Believe in Them

Sometimes kids just need to see how strongly you believe in them and their potential.

Another Poor Leadership Technique to Avoid

I have witnessed adult leaders that ignore followers that don't do what they want. Let me expand on that a bit.

This person did not clarify what they wanted sufficiently, leaving confusion in the follower. Perhaps this leader thought the person would read their mind. Later, when what was delivered was not what was desired, this particular leader avoided talking about the gap directly with the person, but started working through others instead. Ignoring people when they don't perform exactly as expected is a failing of the leader, not the follower. This leader's history is to gradually work around the person that did not hit the unclear mark until they are reassigned.

Leaders are paid in companies to clarify what they expect and to provide feedback to followers that miss their expectations. In organizations where pay is not relevant, it is still the leader's responsibility to clarify what is expected. It is a leadership responsibility to clearly articulate expectations and to ensure understanding. Of course, the level of follower modifies this somewhat. If the follower is a high level leader too, there is an expectation that not everything should be spelled out in great detail. This is a balance.

Some adults find providing direct face to face feedback difficult to do. Some perceive this leadership task as confrontational and avoid it altogether. This response is not effective leadership. This does not coach the person so they improve, making the organization stronger. It leaves followers wondering what is going on.

Don't do this with other adult followers, and especially don't do this with children. Children need direct and specific feedback when they miss the mark so they can learn how to improve. Children need encouragement. So do adult volunteers. Frankly, employees could use some too, but this is often not the case.

Inputs to Leading Yourself

The inputs to leading yourself include the following:

• Motives
•  Internal
• Needs hierarchy (Maslow, Alderfer)
• Seek to fulfill
• Desires->Priorities->Choices->Actions->Achieving->Becoming
• Values
• Direction
• Task motivation
• Relationship motivation
• External
• Stimuli
• Stress
• Conditions
• Expectancy
• Behaviors -> performance outcomes -> reward outcomes
• Positive
• Negative
• Feedback
• Consequences
• Positive - rewards
• Negative - punishments
• Resources
• Energy
• Cognition - Assimilation
• Perceptual clarity
• Attention - Focus
• Persistence (Grit)
• Knowledge, Skills, Attitudes
• Personality types
• D, I, S, C
• Red, Yellow, Blue, White
• Meyers-Briggs
• Or other systems

For Kids, Start with Leading Themselves

The United States Military Academy teaches leadership formally and used to address leadership in a couple of different categories.

• Leadership at the Individual System Level
• Leadership at the Group System Level
• Leadership at the Organization System Level

For now, I'll ignore small groups and organizational leadership because I think that tends to be more appropriate for adults. Here is the scope of competencies needed for leading yourself. This is a big job with kids that needs repetition like advertising. One time exposure is not enough for kids to learn this well enough to apply it. Whether you call this a Competencies Framework or learning objectives or performance objectives, these items are important to teach and have practiced.

Lead-Yourself Objectives for Kids
    Build character
        Read stories of strong character (provides examples in context)
        Have adults surrounding the child model strong character
    Develop sound judgement
        Teach and model classical values (for example, Christians use biblical values)
        Reason critically (teach critical thinking, problem solving, decision making skills)
        Reason and Lead ethically (role play with kids)
        Be aware of ethical and moral dilemmas and make right choices (role play with kids)
        Questions facts and assumptions (role play with kids)
    Apply Courage
        Confidence to say "I don't know" and then find out
    Orient to the best in us all
        Build empathy for others
        Accentuate the positive
        Nurture abundance thinking patterns over scarcity patterns
        Recognizes the worth of each individual
        Be optimistic about people
    Build confidence
        Be confident enough to convince people that you can lead
        Be humble enough to realize that you are often going to be wrong
    Anticipate consequences to choices
        Anticipate 2nd and 3rd order effects of actions and decisions
    Take ownership / accountability
        Avoid blaming
        Develop a sense of responsibility
    Influence peers more than you are influenced by them (hard for teens trying to fit in)
    Grit
        Keep pressing on despite setbacks or failures
        Persistent in face of continuing obstacles
    Understand the impact of own behavior on others
    Develop and maintain emotional "fitness" or strength
        Watch for kids with anger issues/fits (highlights emotional literacy improvements needed)
        Improve emotional literacy
            Self awareness
                Perceive emotion, changing moods, decide to be aware
                Monitor own emotions
                    Recognize their impact on others
                Discriminate between different emotions
                    Label them appropriately
                    Vocabulary to name emotions (language of feelings)
                    Know the difference between "I need" and "I want"
                    Play emotional charades
                    Keep a feelings journal
            Empathy
                Consider other people's feelings when making decisions
                Empathy is key to caring supportive relationships
            Social Effectiveness
                Use persuasion and influence
                Recognize power dynamics
                Use harmony and collaboration
                Use non-verbal communication to connect emotionally with others
                Use verbal communication to connect emotionally with others
                    Tone of voice
                    Timing and pace of the conversation
                    Avoid sarcasm, anger, name calling, and why questions
                    Use playful communication to relax
                    Stay focused in the present
                Monitor other's emotions
                    Pick up on emotional cues
                    Subtle facial expressions
            Regulate emotions
                Control own emotions and behavior to avoid negative impact on others
                Learn how to recognize and relieve stress
                Adapting to changing circumstances
                Accept personal responsibility for own reactions to change
                Control or redirect impulsive feelings and behaviors
                Chose to be a good, kind person and loving
                Know hardest times (tired, hungry, lonely)
            Decide not to be a victim
                Listening does not mean I agree
                It is not about winning
                What you say about me says nothing about me. It only tells me about you.          
        Stay cool under pressure
        Quickly recover from difficult situations
        Exemplify resilience       
        Hear difficult feedback (hard for kids, make sure they know you love them before this)
    Use self awareness to monitor and adjust their actions
    Demonstrate initiative
        Is comfortable in unexpected situations
        Take action without direction
        Align efforts with higher level goals
        Be proactive
    Adapt
        Scan the environment, identify conditions, and adjust
        Apply plan-do-check-adapt pattern      
        Respond to situational changes and evolving trends
        Learn the lessons of experience
        Recognize when what others have done is not an effective solution and make new solutions
        Take appropriate action
    Personally apply teamwork  
    Begin with the end in mind (Covey content)
    First things first
        Mental creation before physical creation (plans before action)
        Clarify objectives and intent
    Make ethical choices
        Discern right from wrong (role play with kids)
    Use time effectively (hard for kids)   

