The greatest lesson I learnt in building my own Ranger group is that "Success breeds success." If you want to attract recruits to your leadership team you need to have a successful program, with lots of smiling, happy kids and smiling, happy leaders.

Chances are if your outpost is starved of leaders you run an unsuccessful, unachieving group. Examine what you do. Is it boring? Is it uninspiring? Does anyone succeed in your group?

Success breeds success. If you have a successful outpost - you won't have trouble recruiting new leaders. In fact you'll have people lining up asking if they can be involved.

People like to be successful. God wants us to be successful, and success attracts people. Just as flowers and trees put on beautiful blooms to help attract bees, so you must too - put on a successful program to attract

leaders. People aren't interested in joining something that is a failure, or a disaster, or something that's boring. They want to be seen with successful people - being successful themselves.

Do you remember your time back at school? Why do you think we all wanted to be associated with the fastest, brightest people? 'Cause we want to be seen with successful people. Incidently that's whay people spend millions of dollars buying self help books because they hope to emulate the success of the author!

ACTION Steps - How you can be successful.

1) Choose your own measure of success - do it - and then tell everyone how wonderful you were.

You might plan a great outing, a successful stab at Star Patrol at Pow Wow, a great pinewood derby, five salvations, 10 new ratings - whatever. It matters little in this context you simply need to begin succeeding.

2) Share the success. Don't hog it all for yourself. Give it all away - and then some. Remember words are free. They don't cost anything - except pride. Boast about your leaders. Build them up infront of the kids at opening parade. Tell you pastor hhow great they are. Tell the kids parents what a talented and motivated team you have.

3) Reinforce successful behavior. This is harder. Look for the attributes or actoins that contribute to success in your program. Then point it out the the person doing it - and to those who aren't. Example notice Commander Richard teaching knots in a way that slow Johnnie can understand and succeed in. Point it out. Praise Commander and child. Both succeeded. Both required each others participation to succeed. That's team work.

4) Go back to step one - and do it again. and again. and again.

People we need to generate a culture of SUCCESS.
Without it your program will die.
With it - you can change the world!