Scoutmaster Podcast 42

And now, to you, Scoutmaster.

Hey, you ever hear of Ken Hubbard? Ken? K-I-N? Hubbard? I'll bet you haven't. Ken was once a household name. Yeah, he was a cartoonist. He had cartoon in newspapers. But this is like in the 1920s, 1930s. No, no, I really, I don't go back that far. But I learned a little bit about Ken because I saw something that he said, and I thought it was great. This is what he said. Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men. Now, all the women who are listening, they just said amen because they understand this. They know this. They've known it for a long time. But some of the men who are listening, Hey, guys, just come over here for a moment. If you didn't get that, if you didn't understand that, go talk to your wife, and she will explain it to you. Okay?

Hey, this is podcast number 42. Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!

Hey! Welcome back to the Scoutmaster Podcast. This is Clark Green. Don't know about you, but it's been pretty busy around here. Hey! It's the fall. Camping weekends. Going backpacking soon. Love to go backpacking. So the emails keep pouring in, as do the comments on the blog. Now some of them I'm going to hold on to because they relate to a subject that we're going to talk about later on. But here's one that I got from Chris, who's a Cub Master in Sylvania, Ohio. Mr. Green. Oh, you don't need to call me Mr. Chris. You can call me Clark. Thank you for your great podcast. I enjoy listening to your jokes and the scout information you give out. Well, there's another person that enjoys listening to the jokes. I'm beginning to worry about you people, to tell you the truth. Well, on today's podcast, we're going to be talking about something called Contribution Syndrome. Contribution Syndrome. It's a pretty good concept. It's something that I found looking around and I'm going to share it with you. I'm going to contribute. It's all part of the syndrome. We'll talk about that in a moment. Then we're going to talk a little bit about hazing. A little bit more of a sober subject, but something that we need to know, understand, and know how to approach as Scoutmasters. And that'll about do it for this podcast. So let's get started, shall we? Scoutmastership in seven minutes or less. I'm reading to you from David Axon's book, A-X-S-O-N, if you want to look it up. The Management Mythbuster. Now, he asserts that successful leaders are successful in part because they ask great questions. Now, I'm a big fan of Scoutmasters asking questions and not doing a lot of talking. Because when you ask questions and you ask the right questions, Scouts learn to think for themselves. They solve their own problems. They think things through and they get in that habit. And boy, I'll tell you, it works wonderfully. It's a great tool for every Scoutmaster to have asking good questions. Problem is, is I know that I talk too much. I know I talk. I have a podcast. How can I not talk too much? I see a fair number of Scout leaders who probably talk a little bit too much, too. After reading David Axon's description of Contribution Syndrome, I've diagnosed myself and I know I've got it. I've got Contribution Syndrome. See if this fits for you. Let me read it to you. Contribution Syndrome. This is what it means. It means no matter what the situation, you have the compulsion to contribute and to show how smart you are at every possible opportunity. Our whole merit system is based on getting the answer right. As we move into the business world, Contribution Syndrome can infect our every poor. We must be seen to be contributing at every meeting or on every project. For some, this manifests itself in a complete inability to sit quietly and listen. It seems to be part of their DNA to feel that if they're not talking, they're not working. Now, the best leaders, Axon goes on to say, stop talking. They sit quietly, taking in the contribution of everyone else and limiting their own contribution to asking a few pertinent questions that lead to discussion in a constructive manner. Great questions are not complex questions. In fact, the best seem to be blindingly obvious questions. Unfortunately, a relatively small proportion of people in leadership positions have the courage, confidence, or even the basic common sense to ask the right questions. The most potent question anyone can ever ask is this simple three-letter inquiry. Why? The key is to keep asking dumb but great questions. This demonstrates a level of humility that is essential for effective leadership. Complexity has become synonymous with sophistication. That's a really good statement. Let me read it again. Complexity has become synonymous with sophistication. How do we get better at asking great questions? We practice. And that's all from David Axon's book there. I think we're all scout masters and scout leaders for a reason. We want to help youth. We want to educate, inform, mentor them. And one of the main ways you do that is you open your mouth and you talk to them. And you talk and talk and talk. And I find myself doing that quite often. I can watch the blood drain out of their faces. I'm standing there going on and on and on and telling them what I think and how this should be done and how that should be done. If I manage to catch myself and I switch to asking questions, then I can see the excitement and engagement in their faces. I can see them start to join in the game and start to try and figure things out. And that's really what we want to be doing. We really want to work with them and get them to start thinking. To get them to start thinking and figuring things out for themselves. Axon said, The courage part is knowing that what you have to say, while it might be important and it might be salient and related to what's at hand, is not necessarily the best course of action. Well, that confidence is not necessarily in yourself. It's the confidence in your scouts that they are going to be able to come up with good answers, with good plans, with good ideas, without having to hear them from you. And common sense, well, if you're working with scout age boys, it's not common sense to talk to them for 15, 20 minutes at a clip. Not common sense to lecture them. It doesn't work. It just plain won't work. The best leaders, he said, stop talking. They sit quietly, taking in the contributions of everyone else and limiting their own contribution to asking a few pertinent questions that lead the discussion in a constructive manner. One good way to sit quietly and get the contributions from scouts is to leave the room. Now, we've talked about this rather extensively in the past, but I'll remind you that your very presence changes the dynamics of everything. Scouts have been taught in school. They've been taught at home. They've been taught in church. They've been taught in the sports teams that they participate in that when an adult is there, the adult is the leader. The adult has the answers. The adult will be directing things. So you need to be out of the way and let them figure stuff out and then bring that to you. Larry Geiger said something like that in a comment he left because this was the subject of a blog post. He said this, one way to hear scouts is to isolate yourselves from them completely. Each year at our annual