Things I learnt about founding & leading a university society- extra points

Few weeks ago I went for an interview at Mediatek, a chip design company in Taiwan. We had a 45 mins interview, only the first 20 mins were technical then they were more curious about my experience running a society. Some questions they asked remind me of a few more points I want to make about this, so I will put them down here.

Situation 1: People might not reply to your email. What to do?

This will happen very often when you are reaching out to people, especially those who are “higher up”. My advice is to send them emails at 9 am in the morning, so they will see your email first thing on the list. And following the same chain of thought, I would also advise sending important emails in the first half of the week (Monday to Wednesday). Of course, there is no problem in sending it later in the week, but there is a chance that people might forget about your email once it is over the weekend.

Situation 2: People (in the committee) never finish his/her tasks. What to do?

You might feel like they are lazy or not motivated, but from my observation people are often struggle to make a start on things, especially when something that you are trying to do is new/ innovative. And people are overwhelmed. What I would do in this situation is to sit down with the person and discuss a detailed plan of what we could do. And if it did not help, you as a leader can spend some time to make a very raw prototype of the thing that you are trying to do, and give it to the person who is responsible for it. Now the person can already see the shape of the thing and will start to carve the bolk of wood you provided to a fine statue that he/she will satisfy with. You will often surprise by what people can come up with, starting with the raw prototype that you did not put much thought into. I found that it is human nature that we are much better at giving advice/suggestions than actually doing what we said. So let this force drive your group forward, when necessary. Let the person’s dissatisfaction with your raw prototype be the force to drive the person to make it to a perfect, or say complete one. That's my advice.