Practicing Meeting Responsibilities with Animals

Animals make a great teaching device for following through on responsibilities. If one has to feed the chickens and another has to feed the dogs as an assignment and they "forget" as children often do, the animal shows the problem visibly to the child.

The dogs whine. The chickens make more noise. The rooster crows more often and more loudly. Goats break a hole in your fence and make their way to your back porch.

This is all good feedback to the child. There is no postponing. The animals protest if forgotten. It makes for a great teaching moment between the adult and the child.

Example Counts in Teaching Goal Setting by Modeling It

Keller Williams Realty in the United States teaches their agents a cool idea called a 411 that can help children track their actions to achieve goals. What does this have to do with teaching leadership to kids, you may ask?

In my experience, most leadership positions that are formal organizationally sponsored positions require tracking of goal setting and attainment of employees and volunteers. In finding which applies most easily to children and teens, I looked for which was the least directive and allowed them to govern themselves.

Keller Williams aims to help their agents set goals and be successful with as little "management overhead" as possible. They don't have time to be "a boss" because they are busy selling too, so they set up this site to help their people help themselves when it comes to goal setting, tracking and attaining.

We are introducing it to our teens to help them have minimal structure for getting stuff done. The Kellar Williams site is called http://www.productivitywarriors.com. It explains it and has some templates in MS Word. Check it out so you can visualize what I'm talking about. Also instead of corporate-speak "performance goals", we are calling them "getting better goals" with the kids.

To make it feel less formal, we're just drawing the 411 on a sheet of school notebook paper by hand. Function over form for these initial efforts is okay in my book. The top "1" is annual goals, the next "1" is the month goals that are needed to achieve the annual goals, and the "4" is the four weeks actions needed to achieve the month goals. All visible with a single sheet of paper.

This alignment of tactical efforts to strategic aims is a crucial piece for leading and fully aligning organizations. For kids, no jargon is necessary. We just say, the annual goals need stuff to be done to meet them, so the monthly goals provide twelve iterations to get it done. Then the weekly goals help us do our weekly accountability session.

Again, Keller Williams has a very cool accountability session script. I like it because it helps focus on self governance, teaching the kids how to stay after their own goals without it sounding like some parental talking to (in a bad way). This business uses this for their adult agents, so why not use it for kids to help them realize they are the captains of their own ships? The accountability session script goes like this:

   0. "Do you have your 411 with you?" (prerequisite for continuing)
   1. "How did you do on your goals?"
   2. "How do you feel about how you did?"
   3. "What will you do differently during the next period of time?"
   4. "What can I do to help you?"

This is the most gentle goals session script I have come across in all my life's travels that is still effective at helping both the coach and the goal planner (kid) remember who's accountability this really is.

For those of you that prefer computer stuff, check out Trello.com for a neat and free method of tracking to do actions from Joel Spolsky. I like Trello a lot.

After we walk them through the 411 and help them establish goals, we'll check back in with them to see how they are doing since early teens sometimes have a hard time with anything beyond today or this week.

