The Value of Wood Badge Training

[wyomingi]

My boss wants me to go to a leadership training class. I told him to send me to Wood Badge. It costs about one fourth of the classes he has found. Unfortunatly he thinks that I am joking. Does anyone know of good independent references such as magazine articials or web sites that I can show him?

[Scoutmaster Ron]

I've attended many mangement classes for the company I work for and have found that Wood Badge touches on alot of the points...team building ,learning to listen, working with others.

[Eamonn]

It used to be that some colleges used to accept the Wood Badge course as credit towards some courses or degrees. I am not sure if that is still the case.

You might want to call the training department in Texas or have someone from your Scout Service Center make the call.

You could just take the course and then dazzle your boss with your new found leadership skills?? (Only half joking.)

Welcome to the forums.

[fotoscout]

I second what Scoutmaster Ron posted! The great part of WB is that is leaves out all of the business school buzz words that he professional trainers love to throw around.

 

I've been told that the AFL-CIO offers scholarship money for the class, so they may have some useful information for you. I suggest you contact National , they should have the answer to this type of question.

 

[Padre]

I have not taken WB and I am not a fan based on the results I have seen with my spouse and in my district. A good leader attends and comes back a good leader, a bad leader attends and comes back a bad leader that now thinks they are a very good leader. OK, I am biased so I thought I would ask several friends that have taken the WB course and hold Director level positions at my company if they would send their people to WB for leadership training. We all work for a large science based Fortune 500 Company with profits in the billions. All of these folks are men and 2 of the 3 have PhDs in science and one has an MBA, he is also the district commissioner.

 

To summarize their comments and thoughts: They all felt there was some value from a leadership standpoint but the amount applicable could be covered in a couple of hours with an overhead projector. Their conclusions were that if the leadership class couldnt do better than the WB course for their employees then they most likely would not send them to this leadership class. Most thought that WB was more about the tickets and relationships within the patrol and the overall experience. The information was more applicable to how they function within the district and their troop.

 

My own inputs would be that you should hope your boss forgets your request before your performance evaluation is written. There must be a reason your boss is requesting you to enhance your leadership skills. Perhaps you should take both the WB and the business leadership courses. Could it hurt?

 

[Fat Old Guy]

"My boss wants me to go to a leadership training class."

 

Ask him to send you to The Basic School for Marine Officers at Quantico. It's free. In fact they pay you to attend if you qualify.

[andrewcanoe]

Padre,

Maybe the men you interviewed about Wood Badge attended the "old" Wood Badge because the Wood Badge for the 21st century that I attended was very business oriented.In fact camping/scouting skills played a very small part in the whole program. That stuff was covered in depth in earlier courses. As far as tickets are conserned what businessman is not expected, if not required, to make and carry out goals?

[Region 7 Voyageur]

Padre said To summarize their comments and thoughts:.....Most thought that WB was more about the tickets and relationships within the patrol and the overall experience.

 

I hope that I am not taking his post out of context but this is exactly why Wood Badge is a great leadership course. A participant does not walk out of a three hour lecture or presentation to maybe or maybe not use some of the information they received. In Wood Badge the participant builds a real team to complete a real project, and then works on their ticket to put the learned leadership skills to work. They then evaluate with their counselor how things worked. Wood Badge is more than talk and printed words it is planning, action, results, and evaluation.

 

[Padre]

Andrewcanoe,

They all took the recent course. We are all familiar with business goals since more than 25% of our income and our own performance evaluations, not to mention our continued employment, are tied to our individual, department and division goals as managers.

 

The comparison is: Send your employee to WB for a week of training or send them to a business leadership course for a week. Our company sends us to a specific course so that we are all getting similar training. In this way we are creating a culture and similar set of values in the company. Very similar to what BSA is trying to accomplish with WB. The comparison is a 40-hour WB course for business leadership or another targeted course. What is the best use of time and money, all costs being equal. You have to pay an employee for something you require them to do.

 

Back to the comparison, everyone agreed there was value in the WB course but it would not be the better business decision for us. We also thought it better to keep scouting a little more outside of our business environment.

 

I want to travel on a different tangent for a moment. We are a public company; the employees represent a slice of the overall population. We would have a lawsuit from a shareholder some agency/organization or employee within a week if we started sending employees to WB as a company-training course. I do not believe that we can legally do business with the BSA because of the organizations positions on certain issues. We are a government contractor. I am sure different circumstances exist in smaller firms with regard to training, regulations and accountability to investors and government agencies.

 

Like I said before do WB and the other course. But do WB on your own time.

[Eamonn]

OK I am a big Wood Badge fan.

The Wood Badge for the 21st Century is a leadership course. Looking over the course evaluations from the course that I was the director for. Some participants who had taken management courses felt that it covered too much stuff that they had already covered.

It seems that we just can't win!!

I work for UPMC which is by no means a Mom and Pop operation. A few times a year I'm packed off to attend a day long seminar that has to do with sort of management / Leadership Skill. Some I have to admit do a better job then the course does and some don't. Of course that is just my opinion. What doesn't work is when they try and put us in teams. This fails, mainly due to the fact that other then working for the same company and at times being lucky enough to have someone in the same area of work. We don't share anything in common. Of course when dealing with a topic like Diversity, this is no big deal, still when it comes to team building it becomes a waste of time. You might as well just read the hand outs.

