Philmont Leadership Development

How do you develop leaders in your organization?

One of the ways I give back to the community is to volunteer as a Varsity Coach for the Boy Scouts of America.  I work with 14 to 18 year old young men.

We just completed a 57 mile hike at Philmont near Cimarron, New Mexico.

In that setting, you learn about life and leadership.

The purpose of Philmont is for the youth to be the leaders.

In our crew, all decisions and planning and orienteering were done by the young men with us.  If they chose the wrong trail, we all went that way.  The cooking, the bear safety precautions, and even the spiritual devotionals each evening were all under the direction of the crew leader, who was 18 and had experienced Philmont before.

Other crews would arrive at camps and the adult advisers would sit them down and go over all the assignments for the day.  They made the decisions.  And at the end of the trek, the young men may have had some good experiences, but they hadn’t developed any new leadership skills.

Here are some lessons I drew out of my Philmont experience that can improve the long term health of your business:

• Having a compass and map are like having a vision and a strategy.  Vision shows true north, and strategy shows you how to get where you need to be.
• Give people the opportunity to fail.  Sometimes spectacularly.  For your business to be the most successful, you need to have your hands in as few a tasks as possible.  Think about it.  Do you want to have to make all the decisions for each individual or department?  No way!  Then you get caught up in the thick of thin things.
• Put people in the right positions.  Just because you allow people to fail, doesn’t mean you should throw them to the wolves and ask them to do things they have no preparation for.
• Individuals and departments need to be autonomous, but aligned with the overall goals of the organization.  If they know the high-level strategy of your business and how they fit into that strategy, it will be simple to make correct decisions.
• When things are unclear, knowing the business strategy can enable creativity.
• Do difficult things.
• Have an adventure.

I loved working with our crew to complete our trek.  What trek are you taking your business on?

This is Mount Baldy at Philmont, elevation 12,441 feet.  We all made it to the top.

Tags: Business Development, Leadership, Success Paterns

This entry was posted on July 7, 2010 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.