Eventually we'll teach the teens the ideas in "Getting Things Done" or GTD by David Allen, combined with Kanban concepts for following Lean principles of visual management. Teams of people using Kanban tools (a whiteboard with sticky notes moving across columns) helps avoid micromanagement. But for now, the 411 is sufficient for their needs.

Do your own 411 to show them you're doing it too. Or make some fake entries, but teens tend to spot falseness very easily. Set follow ups with them on your own 411 form.

I tried mini-Kanban boards from Office Depot with the children a few months back, but realized I had not taught them the basics first after I observed that they put a bunch of sticky notes on their board and promptly forgot them after the excitement of the first night wore off.

So I am starting with Goal setting, tracking, and attaining first. Then I'll move to breaking a project down into its component tasks and putting those tasks on sticky notes on the Kanban board to keep progress visual.

This article on goal tracking is a follow up to a previous article on goal setting http://teachkidsleadership.blogspot.com/2011/11/teaching-goal-setting-to-kids-from-7-to.html

John McCain's book has captivated my 10-year old as we read character building stories

We got John McCain's book "Character is Destiny" and I have read one story a night to our 10-year old. He is way more interested than I thought he might be. He has asked questions as the stories intertwine with each other. It has provided great opportunities for discussions.

Character is the first key building block for children to grow into leadership. Leadership skills without strong character easily devolve into manipulation.

This book helps put character into context that is engaging for a 10-year old mind. I wholeheartedly recommend this book if you plan to read it to a child.

Reflection as a teaching tool

Reflection is a powerful tool for helping pre teens and teens learn. It works with younger children too, but their pool of knowledge is smaller.

Recently I have had a chance to teach classes of 12- 14 year olds and other classes of 15-17 year olds using a method that is centered around questions to start discussions. This method uses lots of backup material in case the discussion doesn't pan out as expected, or in case they haven't considered this before. It also drops the idea of trying to teach it all, so if a discussion arises where they are engaged, you can keep it going and expand on that.

They seem more interested in opinions from their peers and listen when a peer speaks and tells of an experience where a particular principle applied in their life.

The questions are intentionally open ended, for example, "How can...?"

Pausing to let them think gives them time to formulate their thoughts.

Stories and their power to pull kids in

While homeschooling some of our kids, my wife has been applying an educational system called  the Thomas Jefferson education and another type called the Charlotte Mason method, that focuses much on reading stories to the children and then pausing to discuss story scenes that exemplify things we are trying to teach the children in multiple subjects. This method also has them dictate what they learned (for the under-10 crowd) or write what they learned (for 11 and up) as an assessment method that lets her know what they are getting and what needs remediation. And it offers a chance for the child to reflect on the learning.

The reason this method is so very interesting, is that the kids are emotionally engaged in a story with characters they care about. Especially for stories the children really enjoy. This excitement carries over into the discussion about what the character just did or didn't do to a degree that has surprised us both. There have been some really good discussions about the protagonist and their situation. They have paid attention in a way that I haven't seen them do for regular idea teaching. The story context also offers the many details needed for concrete examples.

It's been a fascinating journey watching the children get so into this.

Organizing leadership for kids

While writing professionally about complex scenarios aimed at teaching adults in a particular profession leadership skills using increasingly complex scenarios under high stress levels, I came across a European competency framework for leadership that appears to be usable as a framework for organizing and perhaps teaching children leadership if adjusted for their age level and abilities. Although in the Eurozone they split adult leadership competencies into levels, with kids I think we'd have to adjust for age capacities. My initial thoughts are as follows:

Children up to age 11

 Focus on becoming. Teach attitudes, understanding, and values

 Learn confidence in a martial art or sport or activity. Do something well. Set up or attend Camps with chances to lead their peers for a period of time, like Boy Scouts does.

  Grow a garden to help the child learn that nurturing works for plants and people

  Parent or guardian be a mentor and example the best you can 

  Help them learn the value of each person

Young people 12-17

  Help them increase in confidence in formal  leadership roles in youth organizations or sports teams

  Any leadership role is practice

  Progress from simple roles to more challenging and difficult roles 

  Help them influence leaders and peers as informal leaders in any organization

  Look for opportunities to speak publicly

Find a mentor

The adult mentors need to help them see what was effective and ask how they felt that went and what could have gone better (based on the After Action Review method used to help US Army leaders at junior levels, mid levels, and even senior levels reflect, and reuse successfully used skills and attitudes.)

Young adults 18-21

  Encourage them to lead student organizations

  Join service organizations and offer to lead when needed

  Influence peers positively, encourage, lift up

  Find a mentor with higher capability

  Progress to more complex challenges

Adults 21+

  Look for employment or volunteer in organizational leadership roles

Adults 30+

  Start organizations and lead them

  

Although we can imagine age relevant scenarios for kid leadership, they also need the experiential lessons gained from these types of real interactions with followers.