Head Coach for 7 years, I still look like just another college kid and they will go talk to someone older first. It’s just the natural assumption of people and it’s not something you can fix without just growing older and looking older. For reference I’m 28, the other coaches are at least 10+ years older than me. Most parents on the team will be older than me by at least 8 years probably even with the freshman. That’s just the way the math works out right now. Over time it gets better because that age gap shrinks
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I would agree with everything Kingc95 said but I would say this statement only applies to being a mentor right out of high school.
As, most teams would happy to have their alumni come back to visit their team to talk about how the team is doing, how the alumni is handling college/work and perhaps help with one special task or do a knowledge transfer, but DO NOT expect to be treated as a mentor.
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Nail on the head. Definitely come visit, but don’t expect to mentor on your original team!
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I would say that it very much depends on the situation. If mentoring requires you to be in the “responsible adult” role, then you definitely shouldn’t take it on with this small an age gap. On our team though, a lot of 1st year alumni go back and mentor more as “advisors” because they are usually very experienced in their specific fields on the team. There needs to be an actual adult mentor at meetings, but they can be of great help with giving more personal guidance to younger students. So overall, taking on a leadership role is fine if it is within your constraints, and I definitely encourage the attempt to read more and learn about it.
Edit: I will say that there is a fine line between that role and a “super senior” that takes away from the students, and it’s the responsibility of the adult mentors to scale it back if needed
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I recommend “The Leadership Challenge” by Kouzes/Posner.
It’s tangentially related to your request, but Adam Savage’s book “Every Tool’s a Hammer” has a lot of formative tidbits related to the design process, iterations, prioritizing, and organization.
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At the very least don’t mentor your own team. It’ll be beneficial for you to grow as a person, as well as for your team to develop and find their own roles.
Again, like others here, I’d recommend that you just volunteer at events for at least a year first.
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Lots of articles to read and maybe this would help. I have an account so I can’t tell if this is available to you or not.
You should be able to know what works for mentoring and what doesn’t since you have recent, personal experience on the receiving end of mentoring.
It’s possible to mentor your old team right after leaving it. We have students do that. What they have all soon discovered is they are so busy they don’t have the time to attend team meetings regularly or at all.
Crucial Conversations is an excellent book I would recommend to literally everyone. It’s especially useful if everyone involved in a project/team has read it (or at least been trained on the common vocabulary).
I would also recommend the book On Looking, not so much for leadership and whatnot, but just because it’s an amazing book about perception and expertise that could help literally anyone be more thoughtful and introspective about what they’re seeing vs what they’re missing.
(I also recommend taking some time away from FRC to explore other interests and get some years on you before coming back to mentor, but that’s not what you asked.)
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I respect Patrick, but I disagree with this advice and I see it on here often. The FRC build season is January through February with most competitions in March. Most teams attend local compeitions and a fraction attend the World Championship which means many teams are done in March. There’s plenty of time outside those 3 months to explore other interests. If you love helping students solve tough problems, and you aren’t letting your education suffer (if college is in your plans) by all means keep doing it.
And fair enough. My real advice to everyone is “figure out what makes you happy and do that.” 
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A book I found very helpful in my early days of mentoring was: Tribal Leadership
Cliff notes:
Another book helping categorize organizations into different levels mostly about how they network and compete. It also has one of the best “Strategy” sections and mapping tools I have seen/used.
The categorization is helpful for understanding where your group is, and what it might take to help your organization progress into either a more cohesive team, or elevate into a more impactful organization.
The “Strategy” section is useful in that it has a really good map for picking a strategy, and then mapping it in a way that helps you verify if it is executable.
Another good one from years ago was Influencer:
No this doesn’t teach you how to get a following and free swag on Social Media.
This book instead investigates how to create change in an organization.
Cliff notes: It talks about 3 areas of influence (3 categories or internal and external influence for 6 disctinct areas).
I found this book really great as I had/have tried to change culture in various groups/organizations/projects and despite putting in a ton of work, not having it stick. The book really investigates this, and the usual reason is that you have spent a lot of time/effort in a couple of the 6 areas, but left a gap in some of the other areas. One area I see this a lot in FRC is related to scouting. Teams will make an awesome APP or really cool system, and then it fails because the students in the stand just don’t want to be there.
There are a lot of great books out there and I find them very useful to read and then try to learn how to apply/use them. If you get really excited about a book method, it can also be very helpful to read about opposing “critiques” in order to be mindful of accidental issues you can bring up.
For instance:
The Goal- Is a great book and a very easy read, but brining down inventory to too small of levels can have secondary negative effects if there is a major disruption in the supply Chain (As I enter year 3 of my 3 year lease, I’m finally able to get the heated steering wheel chip for my truck…)
Socratic method: Some find it an incredibly helpful and meaningful way to learn how to think about problems. Some find it annoying, and just want you to answer the darn question they asked.
IE Your Mileage May Vary… but that doesn’t mean its not worth taking the trip.