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by Christopher A. Thurber, Ph.D.
Had it with hiring cabin leaders who just don't “get it”? Tired of combing
the Internet for something more than cookie-cutter counselors whose resumes
all look the same? Eager to reduce liability by hiring staff you've known
for years instead of hours? Consider making internal leadership development
your staffing priority.
Internal leadership development (ILD) is a program of hiring, training,
and promotion with the goal of cultivating staff from the camper ranks.
Designed thoughtfully and implemented seriously, it can eventually become
your primary source of new hires.
(I use the word “leader” to refer to members of the camp staff who live,
eat, and run activities with campers. Although “counselor” is also popular,
this word has other meanings — lawyer, therapist, etc., — none of which
personify leadership qualities. “Staff” is a broader term that denotes
anyone on the camp payroll.)
Great Camps Don't Just Happen
“You could take skilled cabin leaders and put them in a parking lot with
a bunch of kids and make a great camp.” So said Tom Giggi, one of my mentors,
sixteen years ago. I was a proud, first-year cabin leader, smitten with
my newfound power and the immense privilege of having been chosen to return
to camp after my Leader-in-Training year. Tom was charged with the prodigious
task of keeping me humble and focused on my job: the children — not the
equipment or other staff — at camp. His comment has become one of my mantras
because it speaks to the tremendous potential that gifted leaders have
to transform a perfectly good camp into a great one.
This transformation hinges on something simple but increasingly uncommon:
the leader's secure relationship with his or her campers. From that, other
elements of a great camp follow: strong traditions, long staff and camper
tenure, and a spirit that transcends the fancy equipment. Of course, finding
gifted leaders, who can keep children their top priority, is not simple.
Even if you are an expert interviewer, you don't really know how a new
hire will treat your campers. Fortunately, other ways of finding skilled
staff exist. In fact, they are right there in your camp already, enjoying
their camper years and beginning to absorb your camp's philosophy.
Nurturing, selecting, and training your best campers to become cabin
leaders is a complex process that lies at the heart of internal leadership
development. Before you make a commitment to ILD, you must ask yourself
key questions, understand fundamental training techniques, and design
a model that incorporates essential core elements, yet is customized to
fit your camp. Let's take a look at those questions, design elements,
and training techniques.
Begin with a Leadership Self-Examination
Whether you are looking to enhance your existing ILD program or start
fresh, you will first need to ask yourself some conceptual and pragmatic
questions (see table 1). More than an academic exercise, these questions
are a prerequisite to your designing an ILD program and mentally committing
to its success.
ILD programs are not for every camp. Your answers to these questions
will help determine whether ILD is right for you. If it is, then your
answers will lay the foundation upon which your ILD program rests. Plan
at least a daylong retreat this winter to discuss these questions with
your senior staff. (Some camp directors may elect to invite an outside
facilitator to objectively guide this crucial stage in their camps’ leadership
development.) Ponder each question and take your answers seriously. Without
understanding why you're doing what you're doing, you cannot justify the
program's workings to your staff, see where it needs improvement, or get
cooperation to follow through on its stated goals.
Committing to internal leadership development, or to an enhancement of
your existing program, is a bold step to take. Besides the obvious regular
meeting times you will need to set aside to evaluate senior campers and
junior leaders, it means having patience and perseverance over many years
as the program evolves and you work the kinks out of it. It also means
slowly hiring fewer staff from the outside and sometimes putting a young
leader's interpersonal skills above his or her athletic or artistic skills.
Most importantly, it means carefully designing a system of selection,
training, and promotion that cultivates qualities you desire in your leaders.
Design Elements of Successful ILD Programs
Commitment
Internal leadership development programs languish or fail without an absolute
commitment from upper management. Both in faith and in practice, the camp
director and senior staff must move beyond a “this is a good idea” mindset
to a “this is the centerpiece of our leadership” mindset. In practice,
this means:
- giving top hiring priority to homegrown leaders,
- taking competitive promotion from senior camper levels to junior leader
and leader-in-training levels extremely seriously,
- rigorously evaluating and training any necessary external hires, ideally
with the help of a skilled leadership director,
- holding all leaders to the same high standards,
- treating all levels and origins of leadership fairly, especially when
it comes to salary and workload, and
- firing those leaders who break major camp rules, even if that means
letting go of one of your favorites for a season.
