Scout leader one day, manager always?
Scouting helps develop skills that can be useful to executives and business leaders.
“Organization, autonomy, resourcefulness, team spirit are some of the skills that scouting helps to develop as a patrol leader, and which reminds those of managers in the exercise of their function.” – Chris Blaser
The Swiss Scout Movement currently has 48,000 members. This is without counting all those who have been in the past, in their youth. Cumulated, the number of scouts (current and former) must be much greater in our country.
So, of course, we all know someone who is or has been a Scout. This can be the case in particular in his professional environment; a colleague, a department head or a company manager. It wouldn’t be surprising if one or more of our superiors were. Indeed, scouting allows, in addition to acquiring practical skills (such as making a fire, pitching a tent, building a shelter with branches or carrying first aid), when one is in charge of a patrol, to develop “managerial” skills, which can be useful later in professional life, in managerial functions. This is the opinion of executives or directors of companies that we interviewed.
“Valuable skills” on a daily basis “As a scout leader, you have to be autonomous and organized, know how to lead a patrol, manage various activities and providing stewardship, but also knowing how to show resourcefulness, flexibility and agility in the face of unforeseen circumstances ”, explains Dominique Gros, financial director of Kelly Services for Switzerland, Italy and Hungary, and who has was a scout from the age of 7 to 20 under the totem pole (scout nickname) of “Koala”, then a patrol leader from the age of 14. The leader recognizes that these skills, in addition to the values of Scouting, including team spirit, camaraderie and mutual aid, have been “precious” to him and are, even today, “useful in everyday life”. in its function.
Director of the Pangolina textile design company based in Pully (VD), scout from the age of 14 and patrol leader until the age of 20, Eleonora Paradies confirms. “When we take care of young people who are from different cultures and religions, as is sometimes the case in the scout movement, we must show pedagogy, psychology, sociability, listening, empathy, adaptation and consensus. It was useful to me in Scouting at the time. It was also profitable for me later in my professional life, as much with the collaborators who were under my responsibility in the departments that I managed in different companies, as with the customers of the company that I founded ” , she adds.