The interpersonal domain

The interpersonal domain of one of the domains used in instructional design. The other three are cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains.

It seems that because leadership is interpersonal that this domain applies well.

Seeking or giving information	Asking for or giving explanations, facts, or other supplemental information from or to other individuals
Proposing	To formally put forward an idea
Building and Supporting	To further a project as a member of a team; to provide positive feedback; to assist another person toward accomplishing a collective goal
Shutting out or Bringing in	Excluding or involving members of a group or team in the exchange of ideas both verbal and written
Disagreeing	Having a contradictory opinion
Summarizing	To provide an abbreviated version of the original content

I just learned where the Woodbadge leadership principles came from

My Dad got his woodbadge award as a Scouting leader. As an adult I was flipping through his old materials and found the leadership principles taught at woodbadge.

I thought they were great.

* Getting and Giving Information
* Understanding Group Needs and Characteristics
* Knowing and Understanding Group Resources
* Controlling the Group
* Counseling
* Setting the Example
* Representing the Group
* Planning
* Evaluation
* Sharing Leadership
* Manager of Learning

Then this week I discovered that the BSA adopted them from www.whitestag.org. I was going through the white stag site and thought they had borrowed from the BSA. But on reading their history page

Natural Consequences Versus Coaching and Correcting

The scouts are preparing for a 50-mile hike. We went on a practice hike this week with them. The scoutmaster has gotten caught up in the economic downturn and can't spend as much time as he otherwise would. So the adults that can take the week off to go on this 50-mile hike went with the kids on this practice hike. They seem to lean more to natural consequences rather than coaching and correcting. Don't get me wrong, they will inspect the kids gear a few days before the trip, they will bring backup first aid gear, etc. They just see this as an opportunity for these young men to learn.

Although this may scare some in our litigious society, consider that native American tribes often sent boys this age into the woods for their rites of passage or test of manhood. Ages 12-17 are good ages for high adventure.

The troop I was in as a scout had 40 boys and 5 assistant scout masters. That troop gave out packing lists, then had a back pack inspection to be sure each person had all they needed. Then we went. That troop erred on the side of too much coaching and correcting, perhaps, but we still had one boy forget the food he was supposed to bring and another forget the cooking utensils he was supposed to bring. I don't remember being too worried about any of the logistics until we all discovered the utensils missing. Then we carved some sticks and used those instead. It was more about the adventure of it all, as I recall. One kid fell into a stream and got his clothing soaked. A fire dried his stuff out with only a few hours delay.

This troop has about 12 scouts going on the trip with two adult leaders on the hike and 2 more meeting them at two places on the route. They tend more towards natural consequences than my boyhood troop did.

So as the boys, as typical boys, seem to not pay attention to the packing list during the practice hike the consequences were minor because it was in town. One boy had a pack that was half his body weight. Another had hardly anything in it. No worries, because they were home in a few hours that night.  However, when they leave on the 50-miler, they will drive multiple hours away and be gone for a week.

So is it better to let them learn by natural consequences should they forget things? Well, there seems to be some degree of learning by natural consequences no matter how much you try to help prepare them. The scout motto, Be Prepared, is sometimes thought through more than other times. Also part of scouting is to learn some of these things by your own experience. My own experiences in Scouting taught me much by mistakes, both in stuff to take and in leadership gaffes. We can then apply those lessons for the remainder of our lives.

So I think the boundary to allowing natural consequence is the boy's safety. They seem safe so far. They are buying the food today and will split it up Wed night at the scout meeting. It is mostly dry and dehydrated foods for such a long hike. They have been told repeatedly to not bring just cotton socks, but some of them may learn by the blisters they get about that choice. The leaders will have a first aid kit with moleskin inside to aid those painful blisters. Some blisters are inevitable on a hike this long anyway. It is a great personal learning opportunity for each young man. They get to develop their own experiences and live with the consequences of their own choices.

They will be at 6,000 to 8,000 feet in elevation, so cold could be a problem, but it is July. It only drops down to 34 degrees F (1 deg C) at night where they are going.  This morning, in early July it was 44 degrees F (6 deg C) and we live about 40 minutes drive from the mountains.

Some of what we learn best in life is by the mistakes we make. For me it was easier to take the consequence to an action than to hear a well-intentioned adult tell me "I told you so." I think learning by mistakes is the purpose of the U.S. Army's National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California too. They want the mistakes to be made in a "safe" environment so lessons are learned without injury of loss of life and less mistakes are made in real operations. So for these boys, there are safety backups with the adults, but the prevailing philosophy in Scouting's guided learning is to let the boys lead and coach as needed. Natural consequences are excellent teachers and not soon forgotten.

So when tempted to over-correct and to "ensure a perfect trip" consider how that approach could lead to less engagement and less opportunity for people to learn for themselves. If there is significant danger, then a firmer approach may be warranted. Give the benefit of the doubt to letting the natural consequences do the teaching where possible. Quietly have backup, first aid, or other reserve resources as necessary or prudent. This generation needs to learn some of these lessons too. We adults developed our own heuristics or rules of thumb for succeeding at various endeavors. Our job as leaders is not to ensure they get the activity 100% correct, but rather to set up opportunities for learning and discussion of those lessons (reflection). When they learn for themselves, they build a portfolio of experiences that allows them to get to the next level of success at their next, more challenging endeavor. Allowing natural consequences gives them space to make significant choices and live with the impact.

Personal experiences distilled into nuggets versus large-scale studies and citations

Some authors make their case for evidence-based advice and sound research. I appreciate it where I can find it. I also submit that personal experience is an additional form of evidence.

Some replies to my posts have asked for citations about me adding my opinions. My life experiences have informed my current way of thinking and it continues to change. I am not in the business of doing academic studies at this stage of life. I am living it and trying to teach my own kids to do it too.

