NOLS Leadership Skills: Competence

Rich being joyfully competent in the kitchen. 

Rich can cook up a storm.  He's not even a professional chef.  He doesn't even have to be at his Minnesota home in the kitchen.  Take him outside, throw some wholesome ingredients at him, and, "Voila!"  We're chowing down in style.  We're talking about competence as a leadership skill and competence comes in many bits and pieces.

Just as Sir Earnest Shackleton knew the importance of having the right cook on the Endurance, setting your team up to eat healthy -- and hearty -- is good leadership, great group management, and the greatest camp food you'll ever munch on.  Everything tastes better outside, ya?

Okay, let's get our bearings with a quick review of the NOLS 4/7/1 Leadership Model.  Leadership, you will recall, is "situationally appropriate action that directs or guides your group to set and achieve goals."  To teach leadership to its students, NOLS uses a framework of four leadership roles, seven leadership skills, and one (your own) signature style.  When it comes to cooking in camp, Rich has style.  In the graphic below, where the three spheres of skills, roles and style overlap is where you are meeting your leadership opportunities.  The roles are four functions, or "hats" you can wear to help your team reach its goals.  

The seven skills are an integrated system of competencies -- like cooking! -- you can continually develop and improve.  Your signature style is how these fit together for you.  Rich walks the walk. 

Competence includes action to:

• take care of your personal maintenance needs to remain a highly functioning team member.  Take care of yourself.  Set yourself up for success.  

• display basic proficiency and actively improve your knowledge, organization and management skills, technical skills, and physical abilities, to name a few.  Growth mindset!   You can always improve your competence.  Outdoor ed is a killer classroom because the consequences are real, immediate, and impossible to ignore.  Skill mastery, or craftsmanship -- excuse me, craft (to be gender neutral, and with a nod to Outward Bound) is key to competency.  Attention to detail, healthy pride in your work, and satisfaction in a job well done: all of these inform competence.  

• set goals, make action plans, and follow through.  We'll talk more about goal setting later.  It can be as simple as grabbing the superior NOLS Cookery cook book and creating your own NOLS Gold (ultimately).  

Note: This is the fifth in an occasional series on leadership, drawing from the NOLS Leadership Education Notebook. The National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) is a non-profit outdoor education school based in the United States dedicated to teaching environmental ethics, technical outdoors skills, wilderness medicine, risk management and judgment, and leadership on extended wilderness expeditions and in traditional classrooms.