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25 is the magic number
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Do you know how car insurance rates drop when you turn 25? Why that’s the moment an insurance company decides you are a fully formed adult who can drive a car safely enough to not charge you an arm and a leg? It is worth thinking about this when you are looking at your staff. That drop is not arbitrary. The actuarial nerds at the insurance company are not guessing. They have decades of crash data showing the brain piloting the car at 21 is meaningfully different from the brain piloting the same car at 26. So your premium drops. The myth and science have long been debated on this topic. Many still believe that around 25, on a biological level, the prefrontal cortex finishes coming online. That is the part of your brain handling risk assessment, long-term planning, and impulse control. It starts wiring around age 12 and doesn’t finish up until your mid-20s. Which means the 19, 20, or 21-year-old standing in front of you in a counselor t-shirt is still under construction. Camp says it is in the youth development business. The campers count, obviously. The staff count too. Adolescence does not end the day someone signs a camp hiring contract and gives you their social security number. The brain runs through three states as it builds. Survival state in the toddler years, when the only question is “Am I safe?” Emotional development state through elementary school, when the question is “Am I loved?” Executive development state, the long one. It runs from 12 until around 25. The question becomes, “Can I figure this out and make a plan?” That last state is still wiring well into the years your staff is working summers for you. Remember how your feedback might make staff crumble? This is part of why. If a 19-year-old does not feel safe in the conversation or cared about by the person delivering it, the executive part of their brain does not get to drive. The emotional state takes the wheel. And the conversation goes off the road. Once you know this, the leadership move is simple. Stop saying things to your staff implicitly. Start saying them out loud. “We want to take care of you the same way you're going to take care of the kids.” Say that to your staff this week. Mean it. Then go do it. This is not about lowering the bar. Your staff can run a great cabin, hold a high standard, and also be 21 and still developing. Both can be true. The car insurance company already figured this out. The camps that figure it out next are the ones whose best staff stay on the road with them. Sincerely, Senior Consultant at Immersive1st Learn more about Immersive1st's Approach |
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We dropped both of my daughters at camp last week. The 10-year-old was going for the first time. The 13-year-old was going for summer number three. If you asked last week which one would have more nerves, would have said the 10-year-old. Everything was new for her. Not quite. The returner was a bit more nervous. She was getting her last texts in with her home friends. Running through in her head whether the camp friends would still feel the same as last summer. Working the nerves out loud in...
Camp is humming along. Summer is cooking. And in the run of play, a staff member comes to you and asks for feedback on their performance. They want to know what they could be doing better. Great! This is the moment camp directors always say they want. And they believe it when they say it. Wrote a while back about the complaint that comes up most from camp staff. They never get any feedback. So when one of them walks up and asks for it directly, you, of course, oblige. Sit them down. Name what...
Today’s young camp staff are hyperaware of the moment a phone comes out. Think about a moment at your own camp. Something fun is happening at the end of a long day. But now marketing pulls out a phone to grab a quick photo. And then the mood shifts just a little. These staff are 17 to 23. They have spent basically their entire lives watching people get turned into marketing posts, or worse, into memes in someone else’s group chat. They notice the second a phone comes out. They notice when...