I want to provide some context to the question in the title. To start, my team has had a few issues with work delegation, which has lead to many of our team members feeling left out as they wouldn’t have a job to do in their sub-team for that day. To combat this, I decided to try to build another smaller really basic bot, nicknamed, “The Box-Bot” and initially kept it a secret to add to the appeal of it. I was pleased to see about 10 or so members were interested in working on it. Most of these members were from Mechanical or Electrical sub-teams, so this gave them the opportunity to work on their skills and learn some other skills from the other sub-team. This increased our quality of work in our club fairly significantly as more students were provided an opportunity to progress, and perfect their skills in a stress free environment. Eventually as more and more leadership discovered the project, we decided we would try to implement a method to cross-train our sub-teams. Not only our electrical and mechanical, but all of them. Electrical, Mechanical, Design, Programming, Business, and Spirit. I wanted to ask what the best way to do this would be? We want our club members to be excited about learning new skills and feel like they can mess up and learn from their mistakes. Mainly, we want all of them to be interested in what they are working on, so that they can remember what they learned. Our club plans to implement this next year, and we think the earlier we plan this, the better this will be. I am looking forward to seeing responses. Thank you so much!
Using an off-season build is a great way to do this! Instead of building this robot like the regular season robot, move most of the people to a different sub-team for this. Keep a one or two experienced people on each sub-team, but otherwise shake it up. Don’t rule out people crossing back to show how things are done, but make sure that they leave the bulk of the work to those cross-tasking.
Thank you for the quick response, this looks to be a great way to involve people, I’ll talk about it with my leadership team, thank you and if you think of anything else please let me know!
No problem! On 3946, we never forced people into cross-training, but especially with off-season projects, we always allowed and someitmes encouraged it, especially with people on pit crew, or who had shown pit crew potential*. The more things the people in the pit are comfortable doing, the better.
* That is, not only be competent at doing their thing, but responding well to time pressure. Some people fall apart under pressure, a few ignore it. The pit crew needs to recognize the time limits, and do the best job possible with the time they have. After FIRST, this type of response is also essential in military, logistics, and other operational situations.
You mention that your team had issues with work delegation, and I think that’s the underlying issue here. If all the leaders have tunnel vision on finishing the robot ASAP, and repeatedly turn away younger members who want to learn, younger members will stop asking. For my team, we (the mentors) agree that student engagement and team sustainability are a high priority for us, and make it very clear to the student captains that we expect them to make time for teaching, even at the expense of work going a little slower. If we notice a kid who seems bored and ask a student captain to give them something to work on, they know that “I’m too busy” is generally not an acceptable answer (and it they’re genuinely overwhelmed by everything they have to do, we help them redistribute some work to other team members).
If you also have the problem of members just not wanting to cross-train, you should examine your team culture. Do your experienced team members see themselves as only responsible for their subteam’s portion of the work, and everything else that needs to be done is someone else’s problem? Or do they see the whole robot + business as the whole team’s responsibility, and everyone should always be ready to pitch in with whatever needs doing? Do experienced members feel like some kinds of work are beneath them? Or that they only joined the team because they’re interested in [subteam], so nobody has the right to ask them to do anything else? Do people seem excited about getting the chance to cross-train in the off-season so they can be less bored in the spring, or are they dragging their feet? Are your student leaders only excited about this off-season cross-training project because it might finally mean that people will stop bugging them to teach them stuff during build season?
If any of this sounds like your team, I would recommend talking with the student leaders and mentors and start by figuring out whether you agree on the problem. Hopefully you can reach some agreement about how you want your team culture to be, and what each of you can do to help make it happen. In general, you cross-train people to a second subteam the same way you trained them to their first one - projects, workshops, etc. But if you’re fighting your team’s priorities and culture, it won’t go as well as it could. “Extra training in the fall so people can work without us teaching them anything during build season” is a band-aid if the real problem is team priorities, poor delegation/leadership, not-my-problem-ism, etc
Turning to the younger members does not necessarily mean a worse build. As a sophomore that finds myself leading certain subsystems, I always trust the freshman and juniors. There always going to be newbies if you don’t give them the chance. I finds many senior members not willing to let the younger members do important work that involves risk.
Just don’t treat your younger members as garbage. Think of them as the workhorse and you as the senior the decision maker.