planning conference, I put them in a room for two hours and then all the adults leave. Their assignment? To create an annual calendar. The senior patrol leader gives them the standard BSA planning sheet and they go to work. Now they have to listen to each other and not me. Build in physical separation, he says, and that will build interaction between your scouts and they'll start thinking. They'll start figuring things out. You know, the other piece of this is asking the right questions. Yes, but it's also listening and listening very carefully because if you don't listen carefully, you're not going to know to ask the right questions. You don't know what's going on. Not to think ahead of everything. Not to leapfrog over what they're saying into the next contribution that you're going to make. Now, I think it's some good thinking. I think Axon has got it pegged right there. Now, he's writing to management people. He's writing about business leadership and things like that. I'm not a big fan of applying a lot of management science to scouting because I think there's a point past which it works with scouting. But every once in a while, you can come up with a little piece like Axon's contribution syndrome that works very, very well. And I hope that it'll inspire you and that you'll find it as useful as I have. So we were out backpacking one time. We had a load of scouts and six adults going along. And it ran on into the evening and the adults were sitting around the campfire. We were kind of reminiscing. Now, out of that six, three had either never been in scouts or had only been in scouts for a short time. The two who had been in scouts for a brief time said they left scouting because they were being bullied or hazed. And that's two out of three who had been in just for a brief amount of time. What is hazing exactly? I mean, hazing can be a ritual or other activities that use harassment, abuse, or humiliation as a way of initiating a person into a group. That's one way hazing can be looked at. It can be expressed in practical jokes, in bullying, in unwanted physical contact, or a number of different methods. I think what we need to understand at the get-go, and I think you probably already understand this, is all hazing. All hazing is antithetical to the spirit of scouting. Well, how do we know if it's hazing? If an activity or a practice or a tradition is intended to humiliate or trick or abuse or harass, it's hazing. And you've got to put these things to a stop immediately. Some of these things may even be a hallowed tradition in your scout troop. But it's got to be stopped. And it's got to be eliminated. I can tell you, as a younger scoutmaster, you know, in my mid-20s, I really wasn't very savvy about this. And I thought little of the detrimental effects of hazing, and I even participated in some of the standard practical jokes that were all too common at the time and are thankfully becoming increasingly rare, like snipe hunts and things like that. It embarrasses me that adults, some adults in scouting, seem to be unaware of the immense power differential between them and their scouts. And they exploit that difference of power to humiliate a bunch of boys. I just find that embarrassing. As with most things, kindness is the antidote. Now, kindness isn't weakness. Kindness isn't meaning that we're lacking discipline or intensity. It's just being kind. Instead of being a source of frustration, we should be a source of support. I mean, scoutmasters aren't supposed to antagonize their scouts, but to lend them confidence, to help them find their own talents and strengths. If you look in the Guide to Safe Scouting, it'll say this. Any form of hazing, initiations, ridicule, or inappropriate teasing are prohibited and should not be allowed. And if you want to go to the dictionary, hazing is defined as exacting unnecessary, disagreeable, or difficult work. It's defined as harassing or annoying by playing abusive or shameful tricks on a person. Or to humiliate them by playing practical jokes on them. And the dictionary notes that this is used especially of college students as the sophomore hazed a freshman. A scoutmaster can do no greater service to his troop, in my opinion, than to make sure that every vestige of hazing is gone. I mean, initiations, teasing, compelling scouts to humiliate themselves in any way. This quite simply has no place in scouting. When a boy joins a scout troop, he hasn't got anything to prove to anyone. He is immediately and unreservedly accepted. If his behavior has been bad, he's properly corrected. If he does not know what to do, he's treated generously and kindly. Now, Kyle read some of this information on the blog and he sent me a story. He says, I hope that hazing is a lot less prevalent in scouting than it was during my time as a scout in the mid-70s. Hazing was kind of a daily fact of life on campouts and at scout summer camp. And he goes on to explain a pretty horrific experience. And you can only imagine being 11, 12, 13 years old and having to go through some kind of a gauntlet or being treated as though you were a new recruit in the army and having a patrol leader or a senior patrol leader or, worse yet, an adult who wants to be your new drill sergeant, who wants to holler at you and berate you. Kyle goes on to say, I was always at least as interested in the character training involved in scouting as I was in the camping skills. And what my experiences unfortunately taught me about character was there were a lot of people who were attracted to opportunities to wear uniforms and exercise power over other people for all the wrong reasons. I hope scouting has grown in its ability to identify hazing and to eliminate it. Well, Kyle, I think it really has. I'm sorry you had such a bad experience. And it's very, very saddening, even all these years later. We don't want any of our scouts speaking of us in that wise, do we, fellas, ladies? No. No. So we're not going to allow hazing in our troops. Larry Geiger weighed in on the subject as well. He says, He talks about going on a camp out as a scout and there was a bit of a hazing incident. And there was something about they had to go out and sit in the middle of the woods. And he woke up, he got tired of the whole thing. So Larry went to bed. He went to his tent. You know, when he woke up in the morning, he looked around and there was a whole lot of action going on and very worried faces and, you know, guys standing in groups trying to decide what to do. And they just looked like they had been up all night and turns out that they had been because they were looking for Larry, even though he was asleep in his tent. So they kind of got what they deserved, didn't they? So thanks, Larry, for lending a little bit of comic relief to a sobering subject. This isn't all that difficult, is it, folks? I mean, what you're going to do is you're going to make sure there's no hazing going on. You're going to make sure there are no initiations in your troop. You're going to make sure that there are no mean, humiliating, practical jokes, things like that. Their rite of passage in scouting is not getting tricked, not getting humiliated. The rite of passage is a good warm handshake with all your fellow scouts as you walk into a troop and you join and become part of the adventure.

