Scoutmaster Podcast 341

Hi, this is Rob Playsian. I'm the Scoutmaster for Troop 18 in Muskega, Wisconsin. This edition of the Scoutmaster podcast is sponsored by backers just like me.

And now to you, Scoutmaster. As I'm fond of saying, it depends on your perspective, right, The way that you look at things and understand them. Really, perspective means a lot.

For instance, what you and I think of as a tent with a couple of scouts and sleeping bags is to a bear, a couple of soft burritos in a carry-out container.

Yes, another bear joke. Hey, this is podcast number 341..

Well, welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green. And oh, let's do things the way that we always do. Let's take a look in the mailbag. I heard from my pal, Dennis Runyon, who's the scoutmaster of Troop 14 in nearby Westchester, Pennsylvania, says: I hope all is well. I just listened to your chat with Wade and Bucky.

One of the other guys that worked at camp. Wade worked at camp Bucky not so much, And I know Dennis because he's a local scoutmaster and we spend the same week at the same camp every summer and have done so for like, oh, 20 years. Maybe I don't know. It's been a long, long time. But Dennis mentioned that there was another guy who worked on camp staff, who was also on the Appalachian Trail, had a little bit of a head start on Wade and Bucky.

Thanks for getting in touch, Dennis, Glad you're listening in, And I want to tell you also, by the way, that Wade and Bucky are doing just fine. We're keeping track of them. We'll talk to them again one day soon. Heard from Courtney Clapper, who said thanks again for all you do. Your podcast has been a light in the darkness.

We were in kind of a mess, But you kept reminding me that good scouting is out there. Courtney, I'm glad to hear things are working out better And I owe you an email, And I probably owe a lot of people an email at this point. Boy, I've been busy and I haven't been quite as attentive to keeping up with emails as I ought to be.

I think every human being on the face of the earth can probably say that at one point or another, can't they? I'm still going through the rather exacting, long process of working on revamping and redesigning scoutmastercgcom- which still kind of picking away at that- And I appreciate the feedback I've received so far about what improvements and updates you all consider most important, what you would like to see. And if there is something specific that you'd like to see changed or improved, you can get in touch with me at clarkclarke at scoutmastercgcom. I would really appreciate any thoughts you might have.

Hey, we have a live chat session. Try and have one at least once a week, And that's the way this has been going so far for the past couple of months. On Tuesday mornings, We'll usually get started around 8am Eastern time And what you do is keep an eye on the Facebook feed and the Twitter feed and we'll be on for a live chat.

And I want to thank Mike Summers, who's a scoutmaster in Troop 89 in Wilson, North Carolina, And Mitchell Locken, who's a cubmaster in Pac 20 in Lincoln, Nebraska, who both checked in for the first time on the chat this past week, along with any number of folks who we call our frequent flyers, who show up on the chat regularly. It's always good to hear from folks and to see that you check in Once again, live chat at scoutmastercgcom Tuesday mornings. Look on the Facebook feed and the Twitter feed And you'll see a notice that we're live. Come on over and join us.

We have a great time. Before I go any further, I want to make sure to thank all the folks who are scoutmastercgcom backers.

You're the folks that keep everything up and running, And I want to make sure to especially thanks Susan Puccini, who became a backer since our last podcast, And thanks to everyone who supports the blog and podcast through something called Patreon. It's kind of a subscription service, and Courtney Clappert became a Patreon subscriber since our last podcast. If you would like to join all the folks who are backers or subscribers, it's not that hard to follow the links at the top right of any page at scoutmastercgcom, And I'll also have links in the in this episode's podcast notes.

Well, this week I am going to go over some familiar ground to some of you if you've been listeners for a while. It's something that I think is important and we'll be talking about it in Scoutmaster's ship in seven minutes or less.

So let's get started, shall we?

Scoutmaster's ship in seven minutes or less. So this week we're going to talk about asking and telling as it relates to leadership development. If I need to share basic information with you, I will tell you something We're going to meet at this time at this place. That kind of telling, simple sharing of information. If I'm going to work with you to develop your skills as a leader. I'm not going to tell you very much.

I'm not going to tell you about the skills of leadership. I'm not going to give you the seven steps of this or the five steps of that. I'm not going to sit you down at a PowerPoint presentation. I'm not going to train you. What I'm going to do is I'm going to ask you to lead and I'm going to ask you questions about that experience. The way that this works, this kind of experiential learning that's possible in scouting, is something that is unique in the lives of most of our Scouts and most of the other organized activities that they participate in.

They're not going to get an opportunity for this kind of experiential learning. Now, I am not necessarily a foe of PowerPoint or a foe of training, because there are some things that you have to be told, but let's remember, training is not about asking questions. Training is about telling people the way things work and it has some value.

But I believe it to be way overvalued when it comes to developing youth leadership. And I find- parenthetically I'll say this- I find a lot of times the kind of training that we put our youth members through is really there so that later on the adults can say: well, you went to training on it.

Why can't you understand? You know how to do this thing. Or you should have listened more when we had the training thing.

Or I told you this when in training and you forgot it and you know what I'm saying. I think it's subtly aggressive in a lot of ways. There are absolutely wonderful training experiences and I understand that. I just don't find them entirely all that useful, in my experience, for developing youth leaders. You can't really learn to do things like dribble a basketball or throw a football or something like that by having the process of it explained to you.

You have to actually do it and not do it well and then be coached along and then try again and then practice, practice and finally, if you stick with it, you get good at it, and I believe leadership to be a similar kind of skill. You have to practice it.

