Scoutmaster Podcast 143

And now to you, Scoutmaster. Hey folks, we're going to try something a little new this week. We're going to have a little trivia contest. okay, The way to win is to go to the Scoutmaster blog Facebook page and post your correct answer on that page. First person that does that wins the contest and they're going to receive a copy of Mark raise, the Scoutmasters other handbook, which is a really helpful guide with a lot of information in it that you don't find in the- you know, quote unquote- real Scoutmasters handbook. So I'm going to send you a brand new copy of that if you are the first person to post the correct answer to the question on the Scoutmaster blog Facebook page. So don't send me an email, Don't go to scoutmastercgcom and go through the contact thing or anything like that. The only way to enter is to go to the Scoutmaster blog Facebook page. Okay, we got that straight. So the question is this: the World Organization of the Scouting Movement conducted a census in 2010, and they concluded there are, in round numbers, about 25 million Scouts in 161 countries who have an internationally recognized Scout organization. So the question is: which country of those 161 has the most Scouts in their National Scouting Organization? post your answer on the Scoutmaster blog Facebook page and the first correct answer wins the book. Okay, so this should be fun. We'll see how it works. Hey, this is podcast number 143..

So welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green and I'm broadcasting to you straight from the middle of Hurricane Sandy, and I know a lot of you are right there with me. Yeah, it's a pretty big storm.

You may have heard of it If you turned on the TV or a radio or went outside your house in the past few days. but hey, we're weathering it just fine. but you may hear a little background noise because it's pretty windy out there.

So let's take a look in the mailbag. this time Paul Kemp is a Scoutmaster of Troop 720 and he wrote in to say very succinctly: Thank you for maintaining this resource. Well, thank you, Paul, for being in touch. Certainly do appreciate it. Ray Britton is the Scoutmaster of Troop 42 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and he wrote in about podcast 142, our last podcast, and our talk about youth leadership development. and Ray had this to say: is that once again, you hit the proverbial nail on the head. I think your description of leadership development as opposed to leadership training is a much better way to think about turning Scouts into leaders.

Teenage boys just don't learn the way adults do. My experience is that Scouts understand intellectually how to lead. If you ask them about a situation, they can tell you a pretty good way to handle it. but let them experience the situation on a camp out and they may not execute what they know. Slowly but surely, though, as they experience things, it starts to sink in Me. I feel like I'm in the movie Groundhog Day. Every year you get the first year Scouts just starting to function as Boy Scouts, and the youth leaders are just starting to get it, and here comes a new batch of first year Scouts and then a new batch of leaders, and it happens over and over again and it does. Yep, that's the way it works, Ray. We wake up in a new world every day.

Things are always happening, and thanks for being in touch from down in Oak Ridge. Dan Jones wrote in to say I discovered your blog today and I love it. I had a chance to listen to about half of your recent podcast and it's very good.

I found a few small problems with your archive page that you may want to look into. Dan goes on to describe some misplaced links and things like that, and I really do appreciate that. If you find something wrong, get in touch with me, because we are a team of one here.

I'm not a big proofreader. sometimes, and you know, after you put 143 links on a page, some days something is going to be messed up somewhere. So I really appreciate it.

When you see things, you do get in touch. Dan goes on to say thanks for all your hard work on the project. I'm looking forward to spending some time here and we're looking forward to having you along with us. Thanks for touching base and thanks for letting me know about the stuff on the archive page that needed to be fixed there. Last night I had the pleasure of participating in a Google Plus Hangout- my first Hangout, at least on Google Plus- and it was great. Arlen Ward, who's a scouter out there in Colorado, hosted it and the subject was talking about starting Boy Scout troops and there was a good, lively discussion, a lot of good participants, and maybe ScoutmasterCG will host a Hangout or two. If you'd be interested in something like that, email me at scoutmastercg at Verizonnet and let me know what you'd be interested in discussing. It's a great way to get some good ideas. It's fun to talk with other scouts and we can do that from all over the country and all over the world. Now, on this edition of the Scoutmaster podcast in Scoutmastership, in seven minutes or less, we have our second installment of youth leader development, and then I've got a couple of emails to answer and that should be enough for this podcast, Don't you think? Well, I do, So, let's get started.

Shall we Scoutmaster ship in seven minutes or less.

In the first installment in this series on youth leader development, we discussed some key concepts about the relationship between scouts and leadership positions and the way that they develop as leaders. We're going to talk about what we can do as adult volunteers to help foment this kind of youth leadership development.

Event based training- the National Youth Leader Training like NYLT- and troop based training present both some experiential and some classroom learning. as good as the event style training can be, though, it's only part of a broader developmental process.

