How Kids Learn Leadership: The Leaders We Remember (And The Ones We Survive)
I was folding scrap poster board in the back of my son Sam’s 5th grade classroom last month, when the hum of group project work split into two very different vibes. Three tables over, Lila’s group was leaned in over their rainforest ecosystem display. Javi, who still struggles with handwriting and hates speaking in front of people, was kneeling on a chair drawing layer after layer of green canopy, and Lila was passing him extra markers, asking if he wanted more blue for the river at the bottom. Zoe, who brings a different mushroom for show and tell every week, was gluing preserved moss to the border, chattering the whole time, and Lila just nodded and said she couldn’t wait for people to hear all that during the presentation. Ten feet away, Tyler’s group was quiet. Tyler, the student council rep whose mom always mentions his “natural leadership” at back to school night, had snatched the biggest piece of poster board and was writing the title in sharpie, snapping that Sam had messed up the edge of the diorama base. The other two kids in the group were sitting on their hands, rolling a glue stick cap back and forth, not saying anything. Sam was one of them.
On the walk to the car after school, I asked him how it was going. He kicked a rock across the parking lot and said, “Tyler’s the leader, so we just don’t do much. If we try to add something, he says it’s wrong. It’s fine, we’ll get a grade, I just don’t care.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, because everywhere you look, parents and schools are pushing kids to be leaders. I’ve done it too. When Sam came home upset last year that he didn’t get picked for 4th grade representative, I told him he just needed to speak up louder next time. I signed him up for that weekend workshop at the community center, the one that promised to build confidence and command. But after that science fair afternoon, I realized we’ve been getting it backwards most of the time. We call any kid who pushes their way to the front a leader, and that’s not leadership. That’s just being the loudest.
The leaders kids remember aren’t the ones who take all the control. They’re the ones who notice what other people can bring. Lila didn’t have to shout to lead her group, she just made sure everyone got to do the thing they were good at. Tyler got to be the leader, but none of the other kids in his group learned anything, or cared about the project, because he took all the work (and all the credit) for himself. The rest of them just survived the experience, checked out, and waited for it to be over.
The good news is this is easy to adjust with small, everyday changes, no big leadership curriculums required. The first shift I’ve made is changing the questions I ask. Instead of asking my kid “did you get to be the leader?” when they talk about a group project or game, I ask “what did you do to help everyone share what they’re good at?” It takes the focus off being in charge and puts it on contributing to the group. I started doing this a few weeks ago, and it already changed how Sam thinks about it. Before, he thought being leader meant being the one who talks first and decides everything. Now he mentions when he let his friend do the Lego building because he’s better at it, and that counts for something around our house now.
Another small change that works for both parents and teachers: when work is being split or plans are being made, don’t let the loudest person take over immediately. Teachers can do this by pausing 30 seconds before anyone picks a leader and asking every person in the group to say one thing they want to contribute or are good at. It stops the kid who always speaks first from steamrolling everyone else before anyone else gets a word in. I do this at home with my two kids when they’re planning something, like a lemonade stand or a backyard campout. Instead of letting 10-year-old Sam just tell 7-year-old Lulu what to do, I ask Lulu first what she wants to do. Most of the time, she has ideas no one would have asked for: last weekend, she wanted to add chocolate chip cookies to the lemonade stand menu, and that doubled our sales.
I asked Sam’s teacher about this pattern a week after the science fair, and she said she sees it every year. At the end of the year, when she asks kids to name the best leader in the class, almost no one names the student council rep or the kid who runs every group. They name the kid who remembers when you forgot your lunch and gives you half their sandwich. They name the kid who asks you what you think before moving on to the next idea. That’s the leader they remember. The ones they survive are the ones who spent all their time taking control, and no one can remember a single nice thing they did, or anything they accomplished that mattered to anyone but themselves.
It’s not that all loud kids are bad leaders, of course. Some loud kids are great at including people. But we don’t give the quiet kids who are good at organizing and including enough credit, and we don’t teach kids that leadership isn’t about being in charge. It’s about making sure everyone else gets to be in the game too.
We’re still figuring this out at our house. Last weekend, when Sam and Lulu were planning that lemonade stand, Sam automatically started assigning all the boring cleanup work to Lulu before I could step in. I reminded them to go around and share what they wanted, and Sam adjusted, but he still grumbled about it for ten minutes. Lulu ate three of the cookies we were supposed to sell before we even opened. We didn’t break any sales records, and we had glitter all over the kitchen floor for three days. But they split the money evenly, and Lulu talked about how it was “our lemonade stand” for three days after. That’s more than I can say for Tyler’s science fair project. Sam can’t even remember what it was about.
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