Bob White

Schaney, Has the troop considered simply holding the scouts to their promise to follow the points of the Scout Law? I have found that seems to more than enough, and the boys already have it memorized. BW

Juris, While I realize it is too late for you to remove my name from your list, I will hope that one of the many moderators of this forum will do that for you. Please do not include me in any future lists of people that agree with you unless I give you my permission to represent me in such a way. To this point in time I have not found anything of any real substance in any of your posts to be able to agree with, your most recent post included. It is unfortunate that you took it upon yourself to infer that I had. Respectfully, BW(This message has been edited by Bob White)

You are absolutely right acco, and that is because developing the scout is the Scoutmaster's job.(This message has been edited by Bob White)

Having strong training teams is important but there is little that can done to affect that beyond the local district and council. Learning to be be a good presenter can take years of development. Consider what a small percentage of your community would make a good trainer and then consider what a small percentage of them might be scouting volunteers. Much of the success of training volunteers is within the volunteer themselves and their attitude and willingness to learn. Our biggest challenge as trainers is to get adults, many of whom have lead poorly or been lead poorly to put aside previous notions of what the have been brought up to think leadership is and to get them to embrace real leadership methods. Keep in mind that for most our exposure to leadership is the workplace. In most workplaces the goalis not the development of another person, the goal is a monetary figure or product sales. Someone who was a good truck driver long enough gets made the manager of the drivers , a salesman with high sales figures is made the sales managerand so on. By sales skills are not management skills, and management skills are not leadership skills. You manage things, you lead people. Getting people who have been managed as things, and teaching them to lead as people for the benefit of others, is as foreign to most as walking on the moon. But a example is CNYScouter, a new adult leader whose goal goes beyond just being a warm body helper to wanting to see boys get a real scouting experience. That kind of attitude will make a positive impact in the lives of boys. He asks questions. He reads the handbook and wants to know more. He is will ing to take the time to be a student, before he tries to be the teacher. If every troop just had a scoutmaster with that attitude the program could do the rest.

Hacimsaalk, Think about this. You are a scout for 7.5 years, and you are willing to let an adult leader make a decision about you and stop trying to develop you after two or three months? I hope you don't mean that. A boy is far to important to just stop trying after 3% of his scouting career. You say "you can't take a year or two, and spend it on developing one boy into a leader" You are right, a good leader will not take two years...he'll take seven and a half. That's what we are there for. As a leader you learn to evaluate who needs what help, who is ready for the next step, and who can be delegated to and maintained. As I said it is a program delivered one boy at a time. Each getting what they need based on their own needs and characteristics. If you were the scout have a difficult time would you ever want that leader to give up on you? I do not understand your hostility toward this, this is not a bad thing. We are talking about helping each scout get what they need to develop through scouting. This is about putting the scout first, rather than leading by ording others to do what you want to see get done. You want boys to run the troop, well this is how it happens, by talking to the individual scouts, letting them make the decisions and then helping them with the tools they need to follow through. When a scoutmaster has done the job right, the scout feels he has done it himself, and rightly so, rather than just following what someone "above him" told him to do. And, what I said was that as the scoutmaster I don't hire patrol leaders so I don't fire patrol leaders.

My wife and I had the same experience two summers ago when my son who was 15 at the time was at Northern Tier. In rained 9 days out of what was to be a ten day trip. On the next to last day the weather was so bad they fout 3 foot breakers to make their way to an island where they were landlocked for a full day. Wet, cold and unable to find enough room to set up camp they went through most of their provisions trying to stay warm. Seeing a break in the weather ther pushed off a day later than expected with only crackers and mustard to eat for the last day heading into base camp. THEY LOVED IT!!! It was an adventure that they talk about still. They stayed together, helped each other, made good decisions and survived without any injuries. Your son will be fine, he will have an exciting tand challemgiong trip he will always remember. Praying is always good, even when they aren't in trouble. BW

Actually Scouting was founded on the tradional values that our society was built on, not on ones that have yet to be achieved.

