Matt Collins shares his discovery that being recognized for your work isn’t always a good feeling.
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In my teenage years, I had the great pleasure of working as a camp counselor during the summers—a job I would go back to in a heartbeat if the pay was a smidgen higher. I loved being outdoors, staying active and serving as a mentor to children. And, though many people think of it as a thankless job (here’s my child, bring him back at the end of the week, preferably no broken bones), I found it to be very rewarding. My co-counselors and I frequently received thank you notes, hugs from kids, even a few awkward “I love you’s”… and to top it off, each week at our staff meeting, the counselors for a particular group of kids would be designated “Counselors of the Week.” As simple a gesture as it was, this was something the competitor in me strove for. I believed in what I was doing, I put in the effort, and in both of my first two summers my team received the “Counselors of the Week” award early on in the summer.
Then came year number three. I was a team leader now, responsible for all of the 7-year-old boys at the camp with two full-time assistants plus intermittent helpers. I knew how the camp worked, I knew the kids and their parents, and I knew what it took to be a great counselor. Unfortunately, I had a few blind spots as well.
My co-counselors were not on the list.
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Towards the end of the season, my team sat with the 36 campers we were responsible for, listening to the Friday morning announcements. One of those announcements would be the Counselors of the Week, and our kids were really gunning for us. I had never gone so many weeks without winning, and I was a bit apprehensive, but thankfully my name was the first one they read, and I exhaled a huge sigh of relief. The kids were ecstatic. Then they read the next name. It was the name of the team leader for the 8-year-old boys.
My co-counselors were not on the list.
I was mortified. This was my first leadership role ever, and I had received credit without my team getting any recognition at all. I felt embarrassed–even a bit ashamed–and the award became virtually meaningless to me. My assistant counselors were visibly disappointed. It was the first time any of us had seen the designation given to part but not all of a team of counselors, which made it feel even worse for everyone involved. I was quick to reassure my colleagues that they played an equally important role in the lives of our campers, and I expressed my personal disappointment that they did not receive the award and commiserated with their feelings, but I knew that couldn’t fix my error. Somewhere along the way I had failed to help them shine, and I couldn’t go back and change that.
I delegated more, relinquished control, and expressed gratitude.
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Needless to say, the final weeks of the summer looked a bit different for our group. I delegated more, relinquished control, and expressed gratitude. The dynamics of how we went about our work shifted. While there had never been any hard feelings, I believe that shift helped us recover a bit of the mutual pride in our work that had been lost.
Despite my blind spot in recognizing my co-workers at camp, I–no, WE–did get one thing right: every day we recorded “Gentleman Points” for good behavior, and at the end of each week we awarded exceptional campers with a “Gentleman of the Week” certificate, celebrating their accomplishment at following the rules and being nice to their fellow campers and staff. I know that at least one of those 7-year-old campers has held onto their award even though he is now learning to drive, and my hope is that our recognition of his manners in the past propelled him to pursue gentlemanly behavior today–a much better prospect than having left my colleagues behind.
I’m grateful for this early lesson I received in sharing recognition; it’s an experience that has shaped how I approach working with others ever since.
This article first appeared on O.C. Tanner’s blog under the title Lessons from Summer Camp: We, Not Me.
Photo Credit: Arup Malakar/flickr
I agreed that the too much competitive nature of the human race has proven to often to be destructive to society when you look at the unregulated capitalism for the last 35 years.