A massive wall of text in response to “The Mentor Problem”

I originally wrote this in response to a thread on Chief Delphi, a forum for FIRST people, about mentor culture and team sustainability and all that jazz in August of 2024. You can read the original thread here. Some of the specifics are now a little bit outdated, but the meat of what’s here is still very good.

Who I Am & Who We Are

Hi, I’m Brad. I’m the Lead Mentor for FRC Team 461, Westside Boiler Invasion.

We operate as an independent nonprofit, with our mentors & parent volunteers taking on all the actual work of running the program. We also work closely with our school corporation, which provides us with space, transportation, and a few stipends for mentors.

Our program is run primarily by a group of 7 mentors who collectively operate as a fluid and overlapping collection of roles, responsibilities, and areas of expertise that we call the Steering Committee, with me as the “first among equals” in the group.

We’re fairly unique in that we have 8-10 FLL teams, 4 FTC teams, and our FRC team operating under the same roof & largely driven by the same group of people. Each program has a pair of people who serve as lead mentors (at least one of which is part of the Steering Committee), but the Steering Committee drives the organization as a whole.

We’ve got another ~10 mentors of varying levels of engagement, 16-20 parents who coach FLL teams, a few parent mentors who work with the FTC teams, and a dozen or so more involved parents who aren’t really “mentors” but are pretty engaged in providing other organizational/fundraising/etc. support.

A Caveat

The things that work for us will probably not work for you!

Every group is different. Every person is different. Our unique combination of geography, people, personalities, skills, community resources, local culture, school politics, etc. shapes what we do & how we do it. Just because we do something one way or have settled on specific answers to questions doesn’t mean that you should - or that we’ll still be doing the same thing or answer the question the same way two years from now as our circumstances evolve.

Original Questions

How can we be less dependent on exceptional volunteers to build sustainable FRC teams?

You can’t and you shouldn’t want to be - running high-quality programs requires high-quality people to run them.

Nobody’s born an exceptional technical expert and mentor. The question we should all be asking is “How do we get more exceptional volunteers?” or maybe, “How do we make what is now seen as the exception into the norm?”

How do we transfer knowledge to new volunteer coaches to set them up for success?

Community and connection are critical. Building your social connections - both inside your team and with other teams in your area - helps facilitate the flow of information.

Don’t fall into the trap of assuming that formal training opportunities will fix this kind of problem. It’s easy to accumulate certificates, badges, and training hours and learn nothing. Also people need to have the time & energy to take advantage of those training opportunities.

Experienced folks need more time & bandwidth to document what they do, sure. But I’ve found that it’s often more effective to sit down & talk with new people - meet them where they’re at and provide a path forward from there.

What motivates people to mentor and how can we tap into that to grow our volunteer base?

Realizing opportunities to get good at something and share their work with others. Feeling like they belong and have a community they’re invested in and that is invested in them. Having the resources, information, and autonomy to do what they do best and to do it well.

Money, prestige (they almost won Worlds last year, I want a piece of that), and feelings of obligation (I was part of the program as a kid and I should give back, my kid’s involved in this so I should help out) are OK as hooks to draw people in but only get you so far.

How does the onboarding process or lack thereof for new mentors affect their likelihood of staying involved? /

What are the pain points that cause mentors to step back?

The biggest reason I see potential mentors don’t stick around seems to be a lack of engagement and a feeling that they don’t feel like they know how to contribute.

Time commitment is another big one, but we’re also pretty accepting of whatever time people can give so that comes up less frequently - but like we tell the kids, the more you’re here the more engaged/involved you can be…

It’s really hard for someone who needs very concrete, well-defined tasks to feel comfortable melding into our more fluid culture of artisanal leadership. It’s also really hard for people who live in that artisanal leadership culture to take what they do and turn it into discrete, well-documented tasks for people to take on. Everyone needs to stretch themselves a bit to reach each other. Finding people that can interface between those groups & operationalize some work has been working for us lately, as we’ve needed more of our parents to step up and do more to help - one of our more involved parents put together a sign-up sheet with almost 200 tasks or roles for parents across all our programs & events that we help run to take on this year.

Do structured roles and responsibilities for mentors have an impact on retention/recruitment?

Absolutely, and potentially in both positive & negative ways.

