What exactly is leadership in high school? For most students, it means a role, a title, a post. The reality is that leadership has been reduced to a line on a college application. You know that a very good leadership program for high school students isn’t based on titles and activities. It’s a character-based curriculum that prepares students to be leaders before they take the lead, and that is a really great difference.
Why It Matters
Your students are going to grow up in a world that doesn’t reward titles, but does reward trust, resilience, and service to the people and places around them, and those are the skills that a good leadership curriculum would be designed to teach, and most miss.
Why Most “Leadership Programs” Miss the Point
Traditional leadership programs are designed around activities and titles because they measure outputs, not impact. A student can go to a leadership program and achieve five new titles before graduating and have no way to deal with difficult conversations. Character is the bedrock of leadership skills, and it’s a crucial aspect that so many leadership programs never cover. A values-based, peer-driven, character-driven curriculum changes that. It shifts the curriculum from rows of passive students to circles of active, courageous people learning from a strong character-based foundation, which makes all the difference when you’re teaching them to lead other people from a moral foundation.
The Skills That Matter
Self-Awareness: Leading Yourself Before You Lead Others
Every leadership journey begins with self-leadership, and students need to realize that before they can lead others, they need to lead themselves. Self-awareness gives students insight into their own personality that enables them to lead themselves well before they take the reins of a project team, a classroom, or a club. Picture a high school sophomore who holds on to group projects all the time, convinced she’s simply the one who gets things done. Self-awareness helps her see that her drive, left unchecked, crowds out quieter teammates who have real contributions to make. That single insight, practiced repeatedly, teaches her to lead herself before she ever tries to lead anyone else.
Influence Without Authority
Many positions that need and benefit from leadership experience have no authority. Leadership is influence, not position. The ability to influence people with no power or authority, to persuade others to change their thoughts or behaviors with confidence and consistency, over time, will be the key to any leadership program. This is peer-led leadership, and a curriculum that puts students in front of their peers to model good behavior, talk, and coach through challenges is teaching them how to influence people in a process of consistency and trust, which will be a leadership asset that will be useful long after job titles change.
How to Fail and Recover
A student who has never experienced failure is a student who hasn’t learned leadership. A good leadership curriculum gives students chances to try something, fail at it, and try again in a safe space, and the ability to recover from failure is a leadership skill that is so rarely taught. This type of curriculum emphasizes the skill building that takes place when teams do things, fail, and come back to try them again, and it is the art of iteration. Iteration is the ability to identify when things are not working, to name why they are not working, to adapt, and to keep working. And this is the kind of skill that is the course students learn in a good curriculum which will carry over to college and career.
Serving the Team
Most leadership curriculum fails to make a strong point about the meaning of serving others. Good leadership means serving the team, not just holding a title on it. Curriculum that focuses on serving rather than titles forces students to critically consider how they can help their peers and meet the needs of their team, and that’s where leadership really begins.
What it Looks Like
A good high school leadership curriculum doesn’t have to take up a whole day and is not long for your students. It can happen in advisory periods, CTE programs, and clubs for all students, and the research-backed iLead High School from Growing Leaders was created with that flexibility in mind, so that all students, not just those who sign up for the class, can develop the character traits that will help them become leaders in the long run.
Character Comes First
A good leadership program for students doesn’t remove all of the leadership positions and activities; it’s about ensuring that those activities are built on a firm character-based basis. Everything rises and falls on leadership, and it starts with developing character in young people long before they ever take a leadership position.
Are you ready to develop a great leadership curriculum for your high school students? iLead High School from Growing Leaders is ready to equip you with actionable leadership skills, so students learn to lead themselves before they ever take the reins of someone else’s life. Visit growingleaders.com to get started.