Well, thanks for listening to the Scoutmaster Podcast. You can read the Scoutmaster blog at scoutmaster.typepad.com and follow us at Scoutmaster Blog on Facebook or ScoutmasterCG on Twitter. You can subscribe to the Scoutmaster Podcast on iTunes. And when you do, please leave a comment or a review or a rating. I sure do appreciate that. You can email me, Clark Green, with your comments and questions at clarkgreen at gmail.com. C-L-A-R-K-E-G-R-E-E-N at gmail.com. As I said at the top of the podcast, we've been pretty busy. Lots of things going on. We did a survey on the blog called Scouting in the Electronic Age. We're crunching the numbers and making an analysis of that survey. And we'll talk about that in a future podcast. We've also had a look at the new Journey to Excellence program by way of a survey. Still working on that. So there's lots of things to come. And we'd always like to hear from you and know what you're interested in, questions you might have, comments, great stories, and especially funny jokes. Because if you've listened to the podcast for a while, you know that it's one of my missions is to tell a funny joke. That mission doesn't work all the time. But if you've got a great Scout-related funny joke, send it on in. The Scoutmaster blog and the Scoutmaster podcast are not official publications of the Boy Scouts of America. No. Nor are they endorsed or sponsored by the Boy Scouts of America. Absolutely not. No. It's just me talking into a microphone. Trying to have a little fun and lend a hand to Scout leaders. That's what it's all about.

And before we leave you, this word from our founder, Sir Robert Baden-Powell. Sir Robert? Good luck to you and good camping. Why, thank you, Sir Robert. Until next time. -

Thank you.