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Anthony Berger

Anthony Berger
Member since : Apr-02-2009 (Verified)
2 Ideas, 2 Comments, 21 Votes

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Ideas Posted

33
All council or district commissioners to add a focus to the unit commissioners focus. To be viewed by all Unit Commissioners.
Moderator Comments
10/28/2009
From: Marty Walsh/Tom Ritchey

This idea is already on the list of enhancements for UVTS. Thank you for your submission.
There are great resources and training put into the development, retention, and growth of our executive staff yet there is very little for local council support staff.

In every local council the support staff play a key role in the success of a council. Executives come and go but it seems that support staff have a much longer tenure in their position and interact with volunteers from all over. A high performing council has a strong executive staff and support staff. In larger council's the office manager who oversees the support staff may have the largest number of direct reports but has little or no BSA leadership or management training. Although you can send an office manager to FTSLO or PM this seems like success by accident and not by design.

Most executives do not have experience managing support staff until they become Scout Executive. How to effectively manage support staff, proper support staff flow chart, and best practices are currently no where in our Talent Management system.

Develop a training track for support staff that would include job skill development such as use of MS Outlook and Office, customer service, the role of district executives and basic district and council operations.

Something that would give local councils a way to improve and build a high performing support staff, including best practices from local councils. A tool for local councils to evaluate the structure of their support staff to evaluate effeciency, mode, and performance.

A first generation of this could be as simple as an on-line training video for support staff on basic district and council operations and customer service.

Training for FTSEO and Senior Leadership that talks about support staff managment and development. Right now we are not successful with half of our staff by design, we are perhaps successful by accident. A design for success with our support staff who are the backbone of our organization.
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Comments Posted

Anthony Berger 2 months ago
-How about a membership conference for volunteers held in different parts of the country. We do finance, Key 3, 100th anniversary, and even marketing summits but no membership summit. It seems that our concern over membership is only lip service when you look at what we acutually do from the top down to engage volunteers in membership. It would be interesting to do several membership summits around the country to engage our council/district/unit level leadership to see how they would fix the problem. Similar to the process that was used to develop the 100th Anniversay celebration.

-Use the Natoinal Jamboree to get ideas and suggestions from Scouts and leaders on how they would get more youth into Scouting.

-Ask this same question to volunteers in a email survey. It seems that we are even excluding volunteers from being part of solving this problem right now. This site is only for staff. Once again we are trying to solve the problem on our own. Simply put we don't have the answer and we have to be OK with that.

- This year prior to Cub Scout School Nights we held a meeting with pack leadership from around the council and instead of giving the membership plan we asked their input. Then we informed them they could conduct their own school night and they were shocked. Having a one size fits all membership plan can't work for the diverse communities we serve. Each plan should be tailored to that specfic unit and community. We are getting good results so far but more importantly when unit volunteers are happy the program is better and kids stay in.
Anthony Berger 7 months ago
These topics and how people relate to them are found in their faith. I think that P.R.A.Y. and the religious emblems cover these topics well enough.