A pool director at a country club hires teens as lifeguards. She sees parents applying for their kids to make life easier, but it has the opposite effect.

• Susie Johnson is the pool director at a country club who hires teens as lifeguards.
• The mom of five said she has received job applications written by their moms and dads, not them.
• Her most reliable, efficient staff don't have helicopter parents who try to make their lives easier.

When Susie Johnson took her current job as the pool director of a country club, she was responsible for hiring a new team of summer lifeguards.

The 54-year-old — who worked in the field in her 20s before taking a career break to raise her kids — told Business Insider she was "pretty fortunate" to hand-pick staff from scratch.

"I got to choose who I wanted," Johnson said, noting that it might have been more challenging to deal with existing employees accustomed to how a previous director ran the operation.

Now, two years into the role, she has a staff of 12 teenage lifeguards — a mixture of high school kids and college students in their freshman or sophomore years.

She said her job had put her in an interesting position of observing how different members of Generation Z manage part-time work.

According to Johnson, the main factor was their parents' influence. She said the lower performers mostly came from families with a "helicopter" approach who tended to micro-manage.

She said, by contrast, the high achievers were likely to have "hands-off" parents who gave them more independence — and allowed them to trip up now and again.

Johnson offered three tips to moms and dads who want their teens to succeed.

Don't apply for a job on your kid's behalf

The pool director said she received a lot of interest after advertising the available positions at the country club.

However, some responses came from parents who texted or emailed her directly.

"They wrote things like, 'My daughter just got her lifeguard certification and is looking for a job,'" Johnson said. "I'd have much more respect for that kid if they reached out themselves."

She said she'd even received job applications in different styles of handwriting, where the parent had likely completed at least some of the form on behalf of their child.

Only in one circumstance, she said, had she employed a lifeguard whose parent had made the initial query.

"With the benefit of hindsight, if I'd gotten that message now, I wouldn't even reply," she said. "The guy wasn't super dependable and didn't pay attention to detail."

She suspected his mom was managing his work calendar for him and scheduling shifts that he later wanted to cancel.

Raise your children to help out at home

Johnson said her most reliable lifeguards not only listened to instructions but showed initiative.

For example, she said she noticed they would automatically do things as simple as picking up a piece of stray trash by the pool.

"I got the impression they did chores at home, so it was more like second nature," the mom of five added.

She said that while supervising swimmers was their utmost priority, little things also counted, such as stopping to wipe off a dirty lounge chair.

"The lifeguards follow the same checklist every single day, but I had to point out certain things that hadn't been done to the less proactive ones," Johnson said.

"If kids have never had to clean a bathroom or wash dishes, they're going to need a lot more guidance and a lot more reminders when they're doing it at work," she told BI.

Let them make their own mistakes

Johnson said teens benefit when they're allowed to figure things out on their own.

"It's the best way for them to grow," she said. "As parents, if we want to raise dependable and successful teenagers, we have to be willing to let them struggle and fail."

She cited the case of a lifeguard who once lost his iPhone. He didn't contact her by other means to confirm his shifts.

"I texted a schedule to everybody every week, but he didn't get it," Johnson said. "It was a pretty big mess up."

Still, he accepted the consequences. He apologized and said it would never happen again.

"I told him, 'Everybody makes mistakes, and I'm not going to fire people if you make a mistake,'" Johnson added. "But I'm not going to schedule you for extra hours next week because I need to make sure that I can rely on you and that you're going to show up."

She says that he learned from that experience and is now one of the "best communicators" on her staff.

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