The Complete Training Triangle: Skills, Culture, and Systems
What if I told you there's a simple framework that can transform your staff training from forgettable lectures to life-changing experiences?
It might feel like you never have enough time to get through everything you want. Your staff might feel the content is overwhelming and disjointed—helpful but not transformational.
So often staff training is just a laundry list of skills staff need to learn. This is good, but if you want to be great you need a framework that connects it all for you and your staff.
The most effective camp trainings I have seen balance individual skills and habits, building intentional culture, and reinforcing robust systems. Think of each of those as legs to a stool—you need them all for the stool to work! If you feel your staff training isn't quite there yet, read on to figure out what you're missing.
The Training Triangle Framework Explained
Thrive Point Studio (the name of my company!) refers to your organizational Thrive Point, the intersection of three overlapping concepts:
Strong individual habits & skills
Intentionally designed culture and team routines
Robust and reinforced systems, policies, and protocols to support it all
You need all three working in tandem to have a truly exceptional organization. It's like a stool that has three legs—if you're missing a leg, or one is much shorter than the others, it doesn't work! Your staff training is no exception. Your summer staff, at the end of your training, need:
A "full toolbox" of skills and techniques to use all summer (Strong individual skills!)
To have experienced your camp culture through your training and have been explicitly taught how they are a part of it (intentionally designed culture!)
To understand their part in the system, how the parts work together, and have read the necessary policies and documentation to understand it all (Robust systems!)
It is likely your training focuses mostly on the first aspect, a bit of the second, and not so much on the third. Let's talk about each of these concepts individually.
Part One - Training for Strong Individual Skills & Habits
Teaching skills is probably your strongest part of your training series. However, it's building great habits that makes it all stick. Habits run everything, and you can either work to shape them on your staff or they'll create their own. The more habits you have ingrained, the more energy and brain space can be freed up to create meaningful moments with campers.
Every habit formation has three parts: cue (trigger), routine (behavior), and reward (benefit). You can illustrate this through a morning coffee habit:
Your cue is what prompts you to reach for that cup, whether it's passing by the coffee place each morning or each morning as you get ready.
The routine is the actual behavior—in this case, drinking the coffee itself.
The reward is the benefit you get out of it—great taste, a jolt of energy, the pleasure of maintaining your rewards status at the coffee place.
I used to teach habit formation explicitly before practicing the behavior management skills we taught. The more we practiced the skill (such as giving a great teacher stare) the more it became a habit. Rather than reacting and yelling to the misbehavior (cue), they instead gave a teacher stare (routine) that often reduced or eliminated the unwanted behavior (reward).
The key is to practice frequently and often. If you have many, many camp songs to learn, sing one at the start of each training session. If you want to build the habit of appreciation, end each training with 2-3 appreciations for folks in the session. If you want staff to read the information board, quiz them on what's on the board during training. When I was a teacher, I used to hide messages in my instructions like "when you get to this part, draw a star in the top right corner of your page. Don't tell anyone else." When I picked up papers, I knew who had read—and it helped reinforce that habit.
Skills are nothing if they don't stick, and thinking about habits is key to that. Individual habits inform group habits, which is the cornerstone of intentional culture.
Part Two - Creating an Intentional Culture Through Training
You know your camp culture is locked in if a returning staff member turns to a new staff member and says "that's just how we do it here." That's powerful. Culture is something that will emerge no matter what you do. You can intentionally shape it or let it just happen without any idea what might happen. It's the invisible force that determines how your staff behaves when no one is watching.
You likely have stated values and a mission. Culture is how those things are lived day to day, and all of that starts with your trainings that teach and reinforce the culture you want.
Key Cultural Elements to Address in Training
To build an intentional culture, there are three concepts you need to cover:
1. Shared Language and Terminology — Any group has common vocabulary or slang that marks whether someone is a part of that group. You need to explicitly teach that vocabulary in your training and use it intentionally. You can start with something simple like a vocabulary bingo game, and be sure to point out when you've used the words later on in training.
2. Decision-Making Norms — This is about role clarity—who makes what kinds of decisions and what someone does when it is unclear. Do you have a culture of "ask for forgiveness" rather than permission? Then you haven't outlined these norms enough.
3. Conflict Resolution Culture — This is about how staff disagree with each other—either in the side show or the center ring. High performing organizations know conflict is natural and plan for it. Many camps train staff how to handle camper conflict but fail to train around staff conflict.
How Training Design Models Culture
Staff learn more about your culture from how you run your training than what you say about your culture—think how you walk the walk rather than talk the talk. If you say you value collaboration but run trainings as solo presentations run by leadership, guess what message is really getting through?
The structure of your training is teaching your cultural values whether you realize it or not, and it's a powerful first impression.
The logistics matter too. If you want staff to prioritize relationships over efficiency, don't schedule training so tightly that people feel rushed between sessions. If you want staff to model calm leadership with campers, don't run training in a frantic, overwhelming way. If you believe in the power of reflection, build actual reflection time into your training rather than just talking about its importance.
Your training schedule, room setup, group formations, and facilitation style are all teaching your cultural values. Staff will recreate with campers whatever they experience with you during training.
Part Three - Building Robust Systems Through Training
When I was a teacher one concept really stuck with me: the idea that we get brain fatigue from too many decisions. I felt it as a teacher and saw it in my students. I designed routines and systems in my classroom that helped kids focus by reducing the number of distracting decisions they needed to make. Systems in an organization fill a similar function. Good systems make good choices easier by creating written protocols, forms, and lists that actively reinforce the culture you want. Systems work to prevent problems before they happen rather than just solving them. Your organization can run much more effectively with good systems, and that also starts in training.