Not having enough structure means nobody knows what’s going on or who’s in charge of what, so there’s lots of stuff that doesn’t get done or gets done by multiple people.

Too much structure means things are frustrating & slow to get done because too many people need to have their hands on decisions.

Strong, frequent, obvious communication about who’s responsible for what is way more important than having a “properly structured” org chart.

Having mentors who are friends outside of the context of the shop is incredibly helpful.

You don’t have to do anything big or super involved. Start small. Show up early & stay late after meetings just to chat. Go have dinner together on a regular basis.

We have a weekly regional mentor dinner year-round. The FRC team mentors also do lunch or dinner most Sundays during build season to plan out the week to come, and also to just hang out and socialize and watch a movie or whatever.

Or, you can go a lot bigger. Help each other move across town. Take a trip to Kings Island or a college football game together. Watch all 10 Fast & Furious movies together in someone’s basement over the course of a week. Spend a weekend visiting somebody’s hometown & dropping in on the quirky rural town festival going on nearby.

Not everybody shows up to everything, but we make sure people are invited & included. The more of these opportunities you have & the more people take advantage of them, the more cohesive your mentor group will be.

How can teams prevent a mentor role from feeling like a second unpaid job?

Keep your expectations low & hold your team back. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Good stuff takes work. Great stuff takes more work. The work isn’t always fun - everybody wants to build robots, and nobody wants to cold-call potential sponsors - but you’ve got to put in the work to get the results you want.

There’s value in bringing on more people to help spread the load here. However, depending on the structure and personalities involved, that may just make it more like a job because you’re now doing a lot more people and resource management and less cool stuff with the kids. But if you’re going to run a large program, somebody’s got to take that work on to help the program scale up.

This isn’t my job—although it would be great if I got paid enough for what I’m doing here for me to not need to work — but it is my vocation (in the more traditional quasi-religious sense of the word, not just as a synonym for “job”). A big part of why I do freelance/consulting work instead of having a “real job” is so I have more time/energy to spend on this stuff, which if you couldn’t tell by the fact that I’ve assembled a 10 page manifesto about this, is obviously quite important to me.

What opportunities are there for community, government, and employer involvement to make mentoring less of a burden on a volunteer? What opportunities are there for school funded paid coach roles like many other high school team sports?

Find a way to pay us what we’re worth for the time, effort, and expertise we bring to the program.

Provide funding for the team and travel and stuff so that we’re not actively paying to make the team work on top of what we’re already putting in.

More paid volunteer time off, donation matching, etc.

Enable our schools & administrators to better support us.

Invest in HQ and our district/region organizations so that they can better support us.

Follow-Up Points / Questions

What do you mean by Artisanal Leadership?

Practice your craft & be a good steward.

Systems thinking paired with embracing the mess & chaos.

Deep expertise paired with accepting that you can’t know & understand everything.

Strong self-reliance paired with a supportive community.

Putting in the work paired with involving others in the work.

Solving problems correctly paired with finding the correct problems to solve.

Trusting each other to get stuff done paired with talking about why and how we’re doing things.

Consistently coming to consensus about the big important stuff paired with not worrying too much about how the little stuff gets done.

How did we get all of these super dedicated mentors & volunteers? How do we get more volunteers/mentors in general?

26 years of recognizing that we’re not here to build robots, we’re here to build community.

Also plenty of dumb luck. But it’s not really dumb luck if you’ve done a good job of networking and building a good team culture. My predecessor, Steve Florence, did a fantastic job of this and put down a great foundation that I’ve been able to build off of.

We also benefit from being right next to Purdue, which has a solid FIRST alumni organization that feeds us college student mentors. This is often not quite as helpful as it sounds (flaky students, teaching people how to be good mentors can be a lot of work, …), but a handful of us who are here running the show now came to the program through Purdue.

Almost all of our mentors are alumni - several from our program, but mostly from others.

Developing an FLL/FTC/FRC pipeline is incredibly helpful. It’s a lot easier to get FLL-age parents involved in the first place, and once they’re in, it’s a lot easier to keep them engaged as their kids get older. It’s definitely a long-term, large-scale endeavor to try and bring all of that under your umbrella - or to start teams that somebody isn’t already running - but it does pay off eventually.

Leverage your network, your parents’ network, your friends’ network, … and make sure you’re plugged into your district/region network too - people do move and want to find new teams to work with.

