We’ve had a large problem with work ethics in the past, where it would only be a small handful of people do the majority of the heavy lifting, both during build season, and during fundraising through sponsors and grants. How do you get your team members to participate? (I know this is general, but I just want a general idea, and if clarification is needed, I’ll do so accordingly.)
Can we get clarification? In the title you mention mentors participating but in the post you mention members.
Which is this thread about?
Sorry, I meant members.
We don’t allow team members who don’t work to go to competition (or at least we threaten it ;P).
I usually have to rely on mentors to discipline members initially. They are super important for getting the ball rolling on productivity.
Veteran members usually listen to me just fine but getting the new members to follow directions of and respect team leadership is hard. It takes time and patience. Be persistent and assertive on multiple occasions. After pestering members to work for 10 minutes straight they usually give up resisting. After you do this once it gets easier to direct them later.
Probably the most important thing to do overall is to delegate tasks. There will be some members who will never do anything you tell them to do, but most will complete specific tasks if you give one to them. Be sure to tell them what to do, how to do it (if needed) and most importantly, try to give them a timeframe to complete it by.
Good luck!
Feel free to reply or DM me with any questions!
Students not participating is caused by:
Not knowing what to do
Unconfident they can do the work
Actually unable to do the work
Strong members ‘hog’ most of the work
Strong members shooing them away
Strong members not coaching/mentoring them, instead being harsh on their work
Boredom (from the above …)
All of these point to a lack of robust training for new members.
Having a mentor simply enforce the “work or leave” rule doesn’t address the root cause, only the symptom.
On a former team, we allowed these oxygen-consuming-leeches* to stay as long as they did not disrupt anyone else from working. For a time. That’s long since changed.
Teams tolerating a non-participating team member will run into morale problems, guaranteed.
*I’m trying to be gentle here. There’s youngsters about…
That’s just what I call the 80:20 rule (sometimes 90:10 rule): 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people. With volunteer groups, it’s a fact of life unless membership is sufficiently envied/prestigious/desired that you have so many people willing to work that you can “fire” some or all of the under-performers and still do what you want to do. I’ve been there with groups ranging from high school NHS and ΜΑΘ to college physics and science fiction clubs to the society for creative anachronism to off-campus science fiction clubs and conventions to churches to investment clubs to PTAs/PTOs to band boosters to FRC teams and haven’t found a good answer yet.
Edit: I was forcibly off-line a while and was still working on “mentors”. Even with “members”, the same rules apply - unless you have a lot of people interested, you’re largely stuck with what you have.
We have regularly tied having a student “officer” position to the team members who participated on a consistent basis - not so much as a reward as a recognition that we could count on someone. We have also made it clear that it is easier to lose such a position than to earn it in the first place.
Edit2: As Don stated, a lack of productivity is a brisk walk towards the exit door. Actively disrupting productivity instigates the bum’s rush.
Edit3: Also, we celebrate contributions “above and beyond” the minimum with awards at our annual banquet. We have a half dozen or so team awards for GP, Eye of the Tiger (spirit), leadership, Tribal Knowledge (student mentorship) and such. We also have a “meet these criteria” standard which entitles a student to “letter”, meaning that the student may wear an official school “S” on a fancy jacket, and is given a robotics team logo brass pin to wear on such a letter.
Don, I’m curious to hear some more from you here. At the start you seem to be saying it isn’t the “leech’s” fault. Later on you seem to say your team doesn’t tolerate “leeches”
Maybe I’m missing the difference between “doesn’t know what to do” and “leech”. But that raises another question, how do you tell the difference between “doesn’t know what to do” and “leech”?
Do you have any advice on how to turn “doesn’t know what to do” into “productive team member”? Or taking it further, “leech” to “doesn’t know what to do” to “productive team member”?
I can’t speak for Don, but what I think he’s getting at is that there’s a reason someone is being a “noodle-slurper”*. Once that reason has been identified, and addressed, then if that person remains a “noodle-slurper”, they are deemed to be a “leech” and asked to not return.
But HOW you address a given issue depends on the issue and the parties involved. If you simply say “find something to do” and the problem is that strong students are doing the work (and not letting anybody watch), they’ll come back with “There’s nothing to do, everybody else is doing it”. You can only tell them “clean the shop” so many times before they get tired of doing that.
If you notice a lot of “shoo-fly”** maneuvering on the part of the strong students, you get to have a little chat with said strong students about how if they don’t start training these new kids then they’re doing the team AND those kids a disservice, and watch the results. As an example, of course.
Going back to the original question, there’s a lot of good advice already but I think the first thing to do is to ask: Are you making an effort to impress on everybody the importance of the various tasks, and what happens if the task isn’t done on time/properly? (And of course how to do it properly?) Or to put it another way: is it done by only a small group because “that’s the small group that does it”, or because those are the people that actually decide to get off their tails and do something about it?
*Milder equivalent of “leech”, particularly on teams that have lots of noodles for dinner. See also: “Feed them and they will come”.