Essential Systems to Address in Training
There are some required systems you likely are training on already—what to do in an emergency, how staff track their time, or how information is tracked and stored. Those are all logistical systems. They are super important, but don't forget about relational systems. These systems reinforce the culture you want and help improve the skills of your staff. Some of these systems include:
Communication Systems — Building on shared language and terminology, what are the structures and protocols of your meetings? How do you document things? How do you make sure information flows actively between departments and breaks down silos?
Feedback & Improvement Systems — How do staff give and receive feedback? This isn't just one way, from supervisor to supervisee. How do they give feedback to their boss and peers? How is it documented with an eye towards fairness and equity?
Decision-Making and Escalation Systems — Building on conflict resolution, when should folks be involved when there is conflict? What role clarity do you have around who makes what decisions? Documentation?
The absence of these systems can feel chaotic and stressful and can lead to staff departing or not returning. It's important that systems are rigid enough to provide support but flexible enough to adapt to challenges and changing times. The right structure can make staff feel supported, perform better, and ultimately have a better organization.
Training Staff to Think Systemically
Your training needs to help staff not just see what the systems are but their roles in supporting the systems. You can't just be top down with your systems or it won't survive. Your staff need to be active participants. You'll need to include activities that help staff see the connections between their roles and how individual actions impact others. Every time I lead a team we go through a role clarity whiteboard exercise that does wonders to both let folks see the system and feel like they know what is expected of them.First Steps to More Effective Staff Training
Time to get practical. If you’ve recognized some of these system blind spots in your training, you’re probably wondering what to do about it. Don’t worry – you don’t need to throw out your entire training and start over. Consider a few key changes.
What Happens When a Leg is Missing
Most camps unconsciously emphasize one leg over the other—I bet it's mainly a focus on individual staff skills. There is a predictable pattern to the problems that arise from each imbalance.
| Missing Part One: Skills without Systems or Culture |
Missing Part Two: |
Missing Part Three: Skills and Culture without Systems |
|---|---|---|
| What it looks like: Highly skilled individuals who can't work together effectively | What it looks like: Technically competent but soulless operations | What it looks like: Well-meaning chaos with inconsistent outcomes |
| Example: A camp with excellent activity instructors who create inconsistent experiences for campers | Example: A camp that runs efficiently but lacks heart and connection | Example: A camp with great relationships but poor coordination and communication |
| The cost: Fragmented program delivery and staff frustration | The cost: Staff and camper disengagement, high turnover | The cost: Preventable problems, director burnout, missed opportunities |
Building Your Three-Legged Training Plan
Alright, time to get practical. You understand the framework, you can see where your current training might be out of balance, and now you're wondering, "How do I actually build this into my training?" You can improve your training without having to overhaul the entire thing. It starts with asking yourself three simple questions:
Do staff consistently demonstrate key habits and skills?
Can staff clearly explain your camp's culture to others?
Do staff understand how their roles connect to others?
You should involve staff in answering these questions as well, even if you start with just your leadership team. These three questions will reveal what imbalances you might have in your trainings and what to do about them.
Design Principles for Balanced Training
You'll want to both explicitly teach each part of the Training Triangle but also find times to bring it all together. When you do this well, staff don't always learn about culture, systems, and habits separately; they experience how all three work together in real camp situations.
Integration Over Separation: The most powerful training activities are those that naturally weave together all three legs. For example, when we teach conflict resolution skills (Leg One), we don't just practice generic scenarios. We use real situations between camp departments—like when the kitchen needs to change meal timing but the waterfront has already scheduled swim lessons (Leg Three). As staff work through these scenarios, they practice both the communication skills they need and learn to think about ripple effects across the camp system. Meanwhile, we're explicitly discussing how our approach to conflict reflects camp values like "everyone counts" and "work is love made visible" (Leg Two).
Real Context, Real Learning: Instead of teaching skills in isolation, embed them in actual camp contexts. When we train staff on "Strong Voice and Clear Directions," we don't just practice giving instructions. We have them practice giving directions for real camp transitions—like moving from meals to activities—while considering how their communication style models camp culture and affects the flow of the whole program.
Layered Learning: Design activities where the surface content addresses one leg but the process addresses the others. During our "Creating Routines" training, staff are explicitly learning behavior management techniques (Leg One). But the way we structure the activity—with cabin partners working together, peer feedback, and cross-lodge sharing—teaches them about collaboration and systems thinking (Legs Two and Three) without making it feel like separate lessons.
Modeling Through Structure: The way you facilitate training should demonstrate all three legs. When you consistently start sessions by connecting to previous learning and checking in with different perspectives, you're modeling the reflection habits you want staff to develop (Leg One), reinforcing the culture of inclusive participation (Leg Two), and demonstrating how information flows through the system (Leg Three).
Concluding Thoughts
The three-legged stool framework is exactly what transforms staff training from forgettable lectures to life-changing experiences. When you balance individual habits, intentional culture, and robust systems, your staff stop feeling overwhelmed by disconnected content and start seeing how everything connects to create something greater.
Instead of just collecting individual techniques, your staff will understand how their skills, your camp's culture, and the larger systems all work together. That's the difference between information transfer and transformation.
Ready to get started? Take three immediate steps:
Assess your current training to see which leg needs the most attention
Identify one existing training activity you can redesign to address multiple legs simultaneously
Choose one way your training structure can better model the culture you want to create
This integrated approach means staff experience the three parts as naturally connected rather than separate concepts they need to remember to combine later.
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