How are we not burnt out by doing all this work?

From What motivates people to mentor and how can we tap into that to grow our volunteer base?:

Having the resources, information, and autonomy to do what they do best and to do it well.

Not having those things and not doing good work makes me feel burnt out. Doing good work with people I care about that has a positive impact on the world, even when it’s sometimes miserable work, keeps me going and fuels me up.

Also because we have an awesome leadership team we can all skip the occasional meeting, take breaks, and go on vacations without everything falling apart or grinding to a halt while we’re gone.

How can we operationalize what we do—turn it into a manual or a playbook that others can follow to be just as awesome, successful, impactful, and sustainable?

See A Caveat.

Good work in this context must be highly creative and adaptive to your particular situation. You can’t really document creativity or insight. What we can do is share what we do, try small experiments to figure out what works and what doesn’t, and keep evolving and getting better.

“Parents have a really important skill that I’d argue is more important than the technical skills: dealing with teenagers.”

I would argue that this is… often less than accurate.

Many parents are experts in dealing with their kids (but I’ve also seen plenty of parents who… aren’t), not necessarily kids in general. I’ve been dealing with rooms full of teenagers for 15 years, so I’d wager I’m probably more prepared than your average parent to work with our students in this context. Our best parents are smart enough to know when and how to work with their kids and when to go away and let the mentors do what we’re here to do.

Parents also tend to bring baggage from home. If not carefully managed, this can create negative experiences for their kids and their teammates. Kids will also think and act differently with their parents around (i.e., they’re more social and engaged when Dad’s not around and more reserved and let Dad take charge when he is).

This doesn’t mean that we don’t want parents involved or that we don’t want to listen to parents if they have concerns or anything like that — but there needs to be a level of mutual understanding and a collaborative approach between them, us, and their kid for parents to be in hands-on mentor-type roles.

I’ve also seen teams implode over parent-driven drama. That’s a big part of why the mentors run our team & the parents mainly help out, not the other way around.

“Who holds people accountable when critical responsibilities are missed or left undone?”

The Steering Committee provides oversight among ourselves & the rest of the mentor crew to ensure that things are getting done. We trust each other to do good work & help each other out when that’s not what’s happening.

“Accountability” is not a word that comes up often.

“I dont think it’s sustainable. I dont think its sustainING.” “Most teams ride on one person, the more elite teams may have 3-4 with deep FRC knowedge and intuition - knowledge and intuition that really can only be built up via practice.” How do we get more exceptional volunteers? How do we make what is now seen as an exceptional volunteer the norm?

My program has 10 mentors with deep FRC knowledge, 6 with plenty of FTC know-how, and 9 that know FLL inside and out.

Build a bigger tent & invite people in.

My job as a mentor to our students and a mentor to our mentors is to give people the support, resources, and opportunities they need to become experts - and sometimes they will.

Becoming an exceptionally good volunteer is something that we’ve raised a lot of people to be afraid of - you have to be a little different to make a difference, to be exceptional you must be an exception, to be outstanding you must stand out, etc - and people will only get over that if you’ve built a culture where people feel safe and supported as they grow.

Build a culture that views putting in the work as the norm and it’s incredible the amount of work that you can get done. I think we do a fantastic job of showing & including people in what goes on behind the scenes, how much work it is, and the fact that it may not always be fun but that we have fun doing it. A lot of Steering Committee conversations happen with students & mentors around, and we’re quick to find ways to plug people in when they want to help.

“I’m personally only a few steps removed from advocating that FRC doesn’t deserve to exist, and that my fellow mentors and I need to consider ending our commitment to it, and shift our efforts to the kinds of things you are talking about.” “FRC itself isn’t all that valuable. It’s, at best, a convenient way to structure a group of people and sponsors around a timeline and a short-term goal, which has great potential to yield positive outcomes. But, the robot and the competition itself is not what produces the outcomes. Indeed, depending on situation… it’s very plausible that time is better spent elsewhere.“

Great, go do something else if you don’t see the value in this or don’t have the resources or whatever - but don’t try and convince others who have found success or are on a path to success here that it can’t work for them because it’s not working for you right now. What works for us may not work for you.

