BSA’s career-advancement system is a “good old boy” system. Rather than rewarding excellence or leadership, BSA strongly favors fealty to a culturally-rotted, moribund bureaucracy.
A consistent story I get from professionals across the organization: You pay your dues with tenure in this weird system, and the overriding career goal is a cushy, make-work job where, until your career dies, you waste everyone’s time with pilot programs or other silliness. Not all reach this terminal level. Some stay in useful positions and keep adding value.
An ugly outcome: BSA’s career system runs off leaders, instead favoring caretaker bureaucrats. As evidence, consider the national CEO role. That is where any corporate career-advancement showcases its best leadership talent. Incredibly, every BSA-careerist CEO in the past 44 years has been a failure, creating leadership vacuums that perpetuate inertia, abet tremendous mistakes, and allow cultural rot to fester. (Roger Mosby excepted! He was not a BSA careerist.)
BSA’s “good old boy” system encourages councils to select new CEOs from a curated pool of careerist, caretaker bureaucrats. Because of how the “good old boy” system works, far too many in this pool have already hit their Peter-principle competence limits. That starves the pool of leadership talent.
Thankfully, councils are beginning to bypass BSA’s defective system:
- Bob Kurkjian, CEO of the Greater Los Angeles Area Council as of February 2023. He has an impressive resume with zero taint from BSA’s career system!
- Saroya Friedman-Gonzalez, CEO of the Greater New York Councils as of November 2022. Her impressive resume also is untainted by BSA’s career system!
- Joshua Dick, CEO of the Transatlantic Council as of May 2023. Another impressive resume untainted by BSA’s career system!
You can’t get their talent level in BSA’s system. Hopefully our next national CEO has leadership talent, which again necessitates bypassing BSA’s “good old boy” system.
Now here’s the weird thing: BSA’s rules and regulations attempt to force use of its own defective career system, although it gives an opt-out clause:
A local council shall employ a commissioned professional certified to serve as local council Scout executive and/or its chief executive officer having general direction of its administration and supervision over Scouting activities within its jurisdiction. A local council may, if due to exceptional circumstances it is authorized in advance by the Chief Executive Officer and pursuant to guidelines approved by the National Executive Committee, hire a candidate who would not otherwise be eligible for the position. A council Scout executive or chief executive officer shall serve at the pleasure of the local council’s executive board subject to the policies, procedures and guidelines of the National Council.
Rules and Regulations of the Boy Scouts of America, September 2020
If you’re in BSA’s career-advancement system, you are stuck in a clown show. Clown shows aren’t good for your career. I support you in wanting improvement, but you must make noise!
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