A lot of high school clubs and organizations run like big businesses—everyone goes to meetings, a few key people actually make decisions, a few other people actually do the work (it’s not always the same people who make the decisions) and ultimately, not that much actually gets done. It looks like this:
A French Club with 20 members is planning a bake sale fundraiser for next month. The club meets once a week for six weeks to talk about the fundraiser, update the group on the progress, and delegate tasks. Ultimately, 3-4 people end up doing most of the work because there’s just not enough work for all 20 people to do.
If those six lunchtime meetings were each 30 minutes, that’s not three hours of meetings to run the bake sale. That’s actually 60 hours of meetings because 20 people each gave up time to be there. It’s hard to imagine they’re going to sell enough croissants to justify that many meetings.
What if, instead, the group did this:
1. Come up with four or five or twelve projects that might help the club in addition to the bake sale. Accept ahead of time that not all of them are going to be successes. But a few of them almost certainly will be.
2. Break up into smaller teams. If the bake sale really only needs 3-4 people to make it happen, recruit an interested team of 3-4 and put one person in charge. Then let them get to work. They can meet if they want to meet, but there’s no reason to pull the other 16 people into a room at one time to hear their updates. Then do the same thing for the other projects.
Now you’ve got 5-6 focused teams, each working on an interesting project where they get to make real contributions instead of just sitting in meetings.
How much more would your club get done? How much more engaged would your members be?
Your club or organization isn’t a big business. Big businesses are bloated, slow to change, filled with titles and meetings and middle-managers. Be like a small business–agile, quick to give responsibility to someone who wants it, and able to try new things without worrying that one failure will ruin youl.