~by Haley Lynn Gray~
For a stretch of years I led three Girl Scout troops at the same time, alongside a full-time job and four children.
People assumed that was the part of my life with nothing to do with business. It turned out to be the best leadership training I’ve had, including a Duke MBA. Here’s why.
You can’t fire a volunteer
In a business, however gently you lead, there’s authority underneath it. People are paid. There are consequences.
A troop has none of that. The girls are there because they want to be, the parents who help are volunteering their evenings, and if either decides it isn’t worth it, they simply stop coming. You have no lever to pull.
Which means everything has to work through influence. You have to make the thing worth showing up for, make people feel their contribution matters, and make the expectations clear enough that nobody’s left guessing.
That turns out to be what good leadership in a small business looks like anyway — the authority is there, but the people doing their best work are the ones who want to be there. Leading volunteers just removes the option of pretending otherwise.
Break the big thing into pieces a twelve-year-old can start
I once guided a group of teenagers through a Silver Award project that required around fifty hours of work each. Fifty hours, to a teenager, is roughly infinity.
Presented as fifty hours, it wouldn’t have happened. Broken into pieces small enough to begin on a Tuesday evening, it did.
That’s the whole of how large things get done, in a troop or a company. The instinct is to present the goal. The skill is presenting the next step — one small enough that starting it requires no courage at all.
The quiet ones have the best ideas
Every troop has a few girls who talk constantly and a few who barely speak. Left alone, the loud ones set the direction for everyone.
The quiet ones frequently had better ideas and simply needed a different way in — being asked directly, having time to think first, being able to write something down rather than announce it to a room.
Most meetings in most businesses run the same way. The person who speaks first and loudest shapes the outcome, and the best thinking in the room goes unheard. Asking the quiet person first is a small change that consistently improves decisions.
Let them get it wrong
This was the hardest lesson, and it’s the one that applies most directly to owners.
When a group of girls is organising something and doing it badly, every instinct says to step in and fix it. It would be quicker, and it would be better.
But if I fixed it, they learned nothing except that the adult would take over. If I let them run into the problem — safely, with a debrief afterwards — they learned more in that one failure than in weeks of being told.
That’s precisely the tension in delegating at work. Taking back the task you delegated feels responsible and teaches everyone that you’ll always take it back. The discipline is letting people struggle with something they can recover from.
Plan for two things going wrong at once
We took one of my troops to a water park. It should have been an easy, happy day.
One of the girls broke her leg. Not long after, another went down with heat exhaustion. Suddenly there were two girls who each needed an adult’s full attention — one heading for medical care, one needing to be cooled down and watched closely — and a whole troop of other girls who still needed supervising in a water park.
We were juggling like mad. We got through it, and everyone was fine. But I learned something that day that I’ve never forgotten.
I now take at least three adults on every trip, and preferably four. Not because I expect something to go wrong. Because when something does, it’s frequently not one thing — and one crisis is enough to absorb one adult completely.
That’s the lesson, and it applies directly to running a business: most businesses are staffed for the average day. They have exactly enough people and capacity for things going to plan. Then a key person is ill in the same week a big client has an emergency, and there’s nobody left to handle anything else.
The useful question isn’t “what if something goes wrong?” It’s “what if two things go wrong at the same time?” That’s the scenario that actually breaks small businesses, and it’s the one almost nobody plans for.
Which means cover, cross-training so more than one person can do each critical job, a little slack in the schedule, and not being the only person who can handle anything important. It looks inefficient right up until the day it isn’t.
“Be prepared” is mostly about the boring parts
The Girl Scout motto sounds grand. In practice it meant permission slips, allergy lists, medical consent forms, backup plans for rain, and someone who knew exactly where the first aid kit was.
Nothing glamorous. But after the water park, I understood why the boring preparation matters so much: it’s what lets you handle the chaos when it arrives, instead of adding to it by searching for a phone number.
Running a business is the same. Most of good leadership is maintenance — the unexciting work that means the exciting parts don’t turn into emergencies.
You’re always being watched
Girls notice everything. How you speak to the parent who’s late. What you do when a plan falls apart. Whether you keep the promises you make.
They don’t learn much from what you tell them about character. They learn from what they watch you do on a bad day.
Your team is doing exactly the same thing. How you treat the people with no power over you is the lesson they’re actually taking.
It came back around
One more thing, which I didn’t expect.
Being known in the community as a troop leader brought me clients. Not because I pitched anyone — I never did — but because the parents I worked alongside knew what I did for a living and had watched how I handled responsibility. That’s the most credible form of visibility there is.
And watching one of my own daughters go on to earn the Gold Award, the highest honour in Girl Scouting, remains one of the proudest things I’ve been close to.
If you’re ever offered the chance to lead volunteers — a troop, a board, a committee, a school project — take it. You’ll learn things about leadership that a paid team will never teach you, because a paid team lets you get away with more.
