About Wood Badge

This presentation was given at the November 6, 2010 Wood Badge breakfast.  It's designed to help you understand how Wood Badge serves as a leadership training program that you can use in every phase of your life: work, home, Scouting, community.

The Wood Badge course will help you focus on effective techniques to be the best leader you can be.

You start by finding your inner self; knowing your strengths, your talents and where you want to improve.

As a leader in your Scouting unit, your family, your work and your life, there's many paths that often tug at you, and you have to make choices based on your values, vision and mission in life.

Only you can find the best way to your own personal success.  But the Wood Badge course offers many skill development opportunities to help you succeed.

Team building is a big part of Wood Badge.  Teams develop based on storming, norming, conforming, and performing.  You will go through each of these stages during the course.

Mastering human interaction is a big part of Wood Badge.  You need to ask yourself, "how effective am I at getting my message across."

God gave us two ears and one mouth, and we learn that listening skills involves using that 2:1 proportion to effectively communicate with others.

Teamwork and leadership includes setting goals and working as a group to reach the mountaintop.

For many people, their greatest fear is talking in front of a group... a very improtant leadership skill.  At Wood Badge, you develop skills to help you be more confident in your group communciation abilities.

You learn to be a good mentor and coach, and to often ask questions to elicit ideas from others.

You learn project planning techniques, and how to engage others as active stakeholders, who work together to fulfill the group's shared vision.

Communication is a never ending process.  By learning more about the people you lead, and their needs, ideas and opinions, you will be a more effective leader.

Whenever people gather, conflict is a possibility.  At Wood Badge you learn conflict resolution techniques, and ways to engage others to reduce conflict situations.

Positive results can come out of conflict, and it can be a WIN-WIN situation for all involved, if you are sensitive and respectful to others.  At Wood Badge you gain leadership tools to help you more effectively deal with individuals.

By reaching out to others who are different than you, you can get new ideas, new energy and new results.  We are all different and all have different experiences and skills.  At Wood Badge, we learn that an effective leader is like a good orchestra conductor, bringing in everyone's different skills and blending them together.

When the best and the brightest come together, the possibilities are endless.  Wood Badge is a great training model for you to experience this with your Wood Badge patrol.  From there, you can take this idea and use it in every phase of your life.

In Scouting, we say "it's all for the boys."  As a servant leader, you should lead, by serving others.  Servant leadership is constantly stressed in Wood Badge.

As servant leaders, we need to work to nuture each individual, to help them grow strong and productive.  By doing so, we will leave a legacy in Scouting and our life, because they will, in their own way, carry on our vision, when we have moved on to other things.  This keeps the Spirit of Scouting strong and alive.

Right now, we might be at A, but if we are working to leave a legacy, our Scouting unit might grow in accomplishments to D, and after we move on, the Scouters we have coached will continue to make accomplishments, based upon the sustainable foundations we put into place.

Throughout the world, Scouters wear the Wood Badge neckerchief and beads, passed down from Lord Robert Baden-Powell, when he established the Wood Badge course, to provide training to Scouters at the Gilwell Training Center.  Once you've completed the Wood Badge course and finished your tickets as the practical application of knowledge, you will be recognized with these symbols of your leadership skill.