It’s something I say to my staff every summer, but I’m not sure if my staff always totally feel it. The message is always spoken clearly enough: What we’re doing at camp is important. We’re changing people’s lives, here. We’re changing the world. If we’re focusing on all these little things going on in our lives, or worrying about the social lives of others, it’s going to be awfully hard to fully execute on this mission.
We’re the lucky ones who get to be a part of this mission. Don’t we owe it to ourselves to use all the tools available to us to ensure that we avoid hurting one another as much as possible?
But sometimes, summer staff members don’t hear this message as clearly as I would like. So this year, we hope to augment our “pump up” speeches with some additional tools and activities. Instead of simply telling our own stories, we plan to read testimonials from kids from previous summers. We’re going to name them by name, and show a picture of them. It’s not “kids” who are at stake. It’s Camille. And Nick. And Sean. Real human beings whom we have seen laugh, cry, and work through hard times. These kids are important. They’re why we do this.
Once we’re in a mindset of appreciation for the opportunity to help these young people, we’re going to do a team-building exercise I’ve done many times in the past that really drives home the idea of how easy it is for 1 person pushing against a community to disrupt everything. The activity is simple. In a small area, we’ll have 20 empty 2 liter bottles. 19 staff members will focus on setting the bottles up, and 1 will focus on trying to knock them all down. The only rule is that you may not hold a bottle for more than a second, and you may not carry a bottle around with you. After this round, we will have all 20 staff members setting up bottles, instead of knocking them down.
The de-brief for this activity is powerful. The activity is essentially impossible with 1 destructive person, but it couldn’t be easier when we are all on the same page. The same holds true for running summer camp. The question for staff is this: Do you want to be the one person who is knocking everyone else’s bottles down this summer, or do you want to be one of us who is setting them up?
bottles down this summer, or do you want to be one of us who is setting them up?
If we execute well, we hope that this will be a memorable touchstone as we move throughout the summer. In staff meetings, we’ll refer back to this de-brief: “Did anyone pick you up this week? Did you pick anyone else up this week? Look in your own heart. Did you knock anything over this week? Knock anyone over? If you were knocked over, did you attempt to communicate your feelings? Remember – being a member of this community isn’t about being perfect, it’s about moving closer toward who we want to be each day.”
If we’re all intent on executing our incredibly important mission, we’re most of the way to putting the camp before our own personal preferences. But there’s still more we’ll need to do.
Intensely buying in to each other
Once our staff members are bought into our mission, the next step has got to be getting them to buy in to one another. There’s nothing quite like working with someone who’s given you belly laughs and seen you cry. There’s an accountability among summer staff members that doesn’t exist in any other job I’ve found, and I believe we can do even more to increase this sense of duty and love toward one another.
The main points of pain in getting a summer staff to love one another seem to be common from year to year, and while some of them will be unavoidable, I believe efforts can be made to reduce their painfulness.
The first one almost always seems to be new staff members feeling left out. If you’re reading this, you’ve likely been a part of at least 1,000 “remember last summer, when…” stories. Depending on how you got your first camping job, you may or may not have been a part of one of these stories when you had no clue what anyone else was talking about. But if you’ve been a director of a camp, you’ve almost certainly had someone in your office sharing the feeling of isolation that comes from hearing story after story about people whom you’ve never heard of. It’s a difficult discussion to have.
I think that the pain in this person’s heart comes from something beyond a lack of knowledge as to who “Fish” was, and why he put a dead mouse under someone named Erin’s pillow. I think it’s because he or she doesn’t have any camp memories yet. To this staff person, camp is a semi-scary place with a lot of new people who all seem to know and love one another and who share a million common experiences with one another, and none with him or her. I’ve noticed that these concerns almost always die down over the course of the summer, even though story-telling from previous summers persist.
I believe this is because new staff members haven’t experienced the magic of camp, yet. And hearing great things about something you haven’t yet been a part of can build up excitement, but it can also build up resentment, or fear.
Our idea? Start staff training off by giving staff some of the magic of camp. We plan to take the first day of staff training (after some basic getting to know you stuff) and create a camp experience. Once everyone arrives, we’re giving them a few basic supplies, a few bucks, access to our kitchen, and some boats. They are going to have to leave within 2 hours of the last person’s arrival, and boat across our lake. They will be permitted to come back in the morning. Our belief is that the absurdity of this common goal will cure the “remember last year” disease, and give them plenty to talk about, have inside jokes about, or complain about as a group, regardless of how experienced they are.