I think FIRST happens to be a good framework for us to work within and that our goals are reasonably aligned with their goals. If that stops being the case, I’ll probably be looking for something else to invest my time & energy in too.

“We’re trying to form virtuous and skilled people, and prepare them to go forth into the world and improve it.” => “That’s a laudable vision.

But, my goals are a lot smaller than that. I just want to develop kids’ interests in STEM by challenging them to do something big as a group.”

The latter is how you do the former.

The first quoted post is really about changing the culture that instills certain values and attitudes in young people. You can’t change culture by lecturing masses of people or whatever—you have to shift individual people’s attitudes and behaviors by showing them a different path and involving them in the work. If you do that enough times, you’ll start to change the cultural norms, and that’s what the latter post is talking about.

=> “I don’t think HQ actually has [any of that] as a goal for FRC teams.”

I don’t care so much about HQ’s goals — I’m not spending 20 hours a week on this program for HQ’s benefit. I know what’s important to me, my fellow mentors, and my kids, so that’s the direction I’m moving in.

How does our mentor leadership structure work?

I’ve been told that we have a very different approach to this than many teams, and we think that’s a big part of the secret sauce that makes our program work like it does, so I want to explore it in more detail.

In short, I’m in charge, all seven of the Steering Committee members are in charge, all the mentors are in charge, the kids are in charge, and nobody’s really in charge, all at the same time. There are very few rules, but there are lots of vibes. And the key is that we all talk to each other constantly about what’s going on.

All of the Steering Committee members are responsible for a mix of operational and program leadership/team mentorship areas. These are roles that have, for the most part, organically evolved as more people have stepped up and taken on more responsibility over the years. There’s often a great deal of overlap between roles - i.e. I take care of a lot of back-end administrative stuff across all of our programs, but the other FRC lead mentor, the FTC lead mentors, and the FLL coach coordinator also do a lot of that stuff as well. We collaborate, communicate, and work stuff out as needed to make sure things are getting done.

I — and the rest of the mentors, our parents, and our students — trust that the artisanal leaders we’ve put in positions of responsibility and authority are equipped to make good decisions and to be good stewards of our people and resources, so for the most part, they just do their thing. The mentors who are involved in designing & building the robot don’t need to ask for permission from me or get the Steering Committee to vote or anything like that before they finalize their plans, they just work with the kids to figure out what we want to do and get to work. We have a rough budget for how much we’re going to spend on props, printing, and accessories for judging at events every year, so the Steering Committee people in charge can just go spend that money, no questions asked or approval needed. And most importantly, we’re all talking with each other about all of these things so that we’re all getting constant implicit - or explicit - feedback on what’s going on as we go. When weird stuff comes up, like the robot’s looking like it could be ridiculously expensive or we want to buy a new piece of equipment, we all talk about it & figure out how to handle it in a way that makes sense to most everyone.

I don’t need every decision that happens on the team to come through me. Not only is that kind of dumb since I’m not an expert in everything that the team does (that’s what I have the Steering Committee & mentors for - not only am I not at all knowledgeable enough to judge whether a robot design is good or not, I also don’t really care what it looks like or does as long as the mentors & the students are happy with it!), but that culture of empowering people to be autonomous and giving them the resources they need is what keeps people engaged and invested in the program. I don’t always agree with every little thing that the other Steering Committee members decide to do, and they don’t all always agree with every decision I make. But that’s OK because we know that we’re all here for the right reasons, and we all believe that it’s more important that everyone feels ownership over what they’re responsible for than for any one of us to feel like we’re the in-charge-est of the in-charge people.

The other benefit of this more fluid leadership structure is its resilience. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow and the program would be fine in the end. We all bring unique stuff to the table but none of us is truly irreplaceable. Strict hierarchies & concentrated decision-making power tend to create power vacuums when people leave or move around the org chart unless carefully orchestrated, and that is a magnet for trouble & drama.

The downside to all of this is that it requires a great deal of trust that has to be forged in a culture where this kind of thing is the norm over years of working together. It’s often less efficient than having very rigid ways of making decisions, but we think it’s way more effective - and who cares if you’re efficient if you’re not effective. It’s also kind of hard to talk to other people about (I understand how to make rules, but how do you make vibes?) and integrate new people into higher levels of engagement, especially if you’ve never really been a part of an explicitly not-super-hierarchical organization before.