You’re Talking About Campers Too Much in Your Staff Training
Ever noticed that despite your best training efforts, the same staff issues arise every summer?
You cover all the essential skills, run engaging team-building activities, and still find your staff struggling to work together effectively once campers arrive.
After 15 years working with camps and educational organizations, I've identified a critical pattern: most camp training programs miss the forest for the trees. They focus intensely on staff-camper relationships while neglecting the systems and staff-to-staff relationships that actually determine your camp's success.
Think of it this way: a cabin with counselors who work as true partners will create a better experience than one with individually skilled counselors who undermine each other. Yet most training programs spend most of their time on staff-camper interactions and barely any on how staff work together.
This blind spot—what I call "system blindness"—costs camps dearly through staff burnout, recurring problems, and diminished camper experiences. The good news? With a few strategic shifts in your training approach, you can transform how your staff functions as a cohesive whole.
Let's examine why traditional training falls short and what practical steps you can take to build a camp staff that truly sees the bigger picture.
The Common Training Model and Why It Falls Short
Summer camp trainings can range from a couple days to a few weeks, depending on your program. The typical, well-meaning training approaches might look like this:
An intense pressure to cover many topics, leading to long sessions that end up being information dumps, particularly around policies, procedures, and rules
An ever-expanding list of skill acquisition sessions around kids: boundaries, sexual abuse, behavior management, working with diverse needs, trauma-informed practices, peer mediation – so many things that you might not have the expertise in
Some ice breakers and other team building activities thrown in, often disconnected from the actual work
A few scenario-based practices, usually focused on camper issues.
Staff trainings that are just a laundry list of things to teach end up talking about a lot of individual skills but often fail to give context around how those skills work together and fit with the larger mission, “why,” and team.
This workshop-by-workshop approach isn’t enough. In fact, staff might master the skills but still struggle as a team – think of a bunch of competent parts but a dysfunctional whole. I saw staff who were highly skilled pull away from the rest – “I’m better, I know what I’m doing, they don’t know what they’re doing.” Just adding more skills training doesn’t solve this systemic problem.
Let’s go back to our missing element: a focus on relationships and systems. If trainings focus solely on the kid experience, your team will notice that their needs are neglected. They won’t ever really gel as a team and your camp will suffer from it. In particular, system blindness will take over. Staff will blame each other and the “they” that is preventing them from doing their best work – “they don’t care about us, they aren’t as good at their jobs as we are, they don’t know what they are doing.” They might have the skills to work but not work together as a team. Your training might be unwittingly adding to system blindness!
Understanding System Blindness in Camp Settings
I have several blog posts on what system blindness is, but the short definition is this:
The inability to see how individual roles and actions connect to form the whole camp experience.
If you feel your team just isn’t really a team yet, it is likely because of System Blindness. You can spot it if you see any of these behaviors in your staff:
Staff focus on their own area of responsibility, ignoring other areas
Staff miss the ripple effects of their decisions on their own areas but especially others
Staff fail to collaborate across boundaries or teams, particularly around sharing information about campers
Staff fail to see the patterns of dysfunction that can happen each summer and their role in it (even unwittingly)
If you see some of these, your training is falling short! In addition, there are several subcategories of System Blindness:
Spatial Blindness – the inability to see beyond one’s immediate role or activity area. For example, an Archery instructor who doesn't understand how schedule changes affect meal service.
Temporal Blindness – the inability of staff to see the history and patterns of camp over time. For example, new staff implementing changes without understanding why things were done a certain way.
Relational Blindness – the inability of staff to recognize the relationships between staff positions, which creates predictable patterns. For example, the classic “director-counselor disconnect” where each blame each other for the problems.
All of this can happen with “conventional” training. You can probably guess why – a focus on the individual skills and staff-camper interactions can mean staff don’t take the time to understand their roles in relationship to that of others. They might know each other’s favorite ice cream from an ice breaker but not understand how their actions can make life better or worse for others.
There are a few costs to all this.
The Cost of System Blindness
Not focusing on staff-staff relationships during training can lead to serious costs down the line, including staff burnout, recurring issues, and leadership exhaustion. All of that leads to lower quality programing for campers.
Staff Burnout & Turnover
Your staff burnout and turnover is probably exacerbated by system blindness:
System Blindness creates extra work and frustration
There’s an emotional cost to constantly “firefighting” the same problems all summer
It can feel super isolating in certain roles
When I ran my own camp, there was a noticeable uptick in staff retention when we started discussing system blindness during training. Staff felt they knew their role better in the whole system and felt better supported and prepared.
Recurring Issues that Never Get Resolved
System blindness over time prevents permanent solutions, especially if you feel you’re having the same issues each summer. It can feel like “Groundhogs Day” each summer as you see staff address the ongoing symptoms rather than the underlying patterns. I often saw this as the “pendulum” swing of solutions each summer that seemed to undo the solution from the previous summer, such as the number of lunch buffets we should have (or not have).
