Leadership

I’ve learned a lot leading Mines ACM, HSPC, the OreCart project, and many other side projects and group projects. Again, this is just what I’ve noticed. You’ll learn what works for you, and I’ll learn and change my advice as my career goes on. I think a good leader has a vision, cares, takes initiative, and delegates as needed. I would also like to note that a good leader can be a good team player; you don’t always need to be at the helm. See the next section for more info and see below for my thoughts on leadership.

Vision

One of the most important parts of being a leader is also one of the hardest parts: pushing your vision. I feel like this is especially difficult because you’re usually executing on someone else’s vision (unless you’re in a high-up position or making a startup). If that’s the case, you should work to align your goals with your superiors’ vision.

If you’re pushing your own vision, you probably think about it a lot. Even outside of work. It can still be scary and hard to drive this on your own, but keep trying. Explain yourself to people, and let them ask questions. At some point, your vision may even morph as per other people’s vision, or to include their visions. That’s okay! Say yes if you want, but don’t be afraid to say no.

My vision for Mines ACM was to 1) grow the club and 2) build a community where people build soft skills. When I inherited the club, we had just recently added more officer positions and were coming off of the back of the pandemic, so it was a tall order. Over the year I was president, I cared about people. I tried to develop our students not just as engineers, but as respectable people who could do great things in CS. I listened to new ideas from the great team around me, such as hosting a club mixer, where many great connections were made. I rebuilt a community based on our shared interest. While it wasn’t perfect, I felt like I had people’s respect. People still talk to me and ask about ACM. They know I am (or was) the ACM guy. In my mind, I succeeded at my vision.

You’re not going to please everyone, but make sure they still respect you. Early on in my presidency, I made some changes that were instantly controversial. People thought I was too soft or indecisive, or just didn’t like my choices. One scenario that comes to mind is registration: around each registration window for the next semester, we get an influx of people asking which professors are good and which are “bad” and what classes to take in our public Discord chat.

Often, this made for unpleasant viewing. One or two professors would always be scapegoated and made out to be the devil and have unnecessary personal attacks toward them. Unbeknownst to those people, one or two of those very professors were actually present in that chat. I knew I had to do something. I would give warnings and even delete messages with unfriendly comments, which was met with uproar. People wanted to speak freely, and I also wanted them to be honest, but baseless attacks on personality weren’t something I would build my community on. People were mad for a little while. But they got over it, and they respected me more for it, and it built a better community aligned with my vision.

Care

A good leader cares. Tony Fadell once said that as a CEO, your job is to care. You have to care about all of your teams and people (to the best of your ability), not just one. If your team is big enough, it may have sub-teams, and you may not simply have enough time in the day to check in with everybody. But check in with each team or each project’s leader.

In today’s age, attention is the best gift you can give somebody. If someone is on your team, I would hope that you value their ideas and are willing to hear them out. Give them your undivided attention. While there will always be difficult people to work with, I hope you genuinely care about your team too, and can at least respect the work they do toward your mutual vision.

Initiative

People can learn to lead, but I think this is what makes a natural leader. Sometimes I just get an itch to organize people and things if they’re unorganized. An old family saying I’ve heard a lot goes: someone has to be the boss, and it might as well be me.

When the time comes, you step up to the plate, roll your sleeves up, and get working. Whatever that may entail. This is how a lot of people get into leadership positions anyways: they see a gap and they fill it.

See the gap and fill it.

Delegate

Despite all of what I just said about vision and care and initiative, you can’t do everything. Delegate it. An effective leader delegates tasks and picks the battles which they want to fight.

At ACM, I knew I couldn’t do everything, so I had to pick some initiatives that I wanted to personally sponsor and let others go. HSPC was a big initiative for me, so I put a lot of time into it. My good colleague Tyler and my would-be successor Megan went onto run a very successful, first of its kind hackathon called BlasterHacks. I supported it, but I wasn’t involved at all in its administration. I just didn’t have the bandwidth, but it supported our community and my vision, so I let them have at it.

When I was training Megan for her presidency, I couldn’t stress this enough. Pick your battles: you’ll always have the opportunity to do more, but you just can’t. You don’t have the time or energy. Delegate the things you can. We hired officers who were excited to do a job and willing to listen to authority [1].

Other thoughts

Leadership styles are different. That’s why I’m keeping it vague. I’ve seen equally effective “hands off” and “hands on” leadership. Personally, I’m a more “hands on” leader who prefers plenty of communication. But there’s no right or wrong, as long as your people respect you and like you and you can all get things done.

Finally, in the “vision” section, I spoke about the idea of a superior. Again, unless you’re some big C-suite exec, you’re going to have a superior. But don’t be fooled: titles were only ever just titles. They’re useful for describing the job you should be doing (most of the time) but they’re unhelpful when they put someone on a pedestal.

One time at one of my internships we had a corporate dinner which felt corporate-y, but my mentor and I went to talk with one of the VPs of our division, and he said the same thing. Titles aren’t so important, talk to the human. He told us how despite being a more senior executive, he had to stop school to raise his daughter as a single dad and he’s going back to finish his degree now, mid-career.

That was one of the best moments from the entire internship: seeing that the big scary VP was just another human. You should respect your leadership, but you should also know that they’re human just like you.

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[1]

While on the subject: My vice president, Umberto, was genuinely one of the most stellar communicators and leaders I ever met. He let me delegate a lot of things onto him, and he would communicate and delegate within our team. He just understood how I worked, and I told him how eternally grateful I was for that. Honestly, I think this is pretty rare, but if you can get someone like that to work with you, leadership becomes so much more fun.