Do the right thing!

"Management is doing things right;

leadership is doing the right things."

-   Peter F. Drucker

I AM a fan of Peter Drucker! Vivian Clecak, CEO of Human Options, is a graduate of the Drucker School, and she truly inspires the board and her staff to always do the right things.

I think that’s also what we want to encourage our Gold Award girls to do:  the right thing.  Learn what issue they are most passionate about.  Delve into the topic, use their community mapping skills to research, then reach out into the community for an organization which can benefit from their work.  This is using leadership and independent thinking.

Management comes in as they put the whole project together:  when to meet, who to solicit to help, where to stage the activities, what will be needed and finally, how it’s all going to come together. That’s managing and doing things right using the girl-led, cooperative learning skills that we teach and encourage. 

Leadership is about keeping focused on the goal or the issue!  It’s about gathering a team and leading the charge!  Being passionate about the issue and having that be contagious, catching others to help support the girl and her project.

Both management and leadership require skills!  And as advisors, we need to help the girls develop these skills, and support them as they go out to do their “right things.”

Peter Drucker knows all

“Peter Drucker once said that the biggest curse a company can have is twenty years of success. It's true. Managers of successful firms tend to become complacent and even arrogant, assuming that past performance will continue....”

I read this quote in the HuffPost, and it struck me. Here we are with Girl Scouts:  turning 100 next year.  We’ve had national level challenges over the years, and we have not remained complacent, as we have reinvented all or part of ourselves over the years.  This last transformation being the Girl Scout Leadership Experience that we are in the midst of now.

Change is hard!  And I recall the first training I went to in GSLE:  even the trainers said it was horrible!!!!  It was a new language with new expectations that were waaaay different from my remembrances of being a girl in my Scout troops.  And sure enough, there was a part of me that said, well, it was good for me, and I turned out okay, so it should be good enough for all these girls, now, too.  (Yes, I know better!)

And the Gold Award Program is changing for the better!  While we still have girls working on the old Go For It! Gold requirements, by far, we are seeing more girls getting ready for the Journey Gold Path.  And it’s very exciting to see!

Yes, this transition has it’s bumpy parts, and yes, we leaders/advisors/

guides are sometimes waaay slower to change than the girls. But change we must to avoid the curse of stagnancy and complacency!  Truly, we are working on a local level to help move the GS movement forward on a national level.

And that’s a pretty humble way to go.