Team Interview: How do you motivate your team when they are falling behind schedule?

Between December 2019 and January 2020, the Curiosum Tech team interviewed a few FS teams in Mumbai, Pune and some at the Formula Bharat 2020 event. The purpose of these interviews were to gain student insight information from their various activities within a Formula Student team and provide it as a resource sharing opportunity with other teams within the country and outside its borders as well.

This is Part 2 of the Team Interview series. Part 1 can be found here.

How do you motivate your team in case they are falling back on schedule or stuck in some area of design or build?

The teams’ interviews compiled here are as follows:

• DJS Racing (Dwarkadas J. Sanghvi College of Engineering – Mumbai)
• Illuminati Racers (Lovely Professional University – Phagwara)
• Team Kratos Racing Electric (Pimpri Chinchwad College of Engineering – Pune
• STES Stallion Motorsport (Smt. Kashibai Navale College of Engineering – Pune)
• STES Racing (Sinhgad College of Engineering – Pune)

DJS Racing

Parvez Shaikh – Vehicle Dynamics Lead

There is an answer to each and every question that you have – just calm yourself, think from the bottom of your mind, and apply the principles and the learning that you have got over the years. Like each and every problem can be solved, there is nothing that can’t be solved or no mystery that can’t be solved. There is a solution for each and everything.

Illuminati Racers

Archiman Sharma – Chassis and Aerodynamics Lead

I would like to say that our team has a specific virtue and we are proud of it; it is the bond we share among us. Like you mentioned, if we have any deadlines that we are not able to meet, we assist our team mates if they have any issues. For instance, within Chassis integration, we have this thing called Meshing where we have to mesh our vehicle for FDA. This is very hectic as there are long hours involved for our team mates. So we comfort them – in Hindi we say ‘tassali‘. We guide them and assure them that even if it doesn’t work out, we can make iterations to our CAD model and so on.

Team Kratos Racing Electric

Hrishikesh Kulkarni – Marketing Lead

So in these situations, most of the times, you have to take a break. You have to gather your thoughts. We keep a session where people can just relax a bit and then, we have a brainstorming session, where we plan our future course of action.

STES Stallion Motorsport

Hrishikesh Pawar – Team Captain

Basically, we encourage everyone to not get to this instance to begin with. Hence we plan to achieve the deadlines in stages. Because at every stage, you get to know how much work you have done.

STES Racing

Parth Jade – HOD of Powertrain and Business Event

The primary motive of our team is never to blame anyone. Even if a department is lagging behind with their deadlines, we try to push them and if they lack the manpower, we try to help them with their work and complete it on time.

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The interviews were conducted by Cleon Rodrigues, with assist support from Ruben D’Souza and Abhishek Patil. The editing and consolidation of script was conducted by Ruben D’Souza and Sharlet Mariados.

Some transcripts were edited for grammatical errors.