The Raccoon Patrol: Lessons in Leadership

Do you recall the New York Times? #1 best seller by Robert Fulghum,?All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten??So simple and yet so profound. And a good measure of its wisdom was reflected in its simplicity. Taking a cue from Robert Fulghum and keeping it simple:

When I was twelve years old, I was offered my first formal leadership opportunity. I was challenged to lead and grow a new patrol within my then Boy Scout troop. I had reached a rank - earned enough merit badges - that finally warranted a promotion.??And in good form each of the standing three patrols were directed to transfer two of their members respectively to seed this new patrol. Kids being kids, I was offered those that were the least engaged, the least fun, the most reserved, and the most disconnected. I understood them because I was one of them. I was “promoted” because I had earned a rank higher than my own patrol leader at the time. I was not one of the cool kids. I was a skinny geeky kid.

So what did we do that led to us to a rank of #1 in our troop and in our district in less than six months – with the most activities and most merit badges earned over that period? I’ve listed the five steps / lessons below (and just to be clear, we weren’t reading books on leadership at that age, we were still mastering two syllable words, let alone three, four or five syllable words; we were just playing nice together, not hitting each other, cleaning up our messes….)

1.?????Name our patrol.?Little did we know as we toyed with various names for our new patrol that we were engaged in establishing an identity – who we were and what we stood for. We came up with the “Racoon” patrol for a couple of reasons. Racoons were generally loners, looked like outlaws with their masks, and were scrappy. That felt like us. We were the troop’s outcasts; we would get scrappy to achieve respect and we would operate self-sufficiently.?

2.?????Set some goals. While discussing our vision we inherently considered some goals. We wanted to be the best in our troop. Frankly, we didn’t look any farther than that. And to be best I went to our troop leader asking what it would take. His advice was simply, do a lot of fun things, earn the most merit badges, do some community work and get bigger. Sounded good to us. And while we didn’t really know how many fun things we would need to do, or how many merit badges the other patrols were earning our how many members we would need to recruit, we simply decided that we would do the most we could do, be our best and either it was good enough or it wasn’t but we felt if we did our best, it would be enough. And in answering the question of our best, we decided we would meet weekly as a patrol, read a book a week, go camping, hiking or fishing as a group once per month, and target two merit badges each per month. Pretty ambitious all in all.

3.?????Make a plan.?Interestingly, our goals set the stage for our plan. Selecting a goal to meet weekly was an element of our plan. What we needed only to do was to pick which day worked best and put in place a process to move this date if we needed to. Agreeing to read a book a week and share with the group at our patrol meeting, we only needed to decide which book. This we left to each member although we asked each member to name the book they were going to read in the coming week. Next we sat down and looked through all the merit badges and asked ourselves which we could earn, would be fun earning and could help each other earn. We listed a number of activities we thought could be fun and could be counted in pursuit of our merit badges such as go camping, hiking and fishing together, and clean up local parks and school playgrounds. And, aligning our activities with the merit badges we could pursue and complete was an efficient use of our time. I can’t recall the word efficient in our vocabulary, but it was the best use of our time.??. All we needed to do was decide which activity we would do each month and then assign out the planning for each activity to a pair of members to plan in a more detailed manner.?

4.?????Do stuff.?This is self-explanatory. We had to hold ourselves accountable to do stuff – execute our plan. And we tracked what stuff we did against what we set out to do. We didn’t understand you get what you measure, we just measured. But most important - we did stuff, we took action. AT some point, the planning ends and the execution begins. And when one of our camping trips was cut short because our chaperon had a family emergency, we adapted. We packed up, went home and replanned other stuff and did that.

5.?????Find more members.?Lastly, we recognized that we needed to recruit new members. We collectively agreed that each member would target recruiting three more members in the next six months. We targeted three with hopes of netting two. We all were army brats and we had long ago learned that we would on average relocate every three years so some of us would likely move in the next six months so while we were adding members, we were also losing members. We needed to recruit at a rate that led to a net growth of 100%. And we looked among our friends in our neighborhoods and schools for individuals who would make us better than we were.

And so many years hence and having managed so many teams small and large and these five steps / lessons are as relevant now as they were then.