Compelled, Delegated or Empowered?

Empowered, autonomous and responsible youth leadership is the heart of Scouting.

Our job as Scoutmasters is to maintain a safe environment where the youth leadership is free to function with full responsibility. To encourage , coach and mentor rather than manage, delegate and compel.

Youth Leadership under compulsion is not autonomous. A safe environment for Scouting can not be so constrained as to exclude the possibility of failure. Instead failure is a real possibility and every group of leaders should have enough latitude to experience a plan gone sour and allowed to discover a way to recover. The only compulsion needed are those of the program; all we do should be focused on specific goals of Scouting.

Youth Leadership is not delegated. One abiding myth of Scouting is that the Scoutmaster is the source of all authority and delegates responsibility to his youth leadership. In reality the youth leadership has its own set of responsibilities that the Scoutmaster should not take away from them (although many do).
Youth leaders are not simply extensions of the Scoutmaster's authority. They are not his servants, employees, soldiers or sailors but volunteer players on a team he coaches.

Scouting is something that Scouts do for themselves by themselves. We adult leaders have the honor of observing, coaching and encouraging.

Comments

[Jerry Schleining Jr.]

Fantastic post. We just had that talk the other night. I wish more people understood that this is the way it works.

Have a Great Scouting Day!

[Rob]

This a great post!

It is amazing how easy it is for the empowerment to be destroyed. My son's troop just had one of the old guard, who was quite intimidating and basically had a strong enough clique that the CC (me) couldn't fire him (though he truly deserved it - but that is another story), have to retire (great) for health reasons (not so great). Remove his glowering from the sidelines and occasional shouts at the scouts and suddenly the scouts are running the show.

[Renee]

I absolutely love this post. So many want to control the outcome of the meetings and not let failures happen. Who hasn't learned from a failure? But for some reason, a lot do want their children to fail or make a mistake. That's the greatest learning moment.
I really, really enjoyed being a scoutmaster for the exact reasons you stated in your last paragraph.