Believe it or not running a summer camp is not easy. We manage hundreds of campers over the course of a ten week season; hire 80 staff members every summer; spend countless hours to train that staff to be the best they can possibly be; program fun and exciting activities for our campers; and that doesn’t even begin to touch the administrative side of things. Around here we often joke with our camp families (what we call our customers) that it takes us 42 weeks out of the year to plan and implement what happens during our ten week summer program. But all joking aside, that’s no joke. What, on the outside, appears to be all games, art, swimming, activities, and fun, is on the inside a very complex mechanism that has to fire perfectly on all cylinders to deliver the type of experience that our parents, campers, and staff have grown to love and expect.
We call what we do the Tate’s Magic, and that magic is solely dependent on one bedrock principle – organizational health. We strive for the best in all we do, but our striving would not produce the same results if we didn’t take the health of our organization seriously. We care about people, and we invest in them whenever and wherever possible. This may be the middle school camper who just can’t wait to become a Counselor in Training in the future, or the 4 year old who is having his first real adventure apart from mom and dad, or the staff member who is learning valuable skills that will later help him/her in their future career in education, marketing, engineering, or medicine. Many places can offer you great products or services, but did you know that often what makes your experience positive with those products or services is the health of the company that supplies them to you? Patrick Lencioni, a noted business and executive consultant with the Table Group, often says that the last real advantage that a company can have in their respective marketplace is organizational health – and he’s right.
A company that cares only about the bottom line or this quarter’s sales numbers is drastically more likely to experience any or every type of organizational health issue from high turnover all the way up through increased HR complaints of pesky inter-office issues. At Tate’s we take our health seriously. Each week our leadership team meets to discuss all kinds of issues, and we are committed to the vision of not only providing a great service to the families that depend on us, but also to the health of our organization. We keep five standards in mind at all times and seek always to have the following:
- Trust – we can’t build healthy relationships or retain great talent without it.
- Healthy Conflict – to encourage and challenge one another and uncover the best ideas.
- Commitment – to the team, the mission, and the vision.
- Accountability – to make sure we deliver what we promise and to remember who we truly serve – our families, our employees, and each other.
- Results – to make sure that we know what all our hard work leads to, and to see how to make things continually better in every way.
At Tate’s Day Camp we care about the process, and we care about our people. We instill this mentality into our staff and our campers so that when they eventually leave us and go out into the wide world, they make the people around them better because of what they’ve experienced here. We are devoted to what we do and how we do it, but most importantly, we love why we do it. Our people, our families, ourselves; we’re all worth it.