So if you want to learn to be a leader, you have to begin leading, and then you need to have somebody who's able to ask you the right questions about the experiences that you're having that get your mind thinking like a leader. So a new patrol leader, a new senior patrol leader, a new youth member with a set of responsibilities. There is an amount of telling that needs to happen in some cases If you have troop and patrols with ongoing youth leadership. There are a lot of things that probably don't need to be repeated because there is a native understanding in the scouts who are taking on those positions, who've been working with other scouts in those positions of responsibility, where they know what needs to be done. They just are not too sure about their own skills in making that happen. And I can take a group of scouts who are taking on new positions of responsibility and I can sit them down and I can tell them lots of things, but none of those things are especially meaningful to them until they have some experience in their position of leadership.

What I have learned to do is to skip over the first telling part and let them lead and then ask them questions about it. So how precisely does this work Right now? This week at our troop meeting it'll be the first meeting for a new patrol leaders council, new senior patrol leader, new patrol leaders. They've been to a lot of scout meetings. They know what needs to happen After they were elected. At our last meeting they spent some time talking and planning and hopefully preparing for this meeting coming up this week.

I will ask the following question of the senior patrol leader when I arrive: Do you need any help from me? And almost without exception, every time I've asked that question of a new senior patrol leader, the answer is no.

Then I'll ask a second question: do you have any questions for me? And maybe there will be a minor question, but usually there's no question because they're pretty focused on what's about to happen. Then I'll sit back and watch things happen and from my observers perch I'll see what goes on and I'll take note of what's happening. And at the end of the evening the patrol leaders council will get back together and I will ask them how things went.

And usually the answer is pretty good: Not a whole lot of thinking there. And if I saw something that was a little off the rails or look like it was causing a little bit of frustration for somebody, I'll ask about that.

How do you think this particular aspect of the meeting went? It could be a game, it could be a skill demonstration, it could be the patrol meetings.

Usually they will say: fine, you know it was fine, because they really don't understand what to look for or what to be thinking about, and they are pretty happy that they got past it without any major incident. But then I'll drill down a little bit and I'll say: well, tell me why you think it was fine, and they'll have to think about that. Then you start to see the gears are starting to move and sometimes there's a little bit of smoke coming out of the ears and that mechanism is kicking in.

They have to go back and picture what happened and think about it and then maybe they'll have an explanation and maybe they won't. I might say: what about when this happened?

What about when I heard somebody raise their voice? Then let them work at that and chew on that one for a little while and see what they have to say.

So you're getting the sense- here I'm being like incredibly broadly general, but you're getting the sense of the way that we start to ask questions and the way that we engage their minds in starting to look at the experience that they've just had and try and draw some understanding and some good out of it. Now I've talked about, up to this point, just talking about things that were maybe a little difficult or frustrating for the youth leadership. I will also want to make sure to comment on those things I observed that I thought were particularly good and that made me feel confident in their ability to develop as leaders, to develop in their positions of responsibility.

And I have to remind myself to do that, because sometimes I'm more focused on the things that weren't working well than the things that went well, and then I might choose, might, but I try and resist doing this. If it's at all possible- and a lot of times it isn't possible, to be frank, I'll want to tell them something salient to the things that we have been discussing.

By me asking questions, I may want to say: you know, if you raise your voice to get everybody's attention, what you're doing is training them to wait until you raise your voice- something similar to that, just a little something in the way of advice or a skill. But I very consciously try and stay away from telling them how I think things went or what I think they ought to do next, because if I pose my questions properly and I listen carefully to their responses, they will be figuring that out on their own.

It's a little difficult to express, but I hope it's not confusing, so let me walk through it one last time if I was to observe something going on in a meeting that I thought was a point where my youth leaders were getting frustrated or having a little bit of trouble making something happen after the meeting, not during the meeting. I'm not going to step in after the meeting.

The patrol leaders council gets together and I ask questions about that particular thing, trying to get them to identify the thing that was either frustrating or they had trouble with, and then just keep asking questions, and one of the one of the ones that I find myself often asking is: well, given that situation happening again, what would you do the next time? Would you do anything differently? And usually that's enough to get them moving. One thing I found when I work with scouts like this- and it just may be me- is that this kind of questioning is a little off-putting or frightening to them, because this doesn't happen all that often.

What they're used to having happen is somebody just to tell them the right way to do things, or to tell them that they made a mistake and here's how to correct the mistake. And so when you start asking these kind of open-ended questions and start probing for their answers and things, they think it might be a trick, it might be.

You know a way to back me into a corner to get me to say something or commit to something that I don't want to commit to or I don't want to say. So you have to carry this off without being the judge and the jury and them being on the defense. What you want to have is you want to have a team-building kind of aspect to it, where you're a member of the team and your questions are posed in a friendly manner, not an accusatory manner.

And sometimes that can be hard because I get frustrated and I get a little impatient, so my attitude sometimes can go south on me if I'm not careful. And once again, I always want to try and find a few good things to emphasize, and it's not usually all that difficult, because if you are looking for problems, you'll see a lot of problems. If you're looking for progress, you'll see a lot of progress. If you're just looking, you'll see both. And those are the things that you want: to take a little bit of time after the meeting to talk to your patrol leaders council about- and when I say a little bit of time, I'm talking five minutes, don't wear out your welcome at a patrol leaders council meeting. That's the difference between asking and telling as it relates to developing youth leadership.

I hope you find that useful. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. I'm easy to get in touch with. I'm going to tell you how to do that in just a moment.