Leadership Problems (AKA basically being the only one running something)

Pre-College Topics High School Cafe
1

So, I’m one of the editors of a literary magazine at the local middle school; the magazine is run by highschoolers.

All three editors (two writing, one art) are sophomores at the moment; I’m a writing editor. Last year, we were all assistant editors, and there was one main editor.

The thing is, at this point, I’m basically the only one running the program–and it’s pissing me off.

I’ll start at the beginning:

Last year, one of the girls (the other writing editor this year) came to only one meeting. Yet this year, she said she “really wanted to do the program” and the old editor let her become an editor. She’s an amazing writer and she’s really nice, but she isn’t actually doing anything. She’s already missed one of the three meetings we’ve had so far this year (she only informed the other editor, by the way, not me).

The other editor (art) didn’t come to half of the meetings last year either.

When we have meetings, we’re supposed to be walking around, looking at the students’ works and commenting upon them; the writing editors go over the writers’ pieces and the art editor goes over the artists’ pieces. However, I end up being the only one actually interacting with the kids; the other two editors just sit at their own table and work on their own stuff.

Also, we have an email account where we send out reminder emails and send emails out to teachers for promotion of our program. I’m the one who ends up sending out all the emails and communicating with everybody (and by the way, we never doled out specific duties).

When I want to communicate with the other editors about what activities we’re going to do, the other writing editor doesn’t reply half the time (“I’m sorry, I was super busy”) and the art editor doesn’t really have many suggestions. I make activity sheets that take me a long time to write for the activity workshops. When I email to ask about what activity we’ll do the next meeting, they don’t have any useful suggestions. They don’t show up for meetings sometimes, so I spend half my lunch period waiting for them and the other half attempting to get the library printer to work so I can print out copies of the activity worksheets.

We’re about to start working on our new issue, but I’m pretty sure there’ll be less “we” and more “I” involved.

tl;dr: I’m fed up with the bad communication skills off the other two editors and the fact that I end up doing all the work. Any advice?

2

Is there a teacher involved?

Either way, I suggest ignoring them and doing the work yourself. Treat them better than they’ve treated you, and shrug it off. Only start talking to someone if they are taking all the credit or something. If there is a teacher, you could also hint at getting another art editor, just to subtly let her know the current one is useless.

3

If there are any other staff working on the magazine, you could consider training them and delegating some of the responsibilities to them. Later on they may be able to “step up” and take on the helm in future years or once the current editors see that they are slacking compared to the staff members, they can improve their own contributions. Of course, I would approach them and talk to first and see if there is any way to specifically delegate responsibilities and set certain deadlines for their current roles

4

So this program is at the middle school and the teacher just manages the fact that we run the program at the school. We’re a branch of a program that was started at another school.

The thing is, another art editor would have to have participated in the program earlier, which makes it hard to find one (the program started when I was in eighth grade, and an editor must be an assistant editor first).

We don’t have any assistant editors this year, as we have three editors; we were planning on taking one next year (and every year after), but we can’t take any more now.