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Keeping people engaged with meaningful work
- Come to meetings prepared with tasks to give people, even if they're small. Even if you have the most dedicated members, they will get bored if you continuously have nothing for them to do.
- Keep track of people's progress in some form. This will not only help you keep track of what still has to be done, but will help you
- Never assign the same task to two different people unless it's clear that they're collaborating. Doing so is an insult and shows that you don't trust either to get the job done.
- Unless a part is absolutely critical and you must do it yourself, show trust in your team members and let them do the work after showing them how. Your main duty as teamlead is to pass on knowledge to your team members, and you can't do that if you're doing everything yourself.
Meetings
Most of your time as a teamlead will probably be spent meeting with other people. In general, there are four main types of meetings that you can expect as a teamlead.
- Exec/teamlead meetings: these are meetings where you meet with other teamleads/exec members to update them about your progress, and what you need help with. The topics are usually high level, and more subteam-specific content is reserved for your subteam meeting and other smaller group meetings. In general, it's best not to get too in-depth about something that doesn't apply to everyone, as you don't want to waste people's time. If you need to interface with other teamleads, you should organize a separate meeting for that.
- Subteam meeting: this is the meeting that you organize after determining the availability of your team members. It should happen once a week (unless there's a holiday). Come prepared with tasks to give members, updates, and food if you can! If you're in the design phase of a part, meetings can be held in the UL, but if you need to show off hardware or have a working meeting, you should have it in lab.
- Individual/one-on-one meetings: These are meetings primarily between you and one of your team members. It is especially important to meet one-on-one in the following cases:
- You have a new member that needs you to explain some aspect of the rocket, or how rockets work in general
- You want to assign a task to a member and explain the task in detail to them
- A member is feeling stressed about a task/something else, or is confused about/doesn't like what they're working on
- You want to check in with a member about the status of a part/task they're working on in detail
- You are training a member (using software, machining, etc.) to do some task
- Smaller group meetings: as the year progresses, your team will break up into smaller teams based on the part they're working on. In this case, you should meet with the group and have more detailed discussions, rather than talking about specifics during the subteam meeting. This is analogous to having a subteam meeting instead of talking about things too in depth during a teamlead meeting. These meetings will get more and more important as the year progresses, as you check in with your members and members of other teams.