OFTW Chapter Leaders are responsible for inspiring, delegating, actively communicating, rewarding, encouraging teamsmanship, listening, and being consistent and reliable. These skills, although difficult to develop, are invaluable assets toward your team’s success. Below, you will find a list of soft-management-esque skills that we think will strengthen you and your team, ultimately leading to more pledges!

Contents:

1. Infectious excitement
2. Communication
3. Delegating responsibility
4. Trustworthiness
5. Rewarding work with words

Infectious excitement:

• Having an enthusiastic attitude is a great way to attract people to OFTW. People flock to excitement.
• Note: An easy way to become excited is to remind yourself that the more work you and your team do, the more lives are saved! It’s truly an incredible opportunity.

Communication:

• Be transparent with motivations, actions, and mistakes. Your team wants clarity and will expect all information to be as upfront as possible. 
• It’s helpful and efficient to maintain a clear and routine communication throughout the school year:
• Form: It depends on the person, but email is often good for more bureaucratic communication while texting and group chats are great for planning and casual conversations.
• Be routine. There is no set guideline for exactly how routine, but some sort of exchange each week with all members is a good baseline for maintaining an active community. Of course, as with many aspects of being a OFTW CL, the more the better.
• Listen! As a leader, it’s vital that you listen to feedback.
• Show that you are listening! Body language - be open, intent, and focused on the person speaking
• Ask questions and acknowledge what they say. Remember, more than anything, you are here to help them do great things, not the other way around!

Delegate Responsibility:

• Delegating is a win-win. You free up your own time and empower your members to complete important tasks. While you are now available to focus more energy elsewhere, the person completing tasks likely will become more invested in OFTW!
• Example scenario where you could delegate - You are having trouble managing social media accounts and organizing tabling at the same time - it’s becoming too much. If you want to delegate effectively, just ask a Student Ambassador or another member of the Exec board. You could ask in any number of ways, but here is one: “Hey! I am juggling too much right now. How would you like to take over our social media accounts? You’d be responsible for the content we post as well as posting as routinely as possible. Would you like to accept this responsibility?” Boom. Just like that.

Trustworthiness:

• Trust, the bedrock of any organization, takes time to build. Here are a few suggestions for building it:
• Be the “Go to” person for your chapter! If there are any urgent issues, solve them as well as you can.
• Be reliable! Respond as quickly as possible when people in your chapter reach out.

Rewarding work with words:

• When a member of your team does something good, tell them! Here are some cheesy examples:
• “Hey! I saw you hosted two Giving Lunches this weekend. I heard they went great. You are doing excellent work. Keep it up!”
• “Thank you for advertising our tabling on Instagram today. It looked superb. And plus, you did it without anyone asking. Nice work!”
• Encouraging and acknowledging effort towards the chapter is a surefire way to build momentum. People want to be appreciated and will likely begin contributing more the more they are supported and acknowledged.