We are not talking about "training" we are talking about leadership development, and that encompasses a lot more than just training. There is coaching, counseling, mentoring, and other skills involved besides just the act of training. I do not understand the reluctance to the thought that an adult leader would want to do everything he could in the way of leadership to help a scout succeed rather than deem him unfit or untrainable and give up on him. I would think that you would want the scoutmaster to be a friendly guide and not a commanding boss? Since the origins of the BSA the supportive coach rather than the order barking superior has been the model for good scoutmastership. No one has said that nothing can be done, what was said was help the scout make a decision on what to do. Why is that such a repulsive notion to anyone? How long should the scoutmaster try to help a scout develop? If you are not there to help every boy throughout his membership, then why are you there at all? (This message has been edited by Bob White) (This message has been edited by a staff member.)

As the Scout leader your job is to help the scout come to his own decision and to help him to implement that decision. I am not trying to "lead" the scout to any specific conclusion. I ask the scout qwuestions and listen to his answers and help him to think the situation through. As I said the range of decisions can be anything from getting better as a leader to stepping aside, and a number of other cjoices in between. The important thing being, that whatever the decison is, that it is his decision. The scout learns nothing from you telling him what to do. Hacimsaulk, Please understand that scouting from an adults perspective is differnet that from a scouts, what you are trained to do and what we are trained to do are different, because we have different goals and responsibilities. I have the advanctage of have beed trained as both a youth and an adult so there are things in scouting I am aware of that you have not yet been exposed to. To say that leadership cannot be taught can easily be disproven. Just look at the scouting program alone, we have over 20 leadership courses for youth and adults. Think of all the books written on leadership skill, the college courses on leadership. Consider Military accademies alone, they are primarily leadership academies. So absolutely leadership can be taught. What you will find is that not everyone chooses to learn all they can. Some just learn what they have to, or what they want to. But as a scout leader my responsibility to continue to try and develop each boy based on their own needs and characteristics stays the same. Besides, would you rather have a SM who believes that the scouts can learn to do anything given the right direction and encouragement r one who feels that one a small minority have any potential and that most will need to be told what to do? ed, Not everyone has to be a Hall of Fame quarterback to be able to throw a football well. Thousands of kids each year learn QB skills and various degress in all age levels. If quarterbacking was a natural skill then why was the first forward pass not done unitil well into our evolutionary history? You make it sound that unless you are a phenomenon then you are nothing. Every scout can learn leadership skills to some degree. And with a good teacher many can learn more than you give them credit for. But just like some adult leaders, some will never quite understand it all. Sometimes it's because they choose not to.

Absolutely right Eamonn.

it's unfortunate that you have been lead to believe that as a scout, hacimsaalk12. That really is not the case. Leadership is not something that you either have or don't have. It is a learned skill. Someday perhaps you'll decide to become an adult scout leader. When you take the training, (and please do not think that after several years as a scout you do not need training) you will discover that not only is it the scoutmaster's responsibility to develop junior leaders, it is his or her #1 responsibility. Any scout can gain leadership skills if the scoutmaster understands the methods and leadership styles of scouting. Being a scoutmaster is not about being a master of scouts, it is about being a master of scouting skills. To a scout the skills may seem to be about cooking, firebuilding, knots etc. And to some degree that is correct. But as an adult leader the skills of scouting is about the use of the methods of scouting in order to achieve the aims, in order to achieve the mission. Telling scouts what to do is not a skill.

What I have said Hunt is that if you use good leadership skills this situation will not arise, and if it does arise you can probably counsel the scout into a solution that could range anywhere from coaching the scout through the problem, to giving him time off to deal with a situation to allowing him to choose to step down. Which solution the scout will choose will vary from situation to situation. The important thing is that the resolution is the scout's choice. He is learning to make decision and you are SUPPOSED to be there to help him grow. You are not his boss and neither is the SPL. Too many leaders today seem bent on being "in charge" of the scouts. Thats the easy way out. As long as you are in charge you never have to teach the scouts to think on there own, you just have to teach them to listen to you. After all... you're the boss, right?