Ritual
For an internal leadership development program to work, campers must perceive
that it is more than fun to work at your camp — it is a privilege. Eventually,
they will understand the great responsibility that leadership entails.
For now, it is enough for them to see camp leadership as something that
must be earned. If your new hires see their job as a role in Meatballs,
as an opportunity for romance, or as an easy, disposable summer job, then
they will treat it like a stick of gum. Once the flavor is gone, they
will be ready to spit it out.
Rituals, such as awards, ceremonies, campfires, camp songs, and special
staff clothing add a sense of mystery, importance, and high purpose to
your internal leadership system. Instead of secretly selecting which senior
campers are ready to be junior leaders next summer and then writing them
a perfunctory letter in the off-season, include some public or private
ritual in announcing your choices. Some camps announce the names of senior
campers chosen to be next summer's junior staff as part of their closing
firelight; others read aloud at their closing ceremonies the criteria
by which junior staff are chosen and then send individual letters to those
chosen. However you decide to integrate ritual and tradition into your
internal leadership development program, your goal should be twofold:
communicate the criteria by which campers are selected to be leaders and
make it clear that membership is an honor.
Up the ranks
Details of how to train your young leaders are included in the next section.
Here, as a design issue, it is enough to note that your overall training
program should be formulated as a multi-season process. One way to do
this is to promote senior campers to become one-month junior leaders,
then junior leaders to become all-season leaders-in-training, then leaders-in-training
to become full-fledged cabin leaders. Thus, by the time a young staff
member has her own cabin, she has had at least one season as a camper,
followed by two seasons of training. Now, during training week, you do
not have to review mundane aspects of camp, such as the daily schedule
or where the bathrooms are. Instead, you can spend time talking about
different leadership styles and how to handle challenging campers.
Often, camps require interested senior campers to take a year off from
camp, before returning as junior leaders or leaders-in-training. While
that extra year may bestow some maturity upon these young people, it is
a missed opportunity to train them, help them grow in camp spirit, and
let them make mistakes from which they can learn. That said, it is important
that junior leaders, who return to camp the season following their final
camper year, do not become indentured servants. Work duties should be
shared among all levels of the leadership, from the director on down,
and not relegated to junior leaders who must “do their time.” If you want
to know who is most worthy of promotion from junior leader to leader-in-training,
or from leader-in-training to cabin leader, you must see how they
work with campers. Anyone can wash dishes, but only a few can work effectively
and enthusiastically with children.
Promotion
As part of an ILD program, you must devise a system of promotion that
takes into account your stated goals, your camp's traditions, and the
style of training that suits you best. Each camp with homegrown leadership
does things differently. The most successful ones make their criteria
for promotion public and work to abide by these criteria, consistently
promoting only those young leaders whose behavior has shown their readiness
and commitment to the prodigious task of leading children. At first, the
yield will be fairly small, and the temptation to promote anyone interested
will be great. Stick to your guns, however, and the yield will grow year
after year. Over time, senior campers and young leaders will begin to
internalize your promotion criteria and work hard to make the cut.
Training Techniques to Maximize ILD
There are six techniques that all camps with successful ILD programs
use. Regardless of how you customize your program, work hard to integrate
these training elements.
Leadership by example
Perhaps nothing shapes a person's behavior more powerfully than the behavior
of those around them. Senior staff, from the director down, should model
good leadership. All leaders should work together to help one another
stay on their toes. From the outset, all leaders need to agree both to
solicit constructive criticism and to provide it. Of course, this requires
a nonjudgmental atmosphere focused on learning. Achieving this is not
easy, given that senior staff are required to evaluate junior staff and
make promotion decisions at the end of the season. This inherent power
differential makes young leaders reluctant to point out older leaders'
shortcomings. To overcome this obstacle to candid communication, senior
staff need to model humility, a willingness to listen, and a desire to
improve. When, as member of your camp's upper management team, did you
last ask for feedback from a new cabin leader or leader-in-training?
