Improve Your Relationship with Staff - camp staff

Camping Magazine, March, 2001 by Eileen White Jahn

Are you inadvertently fostering immature staff behavior?

Having a hard time telling the counselors from the campers? Are your staff too dependent on you? Are you mediating as many petty fights between your staff as you are with the campers?

It is your right to expect mature behavior from your staff because they are your employees. It is your responsibility, too, for a couple of reasons.

First, immature staff behavior jeopardizes camper safety and camper discipline. If you have a staff member who thinks it's acceptable to sit on the bottom of the pool in a lawn chair, you will have campers trying the same. If it's acceptable for the staff to curse and fight, why not the campers?

Second, camp is as valuable a development process for the staff as it is for the campers. Camps are first and foremost a place for youth development. Many of your staff are youths, too. Even if you are paying them to do a job, they are still young people under your care who deserve your guidance. Actually, often the counselors are the very campers who you developed. The staff progression is a logical extension of the camper progression.

You need to look at your management style to see if you are inadvertently fostering the immature behavior you encounter. If you feel you have an unacceptable incidence of immature behavior among your staff, ask yourself the following questions to see if you are somehow encouraging it:

* Are you inadvertently encouraging dependencies or discouraging independence?

* Do you act childish yourself?

* Are you fostering a repressive atmosphere that leads to regressive behavior?

* Are you unclear in your expectations?

Encourage Independence among Staff

Do staff members fall apart when you're not there? Are you the "mom" and "dad" whose presence is necessary to make sure things run correctly? In my first year as a camp director, if I left the camp for any reason, I was paged constantly and met upon my return with wails of "We didn't know what to do without you!" Although I would never discourage staff members from paging me, many of the decisions and crises were things they could have dealt with themselves. In a way, it's flattering to feel so needed, but to accept this neediness would be to encourage this unnecessary dependency and the avoidance of decision making.

Coach staff to make appropriate decisions

A good camp should be able to run without you (for a while at least). Work with your staff to teach them how to make decisions; show them how and why you handle things. Don't just dish Out decisions and ultimatums; explain the rationale behind them and invite input. If a particular crisis can be turned into a learning opportunity, turn to staff members and ask them what the course of action should be. In this way, they learn what to do when you are not around. Set limits on their decision-making/action-taking authority (such as all communications to parents must go through you first), but once those limits are clear, give staff members the freedom to manage a situation.

On the other hand, it's easy to discourage mature behavior inadvertently through your reaction to their decisions. If a staff member makes a decision that isn't exactly the one you would make, try not to get upset. If you do, this teaches them to take all decisions to you. If a decision is acceptable but just not the way you would have handled the situation, let it go. If it is unacceptable or harmful, step in and lead the staff member to the better resolution.

Anecdote: Encouraging initiative

For example, one night we were having a terrible time getting the coals going for an all-camp barbecue. Knowing dinner would be delayed, I was about to send a message to the upper staff in cabin areas to hold tight and not blow the dinner bugle. Then I realized that all the upper staff were off or with me. Knowing that there was no one in authority to blow the bugle, we were free to finish our fire-starting. A short while later, we heard a distant bugle and forthwith the entire camp marched down. My first reaction was anger ("Who told them to blow the bugle?"), but I quickly realized that the person who took initiative and blew the bugle at dinner time should be recognized and thanked. That is the type of behavior camp directors want to encourage.

You Are a Role Model for Staff

Like it or not, the director and upper staff are role models for the rest of the staff. They look to your behavior to see what is acceptable.

Your behavior sets the tone

One director I knew was a talented comedian, but he never turned it off. He had a joke for every situation, usually at the expense of others. I'll never forget the sight of him in the height of a medical emergency involving a teenage staff member. He quickly retrieved the health form to bring to the ambulance, but took the time to trumpet to all within hearing the fact that the counselor was on a bed-wetting medication. His lack of discretion sent a message to his staff that there were no bounds, and they acted accordingly.

Another camp director friend of mine was tolerant of raiding and pranks, mostly because he liked to indulge in this behavior himself. He would sneak around at night and set up jokes and tricks and then laugh at the staff members who got caught in them. Unfortunately, he didn't understand that he was responsible when staff members would go overboard in their retaliation or when they didn't listen when he said enough was enough. He was sending his staff a signal that it was all right to act like this because the director did. If you play practical jokes, so will your staff.