I am wondering what some other teams use for organization of leadership. I am on team 8546 Linebreak, and we just last year changed our leadership organization. We have a team captain and engineering lead at the top level of leadership. Then under the captain there is the outreach lead, scouting lead, safety captain,and media lead and they report to the captain. Under the engineering lead we have the CAD/build lead, the code lead, and the electrical lead. Under the leads they have a miny team. The captain and engineering lead work to create projects for each team. Exited to see other teams leadership organization.
That’s very similar to my team’s (811) organization, except that we do not have an official captain/engineering lead. We have subteam leads, with some being team leads. Our team leads mostly help everyone stay on task.
Our team has three captains since we are a large team with 100+ kids, and a lead for each specific subteam. The captains, leads, and mentors all communicate to set deadlines and keep in touch with progress. This formula works pretty well for us. Captains are mainly in charge of some administrative duties, giving announcements, posting reminders in google classroom, checking in with subteam leads, etc. and subteam leads supervise their subteam, checking in with students and ensuring goals get met.
This setup works pretty well for us, leadership roles are impactful without being too time-consuming; people can be leaders within the team while still having ample time to actually work on the robot, which is pretty nice.
We are a very large team (~125 students) so we have about 25 student leaders, broken down into 4 branches - robot, business, strategy, and project management, each led by a captain. Each captain has a mixture of subteam leads and other positions under them. For all the images below, our coaches and mentors choose (from an application) the leaders in the square boxes, and the leaders in the circled boxes are chosen by the student leads, and approved by coaches / mentors. Below is an overview of each branch, and a little explanation about roles that may not be familiar to those from other teams.
Project Management:
Materials Manager: Manage ordering of parts and inventory
Feature Project Managers: Manage one feature/subsystem of our robot (intake, shooter, arm, drivetrain, climber, etc.)
Robot Branch:
Systems Integration specialist: works with the FPMs to distribute chassis space along with motor allotment, manages full robot integration points
The rest are our subteam leads
Business Branch:
These positions are all subteam leads
The FLL Mentor Coordinator works to run our two FLL tournaments and assign mentors to our 41 FLL teams
Strategy Branch:
Strategic Software lead: oversees the creation and management of our scouting app, SPOT
Strategic Management lead: oversees the creation of our design requirements at the start of the season and works with drive team to determine match strategy
We have a model for our team leadership we call Organic Leadership where instead of having pre-defined roles people will step up to those kind of roles with the skills they have. We do this to create and ecosystem where people can go from learning to leading all in the same season. It also means that people are free to learn what interests them and still take a part in developing those aspects. This leads to a pretty well rounded team where some people will mostly focus on one aspect, or some people will be kind of a jack of all trades.
While there are sometimes problems with it, for us we consider the good to outweigh the bad, and we have a lot of measures to deal with the bad parts. We try to keep a smaller team size (~20-25) and ask that every member attend at least 70% of the meetings during build season which is a 13-14 hours a week minimum.
