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by Jeff Salzman
Staff play an important role in your camp operation.
After all, it is your staff who are in day-to-day contact with campers,
facilitating the positive experiences of camp. Therefore, your staff must
share your camp’s philosophy and be aware of the values that make your
program unique. Collaborating effectively with your summer staff is a
critical element in achieving your organization’s goals and objectives.
The Philosophy Behind the Mission
Most organizations today have developed a formal mission
statement that describes the core values or purpose of their organization
and the objectives that define achievement and success. Some camps, such
as Sunny Skies Day Camp, have a camp philosophy in lieu of a formal mission
statement:
"Camp is more than just a fun way for kids to spend their summer;
camp is a place where we can make a positive difference in young people’s
lives. All of the activities at camp are tools that provide opportunities
for children to participate, build new skills, and form friendships.
If our staff is successful, campers will gain self-esteem and self-confidence
through their experiences and adventures at camp."
Staff Play a Critical Role
Staff play a critical role in making camp more than just
a fun way for kids to spend their summer. The work staff members do (or
don’t do) determines the organization’s success or failure. For the program
to be successful, camp directors depend on the staff members to implement
the camp philosophy. How can you select and train your staff to accomplish
this task? You must become skilled at marketing to your staff!
Interview with your mission in
mind
Marketing to staff begins during the hiring process. Staff interviewing
and selection should be based on your program’s philosophy in an effort
to screen and hire those candidates who want (and are able) to fulfill
the goals and objectives that you have set forth. In order to accomplish
this, interview questions must be designed with your camp’s mission in
mind; an applicant’s response to well-created interview questions should
allow you to compare the goals and objectives of the prospective staff
person with that of your program.
One question that you should ask in order to get a sense
of a candidates’ perspective on the value of camp is "If you ran
a summer camp, what would be some of your goals and objectives?"
Another important question to ask is "What do you think children
can gain from a summer camp experience?" While fun is certainly a
good start to answering both of these questions (and you should be concerned
if fun is not included in the answer), what else does the candidate think
is important? Look for answers that include: "learning skills,"
"making new friends," "being part of a positive group experience,"
"gaining independence," and "becoming more self-confident."
The candidate’s answers to these types of questions will begin to indicate
whether this prospective staff person envisions the camp experience congruously
with the objectives of your camp vision.
Later in the interview, you can begin to share your camp’s
philosophy with an applicant by asking "Do you think children can
gain self-confidence or self-esteem from a summer camp experience?"
(Granted, this is a loaded question!) After they inevitably answer "yes,"
follow up with much more challenging and revealing questions:
- How can a child gain self-esteem from summer
camp?
- Does the staff play a role in allowing that
to occur?
- How would you as a counselor try to build
a child’s self-confidence?
- Do you think there is a recipe for helping
to build children’s self-esteem?
During interviews, ask questions in an attempt to determine
if there is the possibility of a successful match between your organizational
goals and the goals of the prospective staff member. As an employer, the
first step is to be sure that your interview questions are geared toward
your program’s particular philosophy.
Teach staff your camp's vision
After you have selected those individuals who you feel will embody your
organization’s core values, the next step is to educate and train your
staff in detail about the program’s mission and what role they will play
in achieving it. At this point, marketing your mission to your staff should
be a relatively easy sell in that one benefit of an effective hiring process
is that your staff should already share the values and goals that define
your mission — if you have done your job in hiring staff, then your organizational
mission should be, at least in part, their personal mission!
Staff training is a time to provide your staff with a
recipe for how to incorporate the mission into each and every camp activity.
For example, when some camps train their staff to facilitate a canoeing
program, the program leaders are careful to talk about and role play exactly
how this program fits into the camp’s philosophy (in addition to teaching
the procedural elements of canoeing and safety).
It’s no coincidence that their canoes seat four campers
and that sometimes only two paddles are in each canoe. While canoeing
may be about rowing a boat in a body of water, for this program canoeing
is really all about working in groups, communicating with friends, sharing
paddles when mysteriously there are not enough to go around, feeling good
about oneself from the experience . . . and, of course, it’s also a lot
of fun!
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.
Don't accept low achievers
That’s all well and good for the superstar counselor, you may be thinking,
but what about those who are not achieving as well and not helping your
organization achieve its goals? In many ways, the job that you do as a
manager will be defined more by how you handle the difficult challenges
of managing underachieving staff than by how you pat your superstars on
the back. No manager likes terminating staff, but it is an extremely important
tool in marketing your organization’s missions and values to your staff.
If your entire camp program revolves around your staff’s ability to have
positive relationships with and build self-esteem in children, what does
it say to the rest of your staff if you allow a staff person who is negative
and demeaning toward campers to continue to work in your program? On the
other hand, what does it say if you don’t allow that person to continue
as a member of your staff? As difficult as it is, terminating the employee
who does not live up to your camp’s mission plays a critical role in this
marketing effort.
Practice What You Preach
Finally, it is important to recognize that there is a
profound parallel that exists in camp management. You ask your staff to
accomplish specific goals in the ways that they work with children in
their groups or at their activity areas. You want them to praise children
with high fives and kind words; get children’s attention by hand claps
or techniques such as seeing if their group can form a line in less than
six seconds; and discipline them using specific positive discipline guidelines.
As directors and managers, you must practice what you
preach! Your relationship with your staff is a direct parallel to your
staff’s relationship with campers — staff members are your group to coach,
build, and develop. The very best example that you can set for your staff
is to always provide the ultimate model of your organizational mission
and values.
Originally published in the 1999 September/October
issue of Camping Magazine. |
