Help with Leadership

[qwazse]

Sounds like you did a great job listening to your team. Now you need to think of your next moves in "a game with a purpose."

 

Like any coach, you gotta suck in your breath and not let your displeasure overwhelm everything. Let your ASPL know that based on what you saw in the weekend he may one day make a good SPL. Tell him there is room for improvement, but the best way to figure that out how to improve is to hear from his team.

 

In a PLC have the SPL go over things (the usual "what went well", "what didn't go so well","what we should do differently"). Don't

let this ramble on or divulge into a blame match. The point is to get the boys agree on what they expect of each other the next time. Then look ahead to that next time.

 

Then, you get them back on task. "Our cross-overs did not come away from the weekend with as solid skills as we would have hoped. What can we do to help them get up to speed?"

 

This is the tough part of leadership. We can have a good idea of how things should be. We can convey to others how should be. They could agree. But when things don't turn out quite how they should, we need to still figure out how to make the best of the experience.

[JMHawkins]

Interesting problem. On the one hand, nothing is really going to work well if the leaders don't plan ahead of time. On the other hand, having one person responsible for planning the whole weekend might be the wrong organizational structure, especially if it's a new guy in charge. Maybe you could talk to the SPL about delegating individual parts of the planning to other leaders, and he himself coordinates the planning. Spread the load out - not only will it make it less likely any one leader gets overwhelmed and freezed up, it also means if someone drops the ball on one part of the plan, there's a good chance the rest of the plan will still stick together and your weekend will still be a great activity.

 

You didn't mention the size of your troop, but I'm assuming more than one patrol, since you not only have an SPL, but also three ASPLs. If you've got, say, three Patrols, then you've got 3 PLs plus 3 ASPLs, plus however many of you JASMs. You might suggest to the SPL that next time, he and the PLC come up with list of stations for the new scouts (knots, lashings, first aid, cooking, etc), and then delegate the detailed planning of each station to one of the PLs, ASPLs, or even JASMs. That way, the overall burden doesn't seem so huge ("one bite at a time" as Barry said). What I've noticed so far in our Troop is that the SPL/ASPL don't naturally understand how to delegate power - they try to run the whole troop directly, and it's just too many Scouts for that to work! The SPL runs the PLC, not the Troop.

 

Picking up on what qwasze said, you also might suggest that the new scouts didn't get what they needed out of the trip, and it might be a good idea to convert an upcoming trip into a make-up session so the new guys don't get completely left behind. That might help drill into your SPL/ASPLs heads that letting an outing go splat has consequences. "We have to spend time doing skills instruction on our rafting trip because we chowdered the new scout skills trip?"

 

At any rate, I think you have a four-part message to deliver (cheerfully of course) to the SPL and his stand-in ASPL:

 

1) you guys let the Troop down by not doing your jobs

2) it happens, we're all learning and nobody should be defensive about it (nor overly harsh in their criticism).

3) we need to make up for the busted outing.

4) you guys are capable of doing it, and I can coach you.

 

1 & 2 aren't always easy to get across, but I think they're the key. If they don't realize they let people down, they probably won't realize they need to change their approach. But they also need to realize failure when you're learning is okay if you do your best to really learn from the failure and put things rigth as best you can.

 

Good luck!