What’s your leadership style?

This is something that I think will come up during your Adult Leadership Qualification but I think it’s worth having a think about it.

How do you lead your unit?

When I took over the local Guides back in… when was it, 2016?… the old leader said “You know you’ve made it when you’re sitting here at the leader’s table with a cup of coffee while the girls get on with their activity.” And that’s a valid style of leadership but it’s not one to which I personally aspire.

I like to be in the middle of it all. I like to be sitting at the table with my girls, making the same craft as them, except in my case I never get to finish it because I have to help with everyone else’s. I like to be the leader who’s lying on the floor being shoved around by the girls, having the face mask painted onto me. I want to be my girls’ friendly local adult, who they can trust and emulate and feel genuinely comfortable with. I know most of the other leaders in the district aren’t into that – sure, they’ll go around the tables and help where they’re needed but they don’t want to be at the table, getting the glue dripped on them and stretching for the scissors onthe other side. They’ll take the girls to the water park but they don’t want to be in the pool with them. (And that’s another valuable thing for girls to witness: adult women who aren’t Hollywood-perfect and who are not ashamed to be seen in a swimsuit in public – in an appropriate setting, obviously.)

I know there’s a line between being the competent adult and being a friend and I stay on the right side of that line but I don’t think it’s a bad thing to dance near that line. In fact, I think the position of Guiding leader gives you more licence to dance near the line. Think of “I’m not just her mum, I’m her best friend”. It’s a nice theory but you need to know that ultimately, you’re in charge and too much best-friendiness is going to diminish that thing whereby you know what’s best for her and have to come over all adult at some point. You do need to have authority over your Brownies or Guides or whatever but your authority is less absolute and it can take a bit more bending because you fulfil a completely different role in their lives.

Some leaders prefer to be a bit more elevated, to have that bit of distance and respect, to be apart from their girls and a little above them. Some leaders like to appear omniscient and omnipotent to their girls. They don’t want to admit that they don’t know everything for fear of “looking stupid”. I think one of the most important lessons a child can learn is that it’s ok to not know everything. If you think you have to know everything, you’re going to end up either making stuff up completely or taking your tiny scrap of knowledge and turning it into someone else’s gospel truth. I’m a huge fan of telling my girls (and I did it with people at work too) that I don’t know anything about that subject and if it’s really important to them, I can look up the answer and let them know next week. Sometimes I’ll take a vaguely educated guess based on something I know that’s kind of related but that disclaimer gets added to it loud and clear. I don’t want to instill into my girls that some people are better or more important than others or that it’s better to make stuff up than to admit a weak spot – that way, you end up with the kind of people who’ve shoved us into some of the political situations we’ve been in over the last ten years.

And then there’s your unit team. You have to be a leader around your adults as well as your kids. Whether you’re the main unit leader or an assistant or a unit helper or even a Young Leader, you’re all part of the unit team. Are you the CEO? Do you make all the decisions and hand them out to the others? Do you all work together? To be honest, at the moment I’m making all the decisions but then I don’t have a real second leader, only a unit helper who wanted to take a big step back from her Brown Owl days and I don’t want to pressure her too much. On the other hand, when does “not pressure too much” start to feel like “not actively encourage her input”? It’s a balancing act. But it is a unit team and you should all have a part to play somewhere.

The thing with Girlguiding is that it’s meant to be girl-led. Sure, they can’t actually lead themselves in everything – or even in anything very much – but the way I interpret that is you don’t have an all-powerful leader proclaiming that this is what shall be done and how thou shalt do it! but someone who’s just marshalling their ideas into some kind of order. Sometimes that order is “Do you think we should do it like this? Ok, let’s give that a go (as an experienced adult, I know it won’t work but you won’t learn if we don’t try it). Oh no, never mind. At least we tried it. Does anyone else have any ideas? Oh yes, let’s try that (that won’t work either).”

I think part of it is age. The older leaders would rather be a little apart from the girls. The younger ones seem more likely to get hands-on. I don’t know if that’s because we haven’t yet adapted fully from when we were one of the girls ourselves or whether different generations have different ideas about leadership or authority and the pattern isn’t 100% accurate but there does seem to be a certain amount of correlation.

When I started as a Ranger leader, I was less than four years older than my oldest girl. How could I be anything but a peer who happened to have a different coloured Promise badge? Now I know that I have Brownie parents younger than me – one of them was in my sister’s class at school so I know that one for certain – and my friends have kids who are twice the Brownies’ age. It’s entirely physically and legally possible these could be my grandchildren, age-wise, by this point. But regardless of age gap, I do try to be closer to a peer than a strict and law-abiding adult to both Rangers and Brownies. I don’t get them to do things – we do things together and sometimes they’re my idea (approved by the girls, generally) and sometimes they’re the girls’ idea and sometimes they’re joint ideas.

I have one particularly officious Brownie who will order me around a bit – “we haven’t done Brownie Bells yet!” and “You said we were getting badges tonight” and I will chuckle and occasionally I’ll salute and say “yes sir, you’re right sir, I haven’t given out the badges yet” but I don’t take offence at a ten-year-old doing that to me. I daresay there are plenty of leaders who would put her in her place. And I guess the point of this post is that it’s not always immediately obvious where her place and mine are.