By: Greg Kristan
EDGE was something that I learned from my boss when I worked at Boy Scout camp my final year in 2011. This was my final year as a camp counselor (after 3 previous summers moving up in the staff ranks) and my final job was to lead the CIT (counselor in training) program. It was a position that I was not looking forward to at all as I was not doing the scout related activities that I actually wanted to do. Also, this meant being in charge of 15 teenagers for a few weeks during the summer. All of this did not sound good at all to me and also I really questioned why I was even selected to be in this role.
Anyway, as the summer was about to start my camp director asked if I knew about EDGE which I had no clue about. His name was Corey and he broke out what each letter meant by writing each on the board like this.
E – Explain
D – Demonstrate
G – Guide
E – Enable
Basically, as a leader one way to teach others is to be transparent with what you do. I think this lesson from my boss has been a lesson that has not only stayed with me, but something that I preach daily at work! Those few weeks before the CIT’s came to camp, he really spent the time with me making sure I was really prepared for this position and put me on the leadership meetings with people much older than myself. At that time I hated doing all of these boring meetings as it was not fun.
I bring EDGE up in this blog as something I would love to pass along to others who are doing really something in life. For myself, I really did struggle in school when it came to listening to directions as I do have a hard time hearing. I am not deaf and I have never been classified of hard hearing but I will admit that I can’t actually hear (understand) every word from someone. The words do get jumbled here and there, but most of the time I am fine. In fact, I choose to have the subtitles on the TV just so I can follow exactly what is going on. I also do have a hard time understanding myself, which is another reason why I am shooting videos at work to help coach myself on the way I sound and how I pronounce certain words. I like the idea of sharing a weakness on this blog and working to make it a strength. Regardless Corey could of just talked to me those few weeks before the CIT’s got there or had given me some random power point about what to do for this position but he did not! He really worked with me and demonstrated so much on how I should handle different scenarios and really guided me whenever I had questions about how to handle different scenarios or ideas I wanted to get another opinion about.
So basically in summary, this type of teaching is something that I try my best to do with clients at work along also with co – workers. I am incredibly open about my current side project (with the knights) along also with my past project (a wedding photography site). I feel that it is not good enough just to show analytics to someone and brag about traffic increase. I also don’t think it is good enough to show more conversions than last year and say this is for SEO. When we have our SEO meetings where we present something I tend to show real examples and really explain my thought process as to what I did and why! Some cool things about this transparency is seeing the people listening actually listening and interested in learning and then seeing them actually use some of what I presented is the best feeling ever.
Now I am not an expert at all in anything. However, I have a tremendous level of respect for anyone who spends the time to really teach someone something and work with them to get that. That is why I hope to spread this type of teaching as it was once taught to me.