Leadership Exhaustion
How many times does it feel like you’re just fighting fire as a leader rather than shaping the system? System blindness forces directors to constantly intervene rather than build the skills of others:
When directors are the only person who sees the whole picture, it because unsustainable
From there, it’s impossible to delegate when staff don’t understand the system
Everything quickly falls apart as folks blame each other.
It took us years to break these habits through discussing system blindness but also creating competency models for our various roles to help them understand how they fit into the system.
Signs your Training Has System Blind Spots
Use this checklist to assess if your training isn’t quite helping staff be their best:
Staff regularly express surprise at how other departments operate
The same conflicts emerge each summer
Changes in one area create unexpected problems elsewhere
Staff struggle to problem-solve across boundaries
Directors constantly connect dots for staff
If you answered yes to more than 2, you probably have some system blindness!
Other red flags might include:
Staff or departments hoarding information from each other
A territorial defensiveness between departments, perhaps around supplies
Persistent blaming of other groups or teams for issues
Confusion about decision making and “who is in charge.”
If any of these statements are commonly heard around camp:
"That's not my job"
"No one told me that's how it works"
"I'm just doing what I was trained to do"
"Why would I need to know what they do over there?"
"We've solved this problem three times already this summer"
All of this goes back to your staff training.
The good news: it doesn’t have to be this way. Ready to improve your staff training?
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.
Staff-to-Staff Relationships: The Secret Ingredient
Here’s a possibly hot take: The most important relationships at camp aren’t always staff-to camper. Sometimes, they’re staff-to-staff.
Think about it. A cabin or group with co-counselors who are constantly undermining each other creates a far worse experience than a cabin with counselors who work as true partners, even if they are both still developing their individual skills.
At my camp we transformed our work by implementing our “Real Talk Form.” It was a paper packet that structured a conversation between co-counselors that covers everything from individual strengths to communication preferences to fears about the summer. It sounds simple, but it was revolutionary in creating authentic partnerships.
You can use a similar form or not, but the important thing is to build into your training time for staff to talk about what it means to work with each other – the good, the bad, the stressful. Have those conversations before the campers and the stress arrives!
Building in Reflection Time
Without intentional pauses, your staff won't connect the dots between what they're experiencing and the larger patterns at play.
I call these moments "Time Out of Time" (TOOT) – structured spaces where normal operations pause and we step back to see the bigger picture. These aren't just feel-good sessions; they're essential for system sight.
Some practical ways to build in reflection:
Start each training day with a 10-minute debrief of the previous day's patterns
End each topic with "how does this connect to other aspects of camp?"
Create physical visualization exercises where staff map connections between roles
Use scenario-based training where staff have to consider multiple perspectives
Creating a Shared Language
Systems thinking doesn't have to be complicated. At its core, it's simply about seeing patterns and connections. The key is giving your staff vocabulary to name what they see.
At my camp, we used terms like "spatial blindness" and "temporal blindness" in approachable ways. We talk about "dances" when describing predictable relationship patterns.
Common language creates common understanding. When your waterfront director can say to your art director, "I think we're experiencing some spatial blindness between our areas," they've opened a productive conversation instead of a blame session.
Spend time teaching and reinforcing the language of your camp. Quiz staff on it and make it fun – a great place to throw out some candy!
The Bigs Rocks vs Pebbles Approach
Staff need to know what’s most important and, in turn, what they can impact. Picture a jar that represents your camp. If you fill it with sand first (all the tiny details), there’s no room for the big rocks (the essential elements that make your camp what it is).
When I ran camp we identified all the big rocks, pebbles, and sand that made up camp. We debated and listed the big rocks and found that we had too much sand in our training. Your own training needs to make your Big Rocks unmistakably clear – staff should know which elements are core to your identity and which are flexible.
Remember: When everything is important, nothing is important. Your staff can’t prioritize everything, so help them figure out what’s essential and what’s adaptable. This clarity doesn’t restrict creativity – in fact, it enables it by creating boundaries within which innovation and flourish.
These are just a few ways to include more conversations around the staff-staff relationships in your training and reduce overall system blindness. So many more ideas to improve your training coming in future blogs!
Concluding Thoughts
You’re probably talking too much about campers and not enough about staff in your training. It’s not too late to make some changes and avoid the common issues that recur each summer. Addressing system blindness and focusing more on staff-staff relationships by making a few tweaks in your training will create a ripple effect that improves staff relationships and ultimately the camper experience.
Don’t just take my word for it. This idea is sometimes known as the “Employees First” approach and is summed up by this quote by J.W. Marriot, Jr of the Marriot hotel chain:
Take care of your employees, and they’ll take care of your customers.
Take care of your staff and they’ll take care of your campers.
You can take three specific steps now:
Assess your current training for system blind spots
Identify one relationship pattern to address in your next training
Introduce one systems concept into your training approach.
Remember, you got this. It makes sense why most of your training is focused on staff-camper relationships. However, when you focus a bit on staff-staff relationships, you reduce system blindness! Small shifts in training can have big impact!
We can help with your training. Feel free to reach out to us with your questions and follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest! We’ll be able to help you solve your problems.
Interested in working with us? Sign up for a free 30-minute call to assess your systems and see how we can help.
