Collaborating with Staff: Sharing a common philosophy, working to achieve common goals

Camping Magazine, Sept, 1999 by Jeff Salzman

In slightly different ways, each activity area at camp exists as an important tool through which your program's goals can be achieved. Your job during staff training is to illustrate just exactly how each activity fits into the camp philosophy and then to teach staff how to facilitate each activity in a way that will put the philosophy into action.

Achieving a Common Purpose

Once the camp season is under way, one of the really beneficial aspects of having a clearly defined and well-understood camp philosophy is that the entire staff, directors and owners included, work toward the same common purpose. Unlike a more traditional top-down approach where subordinates work for their supervisors (or perhaps work for money), working to achieve your camp philosophy creates a feeling in camp that all of your staff, from your maintenance staff and group counselors all the way to your directors and owners, ultimately are working for the children.

Working toward and accomplishing a common purpose is a positive and incredibly powerful way to motivate staff. (Over the years, many camps have found that a valued common purpose is far more meaningful to staff than money.) There is probably nothing more motivating or more rewarding in the world than enabling, empowering, and coaching people to reach goals that they themselves hoped to achieve. By uniting your staff with a common purpose, you have managed to create a staff that is feeling rewarded and successful as individuals while simultaneously achieving your organizational goals and objectives.

Staff evaluation becomes easier

During the course of each summer, collaborating with staff should play an important role in staff evaluation and supervision. Supervising and evaluating staff is easier when the organization and the employee both have a clear understanding of what the particular goals and objectives are; a performance evaluation should relate the job being done by the staff member to the goals and objectives that comprise your camp's mission or philosophy (among other things).

A successful and effective staff member, no matter his particular role, should be doing a job that contributes toward the program's overall goals. For a group counselor, this obviously means working effectively with the group to provide experiences that meet the requirements set forth in the mission statement; in the case of a maintenance person, this could entail noticing that a particular piece of play equipment has an exposed nail and correcting the problem before anyone is injured by it.

Praise staff with specifics

While different roles in camp necessitate different actions toward achieving the program's goals, staff members need and deserve to know how they are doing individually in accomplishing those goals. Those who are successful in meeting or exceeding your expectation need to know it - tell them personally or write them a quick note explaining exactly how they are achieving some of your organization's goals and values. The more specific you can be in your praise, the more likely they will continue that positive action. Positive feedback will also allow them to gain self-confidence in their abilities which, in turn, will help them perform their camp job even better.