It takes two things to get uniforms washed at camp. 1- a camp wash mashine (5 gallon bucket with lid and a plumbers helper) 2- a knowledge of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain About Wednesday when the scouts were returning for lunch they would find me sitting on my chair working the plunger in the bucket whistling or humming a tune and ignoring them completely. Within minutes one of them would wander over and ask what I was doing I would say, let me show you, go grab some dirty clothes from your tent. The scout would run off and bring some items back, I would take my clothes out, throw his in, and tell him to start plunging like I did. afetr a couple minutes I showed him how to rinse them. almost every time before we got them hung up a small line had formed of scouts waiting to do laundry.

I think you will find asking me what I would do will get you a far more accurate and usable response than "guessing " at what I would do. First I want point out that as a scoutmaster I would have never let things get this far. I would have had regular contact with all new PLs asking them how they think they were doing, asking them what they thought the patrol was doing well at and what they thought their patrol needed to get better at. I would reinforce with them what things I saw that they were doing as a leader that was good and what things I thought they needed to try and improve on. I have done this scouting thing for quite awhile (even longer than juris) and I never had a scout that needed to be removved, or one where the scouts wanted to remove him. I was the junior leader's guide and mentor not their boss. I didn't hire them, and I didn't fire them. But let's take this case as If I was a new SM who inherited this problem. I would sit down with the patrol leader and ask him how things were going in the patrol and how he felt he was doing as the PL. If he said he was doing fine I would ask how the patrol was doing without him at the activities, and how was he managing to lead without being around. Eventually he would have to admit that things were not all that good. I would ask him how I could help. I would offer him assistance in whatever leadership skills he felt he needed. If his problem was home or school related I would see how long he expected the problem to last and what steps he was taking to resolve the problem. If it was goinbg to be a short term thing I would bring in his APL and we would arrange for him to fill in for the PL until he could return to his duties. If it was going to be a long term problem I would ask the scout what he thought should be done to make sure the patrol had the leadership it needed. The scout would probably volunteer to step aside and have a new PL elected or turn things over to his APL to step up to PL and let him select a new APL from the patrol. You do not need to tell a scout what to do. You need to ask him questions so that he can think through situations for himself and make his own decisions. One poster has likened patrol operations to that of a military platoon with the PL passing down orders and telling the patrol members what to do...Yechh. Makes my skin crawl just thinking about treating scouts that way. Scouting is about developing youth to make their own ethical choices not just to do what the SM or SPL tells them to. By-laws, troop rules, orders, inspections, that's not leadership in scouting, that is abdication of leadership. You are making paperwork control scouts rather than you taking the time and ...God forbid...getting to know each scout and what makes them tick as an individual. A poster on this thread once questioned the process of actually asking questions of the SPL prior to arriving at camp as a way to prepare him for his next step. He asked 'what are going to do spent 15 minutes with a scout every time something needs to be done?'. Well DUH! Of course I will if that scout needs 15 minutes. I can get most coaching done in a lot less time, but if the scout needs 15 minutes of my time in order to go do his job well, then I will gladly give him 15 minutes. I had assistants who knew what to do while I'm with the scout. Hunt asks about how I do things in "my world"? I do them very well, thank you for asking.

I'm sorry Lynda but you are incorrect according to the Scoutmaster Handbook, The Senior patrol Leader handbook, and the Scoutmaster Leader Specific Basic Training. The PLC is made of the SPL, the ASPL, the Patrol Leaders, The Troop Guide, the temporary New Scout Patrol Leader, and the Venture Patrol Leader. While others can be invited if they have specific reports or information to share, these are the only actual PLC members and they are the only ones with a vote. The Scoutmster is ther only to keep things on task, the majority of his or her work is done before and after the meeting but not during. (This message has been edited by Bob White)

In this hypothetical situation it very well could be, and in most cases it usually is.

Few boys if any comes into scouting "cut-out" to be a leader. It is the adult leaders job to develop them THROUGHOUT their scouting tenure in the skills of leadership. Of course for that to be possible the adult leader has to have an understanding of the scouting methods and of the skills of leadership.