Enhanced responsibility
If you want your leaders to learn and mature, you must provide room for
that growth by letting go a bit. You must not only delegate responsibility,
but also be silent and see whether your young leaders will take the initiative
to get things done. They must develop a keen eye for seeing what or who
needs attention around camp. To become as sharp as you are in spotting
these needs, you must give them real decision-making power. Resist the
temptation to micro-manage every situation. The only real way your leaders
will grow is by examining the consequences — both good and bad — of their
decisions.
Simulate realistic scenarios
Make role-playing part of your training during precamp week. The main
reason most leaders groan when you say the term “role-play” is because,
if done well, it reveals the leader's true strengths and weaknesses. Most
leaders would prefer a cushier, less confrontational training technique.
But there is no substitute for learning by doing. Draw your role-plays
or “sim drills” (short for “simulation drills”) from actual case examples.
Carefully set up, play through, debrief, and replay each case. Remember
to check in with participants to see how they felt acting out different
roles. Quiz those in the audience about what they liked and what they
would have done differently. Brainstorm alternative outcomes. And for
particularly challenging scenarios, ask a second group to role-play the
same case so that everyone can see the stylistic differences that exist
among leaders. You don't want anyone to think there's only one “right”
way to solve a vexing leadership problem.
Conduct ongoing evaluations
The ultimate feedback for any leader is receiving (or not receiving) a
contract for the following season. Long before then, however, each leader
should have received feedback on his job. You can set the stage by reviewing
the evaluation process with your entire leadership before the season starts.
As I mentioned earlier, you also need to foster an atmosphere of candid,
bi-directional communication. Whether written or oral, formal or informal,
each leader should receive a mid-season evaluation so that he or she has
the chance to improve on specific things during the second half of the
season. No one wants eleventh-hour feedback on something that would have
been easy to change.
The camps with the most successful ILD programs actually have their own
leadership director. This person's job is to solicit feedback from experienced
staff about the job that junior leaders are doing, distill that feedback,
and then review it with the leader in question. Questionnaires help supervising
staff summarize a young leader's strengths and weaknesses, and they give
leadership directors standardized teaching tools. Consider designing a
questionnaire that leaders can use to critique their own or another leader's
performance. Finally, remember to balance strengths with weaknesses when
giving evaluations.
Conduct regular mini-trainings
There is no way that any member of your leadership will learn all of what
he or she needs to know during staff training week. Therefore, you need
to see staff training as an ongoing process. Like any other priority,
you will have to carve out time for mini-trainings. “Fitting it in somewhere”
hardly ever works. Instead, plan ahead and allocate time in your leaders'
schedules for additional discussions, meditations, sim drills, and other
exercises that force honest self-examination of the job they are doing.
At the very least, you will want to provide time in the weekly schedule
for leaders to discuss issues in small groups. Bring particularly enlightening
or critical issues to weekly full-staff meetings and facilitate a discussion
on improvements. Consider hiring a professional staff trainer or a leadership
director from a neighboring camp to conduct a review of leadership performance
and/or a mid-season training.
Give time for leaders to bond
At the beginning of your training week, and throughout the camp season,
provide both structured and unstructured time for leaders to bond. Structured
activities might include icebreakers, trust-building exercises, and team
games. Unstructured activities might include a mid-season pizza party,
a staff movie night, or an evening at the director's cottage. And, don't
forget days off and nights off. Your staff need time away from camp to
recharge. Whatever the mechanism, your goal should be to provide the time
and space for leaders' relationships to evolve from acquaintance to friendship.
Remember, the time you allow them to bond, without the distraction of
other responsibilities, is an investment in the overall strength of your
leadership.
Putting It All Together
If only putting all these philosophical ideas, design elements, and training
techniques together were easy, then every camp would have its own outstanding
internal leadership development program. The fact is, ILD programs are
challenging to implement but infinitely valuable to the health of your
camp and your campers. Take the time to craft a program that capitalizes
on the existing strengths of your camp. With the proper elements in place,
your leadership program will become more than a method for hiring high
quality staff. It will be part of what makes your camp unique and one
of the most important reasons campers return to your camp year after year.
For a camper to admire her leader, to want to be in her position someday,
to want to work at your camp, is the ultimate compliment a camp director
can hope for.
Originally published in the 2001 November/December
issue of Camping Magazine. |