Those that find a ring of truth in what I say are welcome to use it. Those that think I am way off base, are free to ignore what I say and follow their own opinions. I am open and constantly looking for what works in life, whether it is researched and cited or just off the top of someone's head.

I often form a hypothesis about a particular leadership idea, test it and let the results I observe inform whether that idea or method goes into my leadership toolbox or not. My results are within my own sphere of influence and are necessarily limited. I have conducted many such 'experiments' in the 'laboratories' of organizations whether volunteers or paid. I have been in organizational leadership roles for years and have tested much. Leadership is a big subject and has many situational variances, so not all ideas apply in all situations, but as I have searched for truths that transfer across specific situational boundaries and applied the knowledge I have found some things more effective than other things. This is what I hope to share over time. Some of my posts will be less useful than others, I'm sure.

Documenting fully with statistically valid sample data sets is for others to do. The children are growing too quickly for that full process right now. For now, I am time constrained. So I'm not opposed to the research of others, I just don't have the time to be as rigorous in my own experiments.

12 ways of leader thinking - does this apply to kids? Some of it.

There was an interesting post in the Harvard Business Review called 12 Things Good Bosses Believe.

It lists 12 ways of leader thinking that are in addition to skill and knowledge.

To try to put it in terms older children may better understand, I will modify his 12 a bit. Most kids leadership is not based on organizational position, and even when it is, it is more strongly affected by interpersonal influence.

   1.  I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to be led or influenced by me.
   2. My success — and that of followers — depends largely on being the master of obvious and mundane things, not on magical, obscure, or breakthrough ideas or methods.
   3. Having ambitious and well-defined goals is important, but don't focus so much on them that you forget to encourage small wins that help people to make a little progress every day. This is how you get to the goal together.
   4. One of the most important, and most difficult, parts of my leader role is to strike the delicate balance between being too assertive and not assertive enough. This takes time to get right.
   5. Sometimes I have to keep my followers focused when other things distract or affect them.
   6. I strive to be confident enough to convince people that I can lead, but humble enough to realize that I am often going to be wrong.
   7. I may need to convince others I am right, and also listen as if I am wrong. As I get better at leadership, I teach followers to do the same thing.
   8. One of the best tests of my leadership — and my group — is "what happens after people make a mistake?"
   9. Part of my role is to encourage followers to generate and test all kinds of new ideas. Then I help to winnow the many down to the few we can or should do. This means dropping the bad ideas and most of the good ideas, too.
  10. It is important to eliminate the negative and to accentuate the positive.
  11. How I do things is as important as what I do.
  12. Because I lead, I am at great risk of acting like an insensitive jerk — and not realizing it.

With kids, it may be more feasible to ask them to watch for manifestations of these beliefs in leaders within their sphere of influence such as teachers, coaches, youth group leaders, parents, friends parents, and so on. Then after letting them share what they have noticed, ask what they plan to do when they lead or influence. This is more sowing stage than reaping stage with children, in my opinion.

The Leader in Me - Seven Habits for Kids

So we've kept it to one of Stephen Covey's habits per week because we want to keep their attention for 20 minutes. We have been pleasantly surprised at how much of it the children take in. It seems to have helped the teenager's perspective a bit and the younger children seem to take as much in as they understand.

Some weeks we have not gotten back to it due to all the other things going on in life, but it has worked out well so far. We're up to habit 5.

Watching 12 and 13 year old boys plan a campout

In Boy Scouts a few weeks back, the challenge to the youth was to plan the menus for their camp out later that month. It was really entertaining to watch the back and forth as some offered really complicated meals, but when the duty roster for clean up was worked on, the menu changed to less complicated meals too.

This is worth seeing!

1. The Youtube video I'm linking you to is a great talk about motivation that applies to kids just as well as adults. It is aimed at leaders of organizations, but it is a good talk of itself. The subject is about reward systems and how the science shows that pay for performance works mostly with physical skills, but with cognitive skills it doesn't work as many think. The focus instead is autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

2. The person who did the video based on the talk edited their cartoon drawings to match the speaker's voice and timing. What an engaging method of delivering information! My kids might even watch something like this and get something from it. It is like a mind map happening at speaking-speed (from the viewer's perspective).

The Leader In Me

After reading a book called "The Leader in Me" by Stephen R. Covey about elementary schools teaching the seven habits to five year olds and reading of the success they were having with elementary grades I remembered that I had read his 7-Habits of Highly Effective People back in 1991 and thought well of it. The stories of teachers and principles working together to teach leadership to elementary aged children inspired me to develop such a program for our home as a means of teaching my children leadership.

So I put together power point slides and we had a family meeting. We only were able to cover the introductory materials because we try to keep these meetings to 20 minutes because they have homework and other responsibilities too. The paradigm shifting stories were well received. They seem to be OK with learning the material. We had our 18 year old, our 16 year old, our 14 year old, our 9 year old, and our 5 year old around the table with a 28 year old guest too. It seemed to go over well. I gave them a hand out of the elementary school version of the 7-habits because the language is more to the point and clear without business jargon for the kids to stumble over. We'll see how this goes. So far, so good.

I watched a Conductor lead 95 kids in amazing music

In March, on of our daughters had two Japanese students stay with us for a week. It was great to see them absorb how different their cultures are from one another. Anyway, the Japanese band students and the US band students practiced together with American conductor Robert W. Smith. When the evening came for all the community to go see the joint Japanese-American concert, it was fascinating to watch Mr. Smith lead the 95 members of the band in amazing renditions. The way he asked for more from certain sections of musicians with body language and the way they responded and the wonderful music was a wonderful example of leadership in action.