Mentoring Lessons from Scout Camp

Do you know who leads a Scout troop? If you answered the Scoutmaster, then you are not alone. Most parents and kids think that when they first join, and sometimes for a while afterwards. However, it is supposed to be the boys themselves. We adults are there for safety first, then to serve as mentors for the boy leaders.

I just served with two fellow Scoutmasters as adult leaders for our troop’s 2016 summer camp.  Summer camp is a key time for any troop, especially when it comes to building camaraderie and leadership. However, summer is a time of leadership transition: even the most senior boys are inexperienced young teens. Our senior patrol leader had himself just turned fifteen, half of the leadership had just turned thirteen, and more than half the boys were at their first overnight camp.

With such a young crew, we mentors walked a tightrope. Do too much and the boys will not actually lead. Do too little and the boys can become frustrated and lost.  We were grateful that our Scouting and life experiences had given us some tools to balance ourselves. To that end, let’s look at how a few key mentorship dos and don’ts played themselves out at summer camp.

• DO be available to answer questions: In our case, we made sure that at least one of the adult leaders was in our campsite and out in the open. I can’t tell you how many impromptu coaching sessions we had while standing in the middle of camp.
• DON’T always wait for the individual to approach you with questions: We did not just sit there. We also kept an eye on our boy leaders. If any looked a bit lost or uncertain, we might ask a question ourselves. “What are you looking for?” “Where are you supposed to be?”
• DO set a regular schedule and have broad objectives for each meeting:  In our case, we were only at camp a week, so our boy leaders needed daily feedback. Several scoutmasters had experience with agile, so we used sprint retrospective questions to drive our daily troop retrospectives:
  • What went well today?
  • What went wrong today?
  • What could we do differently to improve?
• DON’T feel like you need to have all the answers: In some cases, it was as simple referring questions like “how do I fix my mosquito netting” to the scout’s patrol leader. In other cases, we would let the boys raise options or bat them around. Even if they could not find consensus, we encouraged them to commitment by asking open-ended questions: “Who should do that?” “What do you give up if you choose activity X?” “When does that have to happen by?”

These dos and don’ts are from our internal PM College guide to coaching and mentoring. Mentoring is an increasingly important part of the PM College practice. We build on the relationship built by our instructors to provide guidance based upon both classroom learning and real-world experience. Our mentorship model enables the mentee to synthesize events, experiences, and observations into new capabilities that mature and deepen over time.

[Editor's note from a former Brownie Troup leader: Girl Scouts works pretty much the same way!]