**See Don’s 5th point.
One thing that we’ve found is that younger/newer members aren’t as in tune about time pressures and deadlines, and they know that the veterans/leadership will pick up the slack if need be… so they aren’t motivated to step up.
We make an effort to keep all members up to date on progress and deadlines, so everyone can feel some of the “motivational pressure”. Along similar lines, when tasks are assigned, it is important to make sure the student knows why their task is critical to success.
Adding on: if the issue is a small subset of people doing all the work, then I’d honestly just suggest a frank conversation about inclusivity and team sustainability with those in question. Explain the potential outcomes of their current actions, and why you have to course correct. It’s definitely one of the tougher but important parts of being a leader and looking out for your team.
If I knew the solution to this problem, I could rule the world.
We mostly encourage younger members, or anyone for that matter, to ask what they can do to help. This works pretty well, since most do want to help out with the tasks. We also have a very lovely hand-sewn and framed sign that reads “I need a job” displayed prominently in our workshop/tech lab. It does indeed serve a purpose 
Don hit the nail on the head. My attempts to solve this problem (at least with my subgroup):
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Extensive pre-season training that can be completed as an individual or in a small (2 people) group. The more experienced students reinforce their existing knowledge and can explore more advanced topics. New students can build up their fundamentals. This helps with points 2 and 3.*
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For students in groups, the more experienced person is not allowed to type/touch the robot when applicable. Point 4.
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I encourage students to ask and answer each other’s questions. This is how I try to circumnavigate points 5 and 6. If a student asks me a question that I am confident another student can answer, I redirect. I want to create a culture of peer-mentoring.
As for point 1, I tell bored/aimless students to ask others if they need help. Older students will gladly offload mindless tasks like tightening bolts.
How can you generically solve this problem? I strongly believe in the buddy system - pair up a seasoned vet with a rookie in the preseason and don’t let the vet touch anything (within reason). If a battery needs to be changed, the rookie has to do it. If the robot needs to be power cycled, a rookie has to do it. Any repairs (major or minor) should be done with the older student guiding the younger student. Enforce the “rules” that older students can’t do the work. This prevents the newer students from thinking, “Well I can just watch/don’t have to do it.”
You must participate to be on our team. As of yet we won’t kick anyone off but they will not be allowed to attend the competitions or receive any important competition or build season roles.
We faced this issue over the summer, and the solution ended up being
- Not sending as many emails so people actually read them
- Food.
Bribing people to do work for food works extremely well, and I recommend giving it a shot.
I think Don is right but one thing he may have overlooked is a lack of accountability. Sometimes kids just don’t want to work, and there is no doubt that some jobs are far more desirable than others. Without accountability, all of the less desirable jobs will be left undone.
The ethos we have instilled in our team helps with this. The team is structured so any one member is fully responsible for themselves (something which seems obvious but is harder to implement in practice). If I see that someone isn’t working, the obvious question is why-
“I don’t know what to do”
You should have gone to your group leaders and asked for work
“My group leaders didn’t have anything for me”
You should have come to leadership to see what else there was to work on
“I finished what I was working on”
You should have found more work by doing the above
“I don’t know how to do what I’m tasked with doing”
This is simply never an excuse. Not knowing something is obviously common and completely alright, but not reaching out for help is unacceptable.
Having adequate veteran students and mentor support are two keys to avoiding this problem I think.
I have my students build a lot of robots. I am currently running 3 vex teams. I’ve probably had my 26 students build 12 complete robots at some point or another since build season started for us in September. The programming team even has their own robots that they use to practice with.
I think most folks get stuck on building the one competition robot and don’t realize, you can build a lot more robots than that to gain experience. Then again, we also have been at this for a while so our stockpile of available components is pretty large to accomplish said multi-robot building.
I definitely concur with others that a good training program can also do wonders to help alleviate issues with new members. Unfortunately I haven’t yet figured out the best methods for training as of yet. My training is more like trial by building me a test robot with a mentor or veteran student overseeing the project.
Word.
Some of the teams I’ve worked with have similar problems with having a lot of students who lack the training to be able to do things and stay interested, but also have the problem of the students not showing up for pre-season meetings to get any of that training, they basically show up on Kickoff and expect to have something to do for the next 6 weeks.
This sort of thing puts an enormous strain on mentors and the few experienced students because they have to both design and build a robot in 6 weeks and train and manage inexperienced students simultaneously, which usually just results in pushing the inexperienced ones out of the way just to be able to get something done.
One example I can think of was a student we had who was interested in CAD, but got involved in a school drama production and we didn’t see him until week 4 when he came back in expecting to be able to help CAD the robot (which had already been basically finished a week earlier) even though he had only had minimal training on the CAD software prior to that.
On our team, we impose a strict deadline for when members can join the team (September 15th for those working on the robot and October 6th for our PR side) so that we don’t run the risk of having members who are unable to help during build season. It doesn’t completely solve the problem, but it at least makes it harder to have an excuse for not working. At that point it’s up to the leaders to dispense work equally to the students who are there, easier said than done. If you want to talk about how we run our team in person cbale2000, please PM me and we can work something out.