Officer overload, aka too many Chiefs

[NeilLup 13]

Interesting thread. If you have the feeling that you have too many "chiefs" it may mean that your "leaders" are untrained and have more the "I'm the boss" attitude about leadership than the servant leader concept.

 

Not surprising as boys have extremely little experience with peer leadership, particularly when helicopter parents are around.

 

So one answer is to conduct some pretty intensive training of the leaders, or, if your unit is small, of everybody. The boys with positions of responsibility need to understand what their job is and how to be a servant leader. Check out Troop Leadership Training (TLT) which is a BSA manual.

 

I would also comment that below the level of Life Scout, no Scout "needs" a position of responsibility to advance. Up through First Class Scout, there is no leadership requirement. For Star and Life, the requirement is either a position of responsibility or a Scoutmaster assigned project and functioning as some kind of leader in the Troop can be such a project. I know of Scoutmasters who have considered serving as Asst. Patrol Leader to be such a project if the boy really did a good job.

 

So if you want to have very few official "leaders" in the Troop, you can do that. Then, if a boy says that he wants to be Scribe or Historian or Quartermaster, you could say "Why don't you try doing the job unofficially for a month and let's see how it goes. If you like it and do a good job, we'll consider giving you the position and the badge formally."

 

Consider making having a position of responsibility something special that has to be earned.

[Stosh 3452]

Exactly! Service isn't a project, it's a leadership style.

 

I would also offer up the suggestion that if a boy "tries out" a position for a month and does an excellent job so as to "earn" the POR, I would also back-date the POR time to reflect his month's worth of effort. If he didn't do the work, doesn't continue on with the responsibility, I would just drop it and find him another POR he might want to try out.

 

POR's are the "final exam" of leadership training. They are not supposed to be on-the-job training of hit-or-miss efforts. On-the-job training is developed IN the patrols. A boy might try out scribe duties for the patrol, might try QM duties for the patrol, might try out APL duties, etc. This way when they move down to the supportive role of assisting/serving the larger focus of the whole troop, they have some idea of what to expect.

 

Stosh

[Eagledad 2780]

Hi All

 

I sit here in ah reading these threads listing hypothetical scenarios intended to justify different approaches adults want to take with their program. Hey, Im all for thinking out of the box to fulfill noble visions. But supporting philosophy with hypothetical worse case scenarios and suggesting they are typical of all most troops is not a respectful approach for selling a plan. Oh Im sure there are units with some of these problems or situations, but many of us with been there done that T-Shirts know they are not typical.

 

Now if you want to justify changes to fix or improve your own program, well that is just good managing of a scout program. But you need to understand that after doing this awhile, one begins to realize that in the big picture of youth programs, It doesnt matter if yours is the BP scouts, the Girl Scouts, Best Scouts, Conservative Church scouts, liberal Church scouts or the BSA. A good adult leader will get the same level of performance from any program because they understand the dynamics of how boys grow and they can use those dynamics to work with in the procedural restrictions of any youth program to reach the same level of performance.

 

There is no youth program rigid enough to prevent an adult from making their unit adult run, or visa versa. How the adults work with the boys determines the quality of performance, not the designed program structure. When we understand that, we can stop trying to prop up our epiphanies by putting down all the others.

 

I love this scouting stuff.

 

Barry