I Founded a College Club, and Learned How to Build a Team
The Foothill Startup Club is a Great Experience
Earlier this year, I co-founded the Startup Club at Foothill College. This, in the grand scheme of things, is a minor accomplishment, but it taught me, a business student, a good deal of practical knowledge that I could never learn in the classroom. I would like to provide a few simple lessons I learned over the past few months, perhaps they might be helpful to you all.
On Conducting Interviews:
Do build our team of officers, we had to conduct interviews. Here is what I learned on team-building from these interviews.
How do you find the best potential candidates for a team? This is something that is the center of much disagreement within the corporate world. While references are useful in theory, I don’t think they are that useful as you are effectively extending your current team, rather than expanding what your team can be. Conducting open and fair interviews allows you to assess potential candidates fairly. For our interviews, we had initially created complete scripts and a firm set of questions. However, we found that these question sets would prove to work only in setting up the conversation, and helping us return to topic if things got too sidetracked.
A few interesting thoughts I have in terms of interviews:
- Technical skills can be learned, interpersonal skills and a willingness to learn are harder to provide. Finding someone who is enthusiastic and curious, and you have someone incredible.
- See if their personality vibes with yours and the rest of your team. This is extremely important, as a team must work better as a collective than the individuals working on their own.
- Awkward moments are an incredible thing. Few things better reveal how an individual truly is than when they are faced with an awkward silence or a bizarre (though appropriate) question. Breaking the flow of difficult questions with a few lighthearted and casual questions was what I used for this purpose. Keep in mind this is not a perfect strategy, as some of my club members were initially silent and only engaged in casual chitchat after being an established part of our team.
- A good question that I loved to end interviews with was “If this position and our club didn’t exist, what would you do with the time you are currently willing to dedicate to this post?”
- Good interviewees ask questions. As someone who has been interviewed and has interviewed people now, the latter act completely changed my perspective on “any questions?” People who have genuine questions and seek to learn more about you and your organization stand out, as they are already clearly engaging with your organization and its ideals.
- Look for future leadership. This is especially important with college clubs, as we only have a few years to lead them at most, but is generally speaking a great principle.
Maintaining Your Team
Once you have built your team, maintaining it and seeing that it functions is the most important task. It also might be the most difficult one you will face.
- Expect certain members of your team to ditch. There will always been individuals who seek only to claim credit for your organization’s work (most often for their resume), and you should anticipate these people working for the initial few weeks before disappearing.
- At the same time, there will be members of your team that refuse to stake claim to major roles officially, but will do the work. Do not worry about members of your team ditching, these strong individuals will replace them. Remember to give them the credit and appreciation they deserve!
- Test out your candidates for future leadership. Give them tasks to lead within your organization, and see how they do it. Some future leadership candidates will turn out to not work well with the mission of your team, while others will certainly excel.
- No one leads alone. Find a stable team of leadership around you. Amongst our co-presidents, one of them who is the best at handling emails and internal coordination does such, for example. While it may be tempting to do as much public-facing work to claim credit, it is much more efficient to divide up tasks based on skills for an organization you want to see stably grow in the long-term.
I will repeat and build on the final point. No One Leads Alone. Build a team that you can trust and believe in. A team where everyone trusts each other is worth more than a highly skilled team. A team where tasks are evenly split without “mine” or “yours” dominating the discussion is worth its wait in gold.
This was a bit different of an article, but I do think it was very interesting to write. Let me know if you enjoyed it and would be interested in seeing other such articles soon.