We just welcomed our new Crossovers to our Troop. Those are the former Cub Scouts who, having achieved the highest rank in that organization, the Arrow of Light, have now “graduated” into Scouts BSA, and moved from their old Pack into a Troop.

As part of their welcome, a group of our adult leaders took time to describe their various roles to our new Scouts’ parents. All of those roles, mine included, had at their core the set of services each of us provides to the Troop to carry out its mission. Scouting, when operating properly, is Scout-led. Each Patrol (a group of about five to ten Scouts, usually of similar age and rank) has a Patrol Leader and Assistant Patrol Leader, and the entire Troop has a Senior Patrol Leader and Assistant Senior Patrol Leader(s). Then there are various other Scout leadership positions focused on particular functions (Quartermaster, Webmaster, and so on). Generally speaking, older Scouts who’ve been trained and learned through (sometimes harsh, but most of the time enjoyable) experiences, and who step up to leadership roles, shepherd the rest of the Troop in all our activities.

By serving those various Scout leaders, and the Scouts they lead, the adult leaders serve the whole Troop, helping it achieve its mission of “fun with a purpose.”

Nowhere in any of our adult leaders’ job descriptions is there anything resembling command or control. We guide, educate, and provide resources. Yes, as the adults responsible for youth on outings away from their parents, we assume a certain authority, but to the extent that leads to constant orders, criticism, or expectations that Scouts serve us, is also the extent to which we’ll drive Scouts away from Scouting and undermine its aims and purposes.

That’s exactly how it should be in the business world too. People are finally starting to recognize that – have you noticed the nearly constant references to “servant leadership” and accolades for folks like Simon Sinek? And yet, doesn’t a lot of it appear to be window dressing? There’s a whole bunch of patting selves on backs, and a lot of mandatory training too, but precious little actual changing of behavior that I see so far…

Think about your own leadership style. Do you think you have all the answers, or do you provide the resources for your people to reach and execute their own solutions? Do you guide, or do you direct? Is your priority developing those in your “troop,” or is it developing your own career and climbing the corporate ladder? Do you serve your people, or do you believe they serve you? When things go wrong, do you think first of who’s to blame, or do you focus on how to provide support for your people to fix the problem?

There’s a fundamental shift happening in the business world today. Where my generation and previous ones took a lot of abuse and accepted a lot of bad behavior from our bosses, young people today just don’t – and God bless them for that! They have lots of options we didn’t have, what with remote work opportunities and lots of small businesses that are actually toppling yesteryear’s seemingly indestructible corporations. They’re also more apt to simply opt out; the abandoning of company loyalty by the business leaders of recent decades has boomeranged badly, and the resulting new near-total absence of loyalty in the workforce is now a business reality that leaders grapple with in the workforce constantly. (Did superstars like Jack Welch and his emulators really think they could so completely and constantly dump on their people and that it would never come home to roost?) All that makes the changing of behaviors I mentioned earlier a business requirement, just to have a fighting chance of retaining the talent you’ve brought on board and developed. The sooner you start, the less pain you’ll have.

But there’s a much better reason for doing it. We should serve our people because it’s the right thing to do. Pretty much every company touts integrity as a core value, along with “treating people with dignity and respect,” or some variation of that. But do we really act with integrity if we belittle people, yell at them, or publicly humiliate them? No, we don’t, and we certainly fall far short of that “dignity and respect” goal.

Plus, there’s this: We aren’t the experts. The real experts are the ones closest to the work, not the ones with big titles. As leaders, we may be more experienced in general, and positioned well in that regard to guide the big picture – but we should never mistake that for the day-to-day up-close expertise that only those running our machines or doing our hands-on work quickly acquire. They’re the critical components of what we accomplish, along with their “older Scout” leaders who are hands-on right along with them. If we’re not serving those folks by providing them the resources and the guidance to deliver what we expect them to deliver, it’s time we found something else to do.

Nobody, Scout or adult worker, should have to put up with childish behavior from supposed leaders. I’m pretty sure that if I start throwing abuse at my new Crossovers, their time in my Troop will be very short indeed. That would be just plain stupid of me, wouldn’t it? And yet we still see it in the business world pretty routinely. Why?

Y’know what? Business should be “fun with a purpose” too.