If the conditions in a scouts home troop aren't focused on continual leadership development, the benefits of training scouts by sending them to these big events is going to be kind of minimal. So what are kind of the ideal conditions in a troop for continual leadership development.

I say the single greatest key to strong youth development is the attitude and actions of adults associated with the troop. If they're not invested in creating the conditions required for continuing youth leader development, things will progress very slowly if at all. There's a basic paradox to face here. Youth leader development in its earliest stages will not look like development at all. In fact it will look like things are moving backwards. Getting past that stage requires an exceptional quality in adults and that exceptional quality I borrow from the National Outdoor Leadership School in a leadership quality They identify as capacity for adversity and uncertainty.

I'm going to say that again: Capacity for adversity and uncertainty. scouts developing as leaders won't perform at the same level as adults. in the first stages of development Their performance may even be hard to detect, let alone evaluate. when things go undone or mistakes are made, adults tend to step in And, as we noted in our first installment, adults can grow so discouraged with this whole process They give up the idea on developing scouts into leaders in any real, substantive way.

Scouts in their families also need some capacity for uncertainty. as we are developing youth leaders, Families especially need an initial introduction and continual reinforcement that youth leaders are at the helm and that they are developing leaders, not seasoned professionals. Many families initial experience scouting through a cub pack and they've probably developed really high expectations for order and communication and consistency. and the chaos, incomplete communication and the inconsistency of developing youth leaders can be a real big challenge for them.

It's right for the adult volunteers in a troop to communicate directly with parents through some kind of parallel channel as the youth leaders communicate with scouts. They need to balance the effort to create a capacity in their youth leaders to communicate detail plans with effective communication to families. These are two different things.

Scouts are going to be contacting and talking to scouts and the adult volunteers in the troop are going to back this up with this kind of parallel communication with scouts families. We don't necessarily have to repeat everything that is said. We don't necessarily have to add to the things that were said, but we need to let our scouting families know that we're right there when they have questions, that we know what's going on and that we will help them get answers and will help kind of level out that inconsistency of communication that comes from youth leaders very often as they're developing in some ways. adult volunteers are going to serve as a buffer between families and youth leaders. So, as a buffer, what we do is protect the developmental environment. for youth leaders to develop, they have to have this safe environment that's free from a lot of coercion, a lot of pressure to to begin to learn and develop as as leaders. and I would liken it to a vegetable garden.

You know your vegetable garden needs protection from pests, just as developing youth leaders need protection from outside influences that are going to disrupt the process. as they develop, they're going to become more confident in addressing the concerns of adults and they will begin to stand up for themselves.

But until they have this confidence, they need to be protected, just like a little seedling in the garden needs to be protected. we've got to look out for the scouts. many things that are detrimental to this developmental environment are minimized if we maintain balanced relationships between youth leaders and their adult counterparts. now that balanced relationship is not necessarily constant oversight, advice and over instruction, because that tends to stifle the discovery crucial to leadership development. adults working with youth leaders need to use a minimal amount of telling, communication or direct instructions. They should also understand that youth leaders have different levels of tolerance for mentoring and advising. too little mentoring and advising and oversight and advice is almost always better than too much. our role is more reflective than directive. there's an important difference there. our role is more reflective than directive, where we are available but not intrusive. when we balance this relationship, we create a safe environment for experiential development. now, given a goal or a task, youth leaders will seek a solution. if their proposed approach is not dangerous or inappropriate, they should be allowed to make it happen, and this is important, even if we're confident that that approach may not work. the process of trial and error leads to discovery. and think about Edison. Edison tried out a lot of materials before he discovered which worked well for a light bulb filament. he developed the light bulb experientially.

now, the difference between Edison and our developing youth leaders is: Edison was looking for an unknown. our youth leaders are discovering something that we probably already know how to do. if we tell them everything we know, we deny them the more powerful and more lasting experience of discovering it for themselves. if we tell them what we know, if we say, hey, you know what I have the answer to this, let me tell you what it is- they don't get to discover what that answer is. that's the difference between what I call the directive approach and the reflective approach. in the third installment of this series will be in podcast number 144, we'll discuss some specific practices that aid reflective development of leadership,

Boy Scouts, Boy Scouts.

Hi, this is Dr Paul Auerbach and you are listening to Clarke Green on the Scoutmaster podcast

Email. that is folks, and here's an answer to one of your emails.