"the PL in in charge of the patrol. the SPL and SM tell him what needs done, but he determines who does it, how its done, when its done, ect." That is from a Scout, and that makes my point. If all the PL does is hand out orders from the SPL and SM then he is not in charge of his patrol he is simply a communication device for the SM and SPL and that is not supposed to be the focus of his job. The SM and the SPL are not supposed to be determining what happens in the patrol that is the patrols job. If others are telling the PL what to do then they are in charge of the patrol and not the PL.

I sure some people will not want to hear this, but the program was not designed to REMOVE youth from leadership, but to teach them how to do it. Do not expect the BSA to give a leader instructions on how to punish scouts when the leader did not do their job.

I was with you 100% up until this point..."The Scoutmaster and the SPL have the right to take the position" Since they did not give it to him what gives them the right to take it away?

How do you (the youth) remove bad youth leaders from office? Unless I totally misread the first post, meamemg wanted to here from youth not adults. I responded only after it became clear that that was not happening. I did not ask anyone to abondon their advice, I simply gave my viewpoint. What meamemg is asking is how to claen up the mess but what he really needs to know is how to avoid it. In most cases when a scout does not perform well in a leadership role it is becasue he was not trained well to preare for it or not supported proerly once he got there. Training leaders is the SM #1 responsibility. A boy rarely fails in scouting who wasn't first failed by an adult. Let's treat the cause and not the effect.

You have fallen prey to some common misconceptions eagle74. The Troop is similar to the United States Each Patrol a state The PL is like the Govenor a State. The SPL is the President The troop officers his cabinet Each patrol (state) is totally independent yet recieves and shares resources through the Troop. The SPL has no power over the PL. His job is to coordinate the eforts of each patrol for the good of the troop. The troop only exists as a gathering of patrols. Just as the United States only exists as a gathering of independent states. At a PLC Roles change slightly but the civics model remains intact. The SPL takes the role of the Vice-President and acts as the leader of the Senate. The PLs become Senators representing their individual independent State but charged with governing for the good of the Country. Always look at scouting as a microcosm of the adult world. That is how it was designed. It is a living civics lesson. So who is incharge of the Govenor of the State? (This message has been edited by Bob White)

Leadership development is a process not an inheritence. Bos do not become leaders because they were elected. When the BSA program is followed a boys ledership develop begins in the New Scout Patrol when he follws a Troop Guide for two months as the temporary Patrol Leader to see how a troop rruns and the responsibilities of leadership. It grows as he watches others lead and the ASM for New Scout Patrols talks with the new scouts around a campfire about the scout law and how it relates to being a leader. Theuy see more of it again as an APL for two months. Plus they watch as the Troop Guide models good leadership skills in his duties in the patrol. The SPL explains at the end of the first year that they need to elect a PL who will hold the office for the nest 6 to 9 months and they they need to remember how each person lead and vote for the best leader and not their best friend. It then continues with counseling and mentoring from the Scoutmaster begining with an introduction to leadership conference. When a patrol leader fails it is usually because the troop program failed him first. If he has not had the training and development to prepare him for his responsibilities, and a guiding hand and voice to help him, then although the scout fell it was the adults who tripped him. How do you get rid of a junior leader? The bigger question is how do you avoid having leaders who do not succeed. Your real problem is not with the youth, getting rid of the boy is just an easier way to keep from having to address the real problem.

It shouldn't take a national headline to make any Charter Organization or unit committee to take their responsibility lightly. The mere fact that parents have entrusted you with their own children should be enough to make any reasonable person take action. No unit can risk using poorly selected, untrained, or irresponsible adult leadership. Not everyone who can figure out how to put a uniform shirt on right side out should be allowed to be a scout leader. I do not disagree with the BSA's membership restrictions as to who they deny membership to, but I admit that I have found myself on a few occassions totally dumbfounded by who charter organizations allow in.

3 will not happen simply because there is no cause for it to happen.