Wood Badge may not be the ideal course for every company. Still it might be worth mentioning that across the pond in the UK, companies such as British Airways and British Telecom are sending a lot of their people to attend Wood Badge.

Eamonn

[fotoscout]

Many Fortune 500 companies send their high level executives and senior managers to team building courses. Theses courses are usually conducted in the outdoors setting; Rock Climbing, Rafting, Hiking, etcsome even go so far as to have the team build a log home. The courses are spattered with business school topics, but the prime intent is to force these (very strong minded) people to understand that they cannot bring greatness to their companies all by themselves. They cant do it all alone, they need help, and they need the team. Along the way, they are schooled in the methods of team building. These classes are very expensive, and limited to the cream of the crop. Invitations are very coveted and considered in higher management circles as a kind of pedigree.

 

I believe that WB follows this format far greater than it follows the format of the standard management or leadership courses that I have taken. I would highly recommend WB to anyone looking for a leadership class that gives them real tools instead of more buzz words.

 

 

Padre,

 

As for your PhDs, my workplace has literally hundreds of them, possibly over 1000, in a workforce of 3000. I can tell you categorically that only a small fraction of 1% of them would gain any benefit from WB. They are a different breed, marching to a different drum, in an orchestra of one. They are not the best people to discuss conventional management skills or team building with.

 

 

 

 

[KoreaScouter]

I see a basic disconnect here. If I may be presumptuous, the curriculum designers for WB21 kept the their training audience in mind as they built the course -- altruistic volunteers, whose professional and educational backgrounds run the gamut, and whose mission is to prepare young people to make ethical and moral decisions over their lifetimes by instilling in them the Scout Oath and Law. If that mission statement matches, or is even philosophically close, to your businesses', then by all means use WB as a leadership training venue. Otherwise, much of the value of WB will be irrelevant to your organization.

 

Sure, there's a little Covey, a little Blanchard, etc., but that's not an argument I use to recommend WB to prospective attendees. The staff doesn't use a bone saw to open your head and pour in enlightenment, either. That's an intangible you have to discover for yourself during the course; some do, some don't. Again, the underlying assumption is that you're walking in the door with a certain set of values (the Ideals of Scouting), that have been basted in the sweat, excitement, and reward of having spent some amount of time in the movement and seeing how it works, and more importantly, that it does indeed work. Without that foundation, it seems to me that attending WB would be like going to your first cricket game without knowing it ahead of time, as if you stumbled into the stadium and decided to stay.

 

Some lessons in WB are universally applicable. But, the most important ones will only matter to Scouters. That's okay, since that's who it was designed for. If you want to see baseball, but you go to a football game instead, you will still see grass, uniforms, sportsmanship (hopefully), and teamwork. You won't see baseball, but you can't bash football for that. Likewise, I don't think we should criticize WB because it's not a leadership training cure-all for managers in a for-profit business.

 

 

I've worked for a large Fortune 500 outfit in my past, also. The various staff organizations and operational divisions had substantial training budgets, and they often used the services of outside training pros who would design custom training courses, based on the training audience, the organization's culture/mission, time available, and so on. That's not always a sure thing, but that's the way to bet.

 

 

What makes WB special? Well, as a personal example, among the countless training seminars, workshops, classes, courses, and formal schools that I've been to, one was the Air Base Defense command course. Good course, but one thing it does not do is allow one to see and understand the air base defense effort from the pespective of the 19-year old grenadier or mortarman who will ultimately win or lose the effort. Too bad. However, WB allows you to see Scouting from the perspective of a Boy Scout (if you permit yourself to do so; that caveat again).

 

KS

 

 

[Padre]

Fotoscout,

I certainly respect your opinion on the course and the nature of highly educated scientists. It sounds like we work in similar environments.

 

My last boss was a PhD in Physics. His first book was about Physics, his next two were about management, they both made it to the bestsellers list and he was voted one of the top executives in the country and also one of the toughest, so much for style! There is always an exception to the rule. I worked for him for ten years and learned a lot about managing people and projects.

 

The gentlemen I spoke about are good scout leaders in my opinion. But I also thought that way before they took WB. Nothing changed so perhaps there was little value in it for them. They didnt act any differently when they got their beads, it was refreshing.

 

I believe Koreascouter is on the right track and I would certainly agree that WB is designed for scouting and there are good lessons to learn and skills to gain that are more applicable to scouting than anything else. It is a humble opinion since I have never taken the course.

 

[Bob White]

I feel I need to correct Padre and Korea Scouter. The methods of Wood Badge for the 21st Century were written with the goal of effective leadership in mind. The methods of the various scouting programs were written with the mission of scouting in mind. The contributing authors of WB were asked for input on making the course a more effective tool for teaching leadership skills to adults. The skills of leadership were the focus of the work, not the mission of scouting.

 

WB is a leadership course for all leaders in and out of scouting. It uses the scouting environment when being delivered to scouting participants but that environment can be easily adapted to fit other groups without altering the methods.

 

Certainly as a leader one must understand the characteristics and the resources of the group being lead. However, since WB is for all volunteers at all levels of scouting, not just troop service, the element of seeing the program from a "Boy Scout's" view does not play an intricate roll to the course.(This message has been edited by Bob White)

[Fat Old Guy]

" The contributing authors of WB were asked for input on making the course a more effective tool for teaching leadership skills to adults."

 

Maybe that's the problem. The last time that I checked, adults in Scouting weren't supposed to be providing leadership. We're supposed to let the boys lead.