It's amazing how much you can learn about leadership from a situation in which you didn't really intend to lead. About a decade ago when my son turned 11 and decided to cross over into Scouts BSA from Cub Scouts, my dad had some advice for me.
"They're going to trick you into becoming Scoutmaster," he said, chuckling. "It's inevitable."
I really didn't want that, though as an Eagle Scout myself I knew that I wouldn't refuse the call. I shook it off. I had zero intention or desire to take on that responsibility at the time, and I told him so.
"Regardless," he said, "when you end up being Scoutmaster, develop an exit plan for when it's time to hang it up."
He said this from hard-earned experience. He served as Scoutmaster for Troop 121 of Elkhart, Indiana, for almost 15 years. I'm sure he did it for far longer than he had intended to, long after I had aged out of the program. Having an exit plan was good advice, but I could hardly believe that I would need it since my son's new Troop had an able Scoutmaster and ASM. I could not imagine how they would need me.
One shared tragedy later, though, that all changed.
Leadership is about more than being in charge
Our Scoutmaster suddenly passed that fall, and our ASM had work commitments that took him overseas for weeks at a time. The group needed me to dive into training and prepare to serve as ASM, and before too long, Scoutmaster.
"I don't want that," I said to myself. "I know that I don't want to want that. That's not me." I prided myself on not being the type of person who had to be in charge, the guy who could not be on the team without running the team. I have known a great many people like that in my life, and the thought of being in the same category bothered me.
"I don't see the need to be in a leadership role." Those words kept swimming around in my head. I would love to begin the next sentence with "and then it hit me," but I can't because it didn't hit me. It wasn't something that crystallized for me until at least 5 years later. Maybe I had a sense of it at the time, but I had no framework to explain or articulate it. Eventually, though, a better response to those words did come along: "You don't see the need to lead, because the need isn't yours. The organization needs you to lead, so at that point your needs don't really enter into the equation."
By the time I learned that, of course, I was on the other side of it for the most part, years of meetings, hikes, campouts and spreadsheets. So many spreadsheets. By that point I was, in many respects, a completely different person. I used to tell people Scouting changed my life as a youth, but that's maybe 1 quarter of the real story. It did more for me as an adult volunteer than it even did for me as a child. The earned confidence you gain as a youth in Scouting is vital, but what I learned meeting to meeting, campout to campout, as an adult leader changed how I think and how I work. It changed how I see other people and, most importantly, how I see myself.
##Leadership is the difference between serving on a team and serving the team itself. One very important thing to mention at this point is that Scouting is meant to be a youth-led organization. That means that adults are here to make sure everyone is safe and included while the youth leaders plan everything and run meetings and outings. On one of my first campouts as an adult with the Troop, I recall the SPL, the youth in charge of the Troop, could not attend so I identified the oldest Scout and designated him acting SPL. His eyes opened as wide as dinner plates.
"Are you sure?" he said nervously.
Clearly, he did not see himself as a leader at the time. I reassured him he would be fine and that we would work together. For example, if the Troop needed to start cleaning up after cooking breakfast, I would tell him and he would tell the youth. As frightened as he seemed at the prospect on Friday evening, by the end of the campout he seemed like a natural. By the way, that same young man earned his Eagle a few years later.
As a Scoutmaster you spend a lot of your time mentoring youth leaders. In later roles, I mentor adult leaders as well, and I find it endlessly fascinating how their concerns and stumbles are so similar. The most common issue is a strong reluctance to delegate. Just as a youth leader goes to get water himself or herself because "getting someone else to do it will take forever," many adult leaders do the same thing, attempting to manage every detail and writing every email until they have burned themselves out entirely.
Have you ever given someone advice and later realized that you were really talking to yourself? After one of these conversations, I started to wonder if I was also bad at delegating and, of course, I was. I spent months trying to break old habits to follow my own advice, and it helped enormously. You see, just like the Scouting uses the outdoors as a laboratory for learning skills youth can use in their every day lives, Scouting itself is a lab for people like me to learn about how organizations work and how the people within them can grow and flourish.
As soon as I started my Wood Badge leadership training, I saw my role at work and my relationships with colleagues and clients quite differently. I began to move away from thinking about my work as code or projects and more about service. How can I identify a stakeholder's needs and address them even if they can't fully articulate them? How can I serve my team regardless of my title?
Leadership is about developing other leaders.
In Scouting as well as in business, two basic types of leaders emerge: the ones who feel a strong urge to do everything themselves and those who give people enough room to grow into higher level roles and eventually replace them. While leading a team, you're not just developing software or marketing projects or fill in the blank. You're developing the team itself. This not only means committing to process improvement but also professional development of your colleagues. In that sense, the best leaders are the ones who are trying to lead themselves out of a job.
One way to think of it is a conveyer belt. You want to see what's coming down the line and that it's developed and ready by the time it gets to the appropriate part of the belt. Today's leaders are fostering tomorrow's leaders who will, in turn, train the next group. Without this conveyer belt, the leader gets to the end of the line and nobody is there to take over. This is what my dad was telling me to consider. Keep the conveyer belt going, otherwise you'll get stuck and it won't be good for you or the families you serve. He was more right than I knew at the time.
Recruit parents to help with committees and give them real tasks to do. If you give them a title and do most of it yourself, you're not just overworking yourself. You're robbing that person of something meaningful. If you're worried about them making mistakes, don't. Mistakes are part of the job, after all. In the BSA requirements, youth are required to hold a position in the Troop for certain ranks. It does not say that they must do the job perfectly from day one. Why is that? I believe this is because the point is to learn and without the latitude to make mistakes, we limit what we can learn.
Our former Scoutmaster used to say "give them enough room to fail." There are limits to this, of course. Let them burn a meal and learn to cook as a team, for example, but make sure we have a backup plan just in case. As a manager, can you think of an example that fits this framework? Are you afraid of giving a junior engineer a tricky user story where they will have to coordinate across teams? Perhaps pairing with them on this will help them develop into a more effective team member and move from a junior level to a mid.
This conveyer belt of new leadership is vital for youth and adults in Scouting and also in our professional lives. When you're managing a team, helping your team members work on their professional development is part of the role. You want to help them define what they want to do and how you can help them get there, but you also want to unlock their leadership potential.
As with all things, leadership has a beginning, middle and an end.
When it was time for me to pull back a bit and let someone else take over the role of Scoutmaster, the process was smooth and fairly easy. As much as I would love to take credit for it, this was mostly due to the strength of our dedicated group of parents and a culture of volunteerism. Years after my son aged out, I'm still on the Troop committee and help Life Scouts work on their Eagle rank. Most Monday nights you'll find me there, not only because it's fun and gratifying work but because it still has much to teach me about the way I work, the way I lead, and the way I see the world.
Plus, every once in a while I get to work with someone, youth or adult, who doesn't see themselves as a "leader," and they're always surprised that I do. The excuses start flowing and eventually subside into a half-formed belief that maybe they could lead if they had to. Fast forward to a a few months later, and I'm happily clapping along with the crowd as we celebrate their accomplishments, another rank earned, another year of service to other people's kids. That's why I still do it. It is, I suppose, who I am.