UC Irvine: Leadership

Our robotics team had eleven members and one rule nobody said out loud: the three seniors decided everything, and the rest of us handed them tools. When two of those seniors quit in October after a fight about the drivetrain, I was the junior who knew the wiring best, so the job of leading fell to me by default.I did not start by giving a speech. ¹I started by making a spreadsheet. I listed every subsystem, who had touched it, and who had never been allowed to. Four of our newer members had joined in August and still had not soldered a single joint, because the seniors always grabbed the iron first.So I split the team into pairs, one experienced builder with one beginner, and made the experienced person teach instead of do. ²This was slower at first. Our first practice robot drove into a wall because a beginner had reversed two motor wires. I did not fix it for him. I asked him to trace the circuit until he found it himself, which took forty minutes and which he never got wrong again.The disputes did not vanish. Two members argued for a week about whether to build an arm or a simpler scoop. ³I made them each build a cardboard prototype and time it against the clock in front of the team. The scoop won by nine seconds, the argument ended, and the person who lost designed the scoop's mount.We finished sixth at our regional, our best result in four years. ⁴But the number I am proud of is different: nine of eleven members returned the next season, and every one of them could now wire a board alone. Leadership, I learned, is mostly deciding who gets to hold the tools.