Michael/Jacob/Elizabeth Leadership Discussion Notes

• Teamwide mission statement
  • Post Comp

• Role as a lead
  • Be the representative of your system to outside groups (Team management, other teams, partners, ops, ect.)
  • Be responsible for your team's final product
  • Make decisions
    • Part of being a leader is making hard decisions with incomplete information
      • Do your best with the information you have
      • Consider all the data you have and make predictions on things you don't know
        • "This component will cost $__"
        • "The FEA on this sim has a safety factor of __"
        • "Our final deadline is in ___ days and ___ takes ___ days so we have to drop ___ or ___"
        • "Based on their past lead times it should take them ___ days to ship ..."
    • If you have to make a decision, make it with confidence
      • "The hardest part of making decisions as a leader is sounding 100% when you feel 51%"
      • Only backpedal when you deem that the cost of backpedaling on wasted work, momentum, and team motivation is greater than the cost of making the mistake
    • You WILL make the incorrect choice sometimes but making a bad choice is better than decision paralysis
  • Remove things that block your team from working at full efficiency
    • Team member Management
      • Important to have a good personal relationship built on trust and camaraderie
      • Have something in writing to keep track of member capabilities/availability
      • Load balance work and stressful tasks rotate people in and out as needed
    • Team morale/environment/motivation
      • People are motivated to do solar work by a couple of specific factors, don't harm these factors if you can avoid it
        • Opportunity for experience
          • Avoid giving too much busywork, always pair it with something useful for their development
        • People
          • Build good personal relationships with your team members and between people on your system
          • Keep the workday environment relaxed but focused
            • People will be willing to stay working for much longer if they are working with friends
        • Invested in the car's success
          • This is a heavily momentum-based factor, it takes a while to build up. You can build it up faster by giving people sole responsibility of important projects
          • Good for a short(week to a month) push
    • Logistics of supplies/services
      • Everything has a lead time you never want your blocker to making progress to be waiting for shipping
      • List of everything you need for any major task
      • Inventory what your have - secure your inventory
      • Order what you need
      • Lay everything out for your team in an "Idiot proof manner"
    • Looking for and resolving blocker tasks
      • Blocker tasks are any small task that hold up all progress but can be solved by 1 person relatively easily
        • Ex: Looking for a tool you will need for the next step of a process
    • Empowering your team to act independently
      • BULLETPOINTS EXPANDED ON UP TO HERE
    • Knowing how to get the answer for anything your team needs to know
      • NOTE: THIS BULLET DOES NOT SAY "BE THE BEST AT EVERYTHING UNDER YOUR SYSTEM'S UMBRELLA"
• Developing team vs. developing the car
  • Costs/benefits of each strategy
  • Short term vs long-term goals
• Meetings
  • Meetings are necessary but there's a reason everyone hates them
  • The purpose is to inform every person there of something and or get feedback on something that EVERYONE in the room should have input on
  • If you're running a meeting, need an agenda
  • For both being in a meeting and running a meeting, keep things that aren't important for everyone to know for after the meeting so you don't waste people's time
  • Exceptions for when you need to understand something to make an informed decision and you don't
• Logistics thinking about ahead of time, avoid aeroshell last second purchases
  • Mock layup purchase request
  • Mock purchase requests
  • Keeping ops involved with purchase requests and required mats to get carbon fiber donations for example
  • Embedding technical system members into ops?
  • Maybe just pull in area leads so they at least are more cautious about it
• Recruiting Stuff
  • Generate starting projects(Start immediately after comp)
  • How many people do we want
  • Interview format
  • Mock interviews
  • Non-car starter projects. Just stuff that is fun and educational or useful off car
• ME302  Better than ME302 design process get people on that mindset
  • Practice examples
  • Team wide bracket for design
  • Justifying design decisions(should almost always be able to cite a number or equation of some kind)
  • Design Philosphy
    • Requirements
    • Constraints
    • Capabilities
    • Goals
• Soft Skills
  • Communication skills
    • Everyone's goal is to work together to make the team do well
    • listen/understand other person's perspective before trying to convince them
    • do not have an ego

Jacob showing up to help teach, not so much making decisions

Hardhik Sitting in the front at leads