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 f...

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 ...

I'm speaking at CADA this week, California Association of Directors of Activities ( www.cada1.org ). CADA is the largest organization of its kind, a network of people who oversee student government, leadership trianing, and the like.  In one of my workshops, I talked about how to identify students with leadership aptitude, since approx. 50% of student governments consist of students who are popular, but not leaders. One thing I said was, "It's not about programs or events, it's about developing young leaders."  A man came up to me afterward and said, "I've been trying to say that to my peers for 25 years, it's about developing the student."  A lot of school activities directors focus on the planning of homecoming, yearbook, and whatever other events they're charged to "do," but they often overlook what's best for the student.  I love LeadWell training curriculum for teens, because it unleashes them to "do" by helping ...

CDC stands for Centers for Disease Control.  Recently I met with the person in charge of anti-bullying at CDC.  Those of us in the USA think of the CDC in terms of infectious diseases, news reports on flu outbreaks, and other epidemic health info.  But low and behold they have an office dealing with bullying, because it's considered a health hazard. My meeting had to do with our findings that student leadership development abates bullying and other negative social behaviors.  We're also talking to ChildFund because they're engaged in this issue globally.  While most bullying programs are about adults telling kids not to pick on each other, the Trojan Horse solution is to identify the social influencers, teach them how to lead positively, and then equip them with anti-bullying tools and ideas.  Seems a no-brainer solution since we're merely tapping a natural process, proactively.  Here's a whiteboard video we produced on the topic.  Cli...

On Saturday morning December 22, 2012, a group of KidLeaders were busy organizing children’s pajamas at the Learning and Loving Education Center (LLEC) in Morgan Hill. The LLEC serves adult immigrant women and their children living in the surrounding low and extremely low-income areas of the community by providing English and computer classes, a daycare and preschool. KidLeaders decided to collect children’s pajamas to give away to the LLEC families for the holidays. At the beginning of December, the KidLeaders had placed collection boxes at their schools, the city’s Recreation Center and the local TJ Maxx. Kidleaders collected 160 pairs of pajamas. The group organized a Pajama Room where the mothers of the families would go to pick out pajamas after they had chosen toys for their children. Over 100 families picked up pajamas that day, with KidLeaders helping the mothers choose pajamas in the size and design that they wanted. Steve Tate, the mayor of Morgan Hill, served as a Ko...

We are excited to announce that KidLead is coming to the Caribbean.  On Feb. 21-24, 2013, we'll be training staff from Skills Bahamas, a training company in the Commonwealth of the Bahamas, to use the LeadYoung curricula.  Skills Bahamas plans to launch this year in their islands country and then expand to the Caribbean.  The Bahamian people are wonderful and they can also offer this training to tourist families on vacation.  We always love to see organizations that focus on adult training, catch the vision for turning attention on leaders while they're moldable.  KidLead welcomes the Bahamas to the growing number of countries around the world, focusing on young leader development.  A new landing page will be on the KidLead website very soon.

The goal of training preteens and teens to be leaders is to improve society. Here’s an example of that. The Eaton (Colorado) community once again found the true meaning of Christmas as the community worked together to pull off an amazing season of giving. The 2012 Giving Tree Project, overseen by Eaton’s KidLead group successfully helped provide Christmas for 64 local families (141 individual children) and 60 apartments at Benjamin Square. For a month and a half the group of 4th-12th grade students worked to complete the project. This year the group really dove into their leadership skills by presenting the project to local business and the Chamber of Commerce asking for help to complete the project. Ninety-nine tags were placed on trees around town and the community responded by buying gifts and items on the tags. The group received everything from clothing to toys- even a couple of bikes, with helmets included. Among the gifts this year KidLead youth busily made 67 fleece tie blan...