KidLead Insights

Yesterday I got to meet Gretchen Lester, PhD, who teaches global leadership in the business school at San Jose State University.  She studied under Dr. Bruce Avolio, a pioneer in the field of transformational leadership, where she also met her husband who now does research with the army.  Gretchen's and Bruce's chapter (9) in this book, "Early Development and Leadership," is my most marked up portion of this wonderful volume on academic research, looking at the field of young leader development.  This is the first book on this topic, so I was excited to discover that Dr. Lester lives near Monterey, CA. The first sentence reads, "We take the position in this chapter that most of the strategic efforts to develop leadership probably start too late in the life cycle to optimize the impact on genuine leadership development."  They proceed to offer research and examples of developmental issues and why it makes sense to begin developing our leaders far younger

Last week I did workshops and KidLead had a booth at the California Association of Directors of Activities convention in San Diego.  These folk oversee student governments, clubs, and many events in their schools, working with student leaders.  The standing room only workshops on identifying leadership aptitude and coaching student leaders burst with energy.  This was my first time at a CADA event, the largest network of its kind in the world, I believe, and it was truly exciting.  We had over 240 people sign up for more info on LeadNow and LeadWell, which is pretty good out of 1300 attendees.  The big ah-ha for a lot of these people is that although they work with student leaders, they rarely actually take the time to do leadership training.  Another discovery is that many in student government are not leaders; they're popular teens who get elected, but then don't know how to organize their peers.  That's the power of LeadNow and LeadWell is that it focuses on those sk