I'm going to tell you how to be in touch with your comments and questions in just a moment, but I've got email here to take a look at when will remain anonymous. describes a bit of a difficult situation, and the author says this. he says we are a new troop and I'm a new scoutmaster. I'm having a problem with one of our adults yelling at the Scouts. he's a strong-willed man and he takes any behavior he does not like as disrespect. I've refused to be a troop where adults yell at Scouts or make them feel belittled or threatened. I am afraid of this guy, though, and how we react if I confront him about this now. this is a really serious matter, and it's not going to necessarily be handled by the Scoutmaster. it's going to be handled by the committee chair and the chartered organization representative. most of you have probably heard me say before, but the we need to brush up a little bit on our job descriptions every once in a while. so the committee chair and the chartered organization representative are the ones who select volunteers and they have the authority to remove volunteers. I have no idea if the person in question here can be counseled out of their bad behavior or not and frankly, it's none of my business and it's really none of the business of the Scoutmaster either. the simple fact is is that this kind of behavior- yelling at Scouts and threatening them or belittling them- has to stop now, not later. it needs to stop right away. the writer notes that they don't like confrontation and they're even a bit scared of this guy. a confrontation doesn't have to be angry or have other negative feelings associated with it, but this kind of behavior has to be confronted. like I said before, I don't see this as being something for the Scoutmaster to do, because the Scoutmaster does not. the Scoutmaster does not select and approve volunteers. that is up to the committee chair and the chartered organization representative. so what we're going to do here is we're going to go to them and we're going to tell them what's going on. they may need to be reminded about their job description a little bit, but here's the shorthand. the committee chair and the chartered organization representative collaborate with the head of the chartered organization to select and approve adult volunteers. they have absolute authority as to who may and may not serve and their decisions cannot be appealed to a higher level. in other words, nobody can go to the district or the council or whatever and say: these guys over here in this troop are treating me unfairly, they remove me from membership and I want to be reinstated. that's not going to happen because the chartered organization owns the unit and it's their decision about who gets to serve as a volunteer in that unit. so volunteers serve at the pleasure of the chartered organization. they can be removed at any time, for cause or for no cause at all. no vote of the committee, approval of the district or council or even the Scoutmaster is required for any of these decisions. committee chair and the chartered organization representative have complete authority. and if they get flummoxed and they're in a tie and they're not able to decide, well, the head of the chartered organization makes the final decision. so now that we know what the scope of authority is here about decision making once they're appraised of the situation of the scout leader who's yelling at scouts. they go, meet with them and tell them that this is a serious matter and it must not continue. depending on the individual and depending on the reaction, they may need to be able to council and discuss things and figure things out, but they may need to just tell that. tell this person that their services are no longer required and that they are terminating any relationship he has with the unit. as of now, and before they go into a meeting like this, they will have prepared a letter to this effect and handed to the leader in question and after that, that's it, they're out. there's no appeal, there's nothing else that needs to be done. that's it it. why is the situation where an adult is yelling and intimidating and perhaps belittling scouts a serious situation? because it's called bullying and it can't continue. we just don't do that in scouts. now, I understand how uncomfortable and difficult this kind of situation is, but imagine this, and this is a little bit of a silly illustration. but imagine you're out camping and a bear is about to attack your scouts and you have a rifle. what are you going to do now? as much as you may regret it, you're going to shoot the bear. you're not going to reason with the bear. you're not going to tell the scouts just to ignore the bear because he's in a bad mood and he'll go away. or you're not going to allow the bear to attack one of your scouts and drag them off. you're going to shoot the bear. so how is the situation with this adult volunteer yelling at scouts all that much different and how is your reaction going to be all that much different? this is a real thing that hurts scouts and hurts units and it has to be dealt with. and it has to be dealt with quickly and it has to be taken care of. and the last bit of advice I have for you happens via email. emails are really problematic. they can get interpreted in all kinds of different ways. you have to meet face to face when you're dealing with issues like this. after I received this question and sent a reply, I got this message back that pointed out how things were resolved. the yeller came by my house and apologized for his actions the night before. he said he would apologize to the scouts as a group and individually. I explained to him we have a yell free troop. our committee chair is going to talk to him about it as well. he's going to make it clear that if he cannot refrain from this behavior, his services as a leader will no longer be needed. thanks for your email advice. we have a lot to learn. as we're a young troop, we want to help our scouts create a great program. I had fallen short of calling this bullying, but it's exactly what it is and I'm glad you made that clear for me. if it happens again, I'm not going to be afraid to stop it immediately. thanks for all you do for us and once again I'm withholding the name and the location there. I'm relieved to hear that this came to a good resolution and that this volunteer saw the error of his ways and saw it was appropriate to apologize. plus, the unit has also got a bit of a backbone now, in that the committee chair is going to address this and just make sure it's understood by everyone, and now the Scoutmaster has this bit of experience where they can say: I didn't really recognize this for what it is. thank you for pointing out, and I will not hesitate to stop it in the future. so good outcome all around on that one, if you want to email me with a question that we can help you with here on the podcast. we'll find out how to do that in just a minute.