Reflections on Leadership, Evaluation, and Sparkle

In preparation for the upcoming LIT/CIT workshop that I will be facilitating along with my good friend and personal superhero Jason Smith for The Summer Camp Society, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what makes a good leadership program. It felt pretty straightforward to me. I’ve run a successful program before, and heard about countless others. Just explore the components of the programs people are proud of and compare them with the ones that are struggling to get off the ground, I thought to myself. Simple as that! But I realized that by looking at program-wide outcomes I might be missing the point. A good program isn’t defined simply by program mechanics (i.e., how many years is your program? How many weeks do they spend at camp each summer? Do you require off-season programming?), enrollment numbers, how many trainees end up on staff, or testimonials. Great programs are defined by the question every program seeks to answer, implicitly or explicitly. And that question is: how do you take any old kid from the block and build a leader?

Leadership is a difficult thing to feel as if you’ve fully, utterly grasped. How to even start? What if you were to rattle off the traits of exceptional leaders you’ve worked with? Some are kind and understanding. They walk alongside you as you struggle and as you thrive. Some leave you feeling like they are your best friend - and they may even become one! Others are sharp, driving, even cold. But they always believe that you are capable of the extraordinary. They hold you to incredibly high standards, and you find that under their tutelage, you are producing and leading in ways you never thought possible.

I’m not here to suggest any one answer (sorry if you were holding out for a magic bullet). I do not believe that there is such a thing as the platonic ideal of a leader, whether in a summer camp context or anywhere else. But I do believe in a core value that can help any individual towards their own personal ideal: the optimal version of yourself as a leader is one that is truly, authentically, and genuinely YOU.

Maybe this is obvious to some of you, but it took me a really long time to understand for myself. As an LT (leadership trainee) at YMCA Camp Minikani, the camp I went to and worked at for 19 years, we received frequent and thorough evaluation in the form of a double sided sheet of paper with anywhere from 6 - 10 categories that aimed to holistically evaluate a young leader, complete with ratings and comments. No matter how positive the overall evaluation might be, I was naturally drawn to where I needed to improve. That’s also where the bulk of conversation with my evaluator lingered. The questions we tried to answer together all focused on leadership traits where I tended to struggle (if you’re curious, 15-year-old Peter struggled most with ‘group presence’). 

The trend of focusing evaluation on areas of improvement (or deltas, as we call them at Minikani) didn’t go away as I got older and became the person facilitating evals for younger staff, or overseeing evals between counselors and trainees. I could be listening to my very best counselor evaluating my very best LT, and you’d still leave the conversation feeling like that LT had a ton of work to do. If the LT planned really fun, engaging days that weren’t overly creative, they would be asked to try something zany. If the LT made spectacular connections with campers one-on-one or in small groups, they were pushed to get loud and engage everyone.

This isn’t too surprising. When naming the purpose of evaluation, identifying ways a person can improve and singling out challenges are typically prime objectives. Still I have a hunch that a lot of us could be served by reflecting on our own process of evaluation. While our process at Minikani was really good, and really helped people identify growth areas, it implicitly assumed that you could thrive at everything. That every person could end up exceeding expectations on every variable. And that the place to start working towards your own platonic ideal was the place you are struggling.

As I spent more time in leadership at Minikani, I started to ask different questions of my staff. Sure, we always identified places staff could get better. I’m pretty confident there is always space in leadership to identify and discuss struggle. But that stopped being the core of our conversation. Instead, we talked about what made a particular person sparkle. Even if a leader was having a really tough time in nearly every part of their role at camp, there was almost always something that they felt great doing, and that other people responded to in their leadership. We spent time talking about that. And I believe that the best leaders are the ones that see where they really sparkle, and let it suffuse every part of the leadership. Instead of asking for a jack of all trades, I asked for people to be fabulously accomplished at what made them special. To take that trait and make it a superpower. In the best of times, that overwhelming sparkle proved transient. It papered over perceived flaws, or better yet it turned what had been flaws into something now irrelevant. 

Which brings me back to LIT and CIT programs. It was so easy for me as a director to see the silly things that teens do and to focus on correcting silly behaviors. And of course, I always need to remind my LTs to please remember their staff shirt, to wake up on time, and that no you cannot swear in front of the teen campers. But looking back, the moments that I think were most universally positive were the ones where an LT figured out what made them special. Because ultimately, that’s what made them great, both as a leader and as a person. And the more they sparkled, the better they felt, and the better camp became.

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Peter Drews
TSCS Facilitator
Philosopher King
peter@thesummercampsociety.com