KidLead Insights

Next Wed., June 26, at 11AM PT in Silicon Valley, a press conference  will be held to officially announce the launch of the world's first leadership training curricula for 2-9 year olds.  Move over Baby Einstein, KiddieLead (ages 2-5) and Lead1st (ages 6-9), reflect a focus on identifying and developing leaders when they're very, very young.  If you would have told me, 8 years ago, when we began our pioneering work in the realm of preteen leader development, that I'd be focusing on leaders while they're in preschool, I would have scoffed such ignorance.  But today, I believe we're onto one of the most important social finds in history, the ability to identify early bloomers and offer all children an opportunity to experience peer leading, as well as those with natural gifting in this area.  Years ago, Suzuki began teaching the very young how to play the violin.  We've all seen pictures of babies, swimming when dropped into water.  Watch t...

Last week, I had the opportunity to celebrate my son's and daughter-in-law's graduation from Duke Divinity School in Durham, NC.  So I was thrilled to drive an hour to Greensboro to visit the headquarters of the Center for Creative Leadership, the world's premier leadership research and training organization.  My couple of hours passed quickly, introducing our work at KidLead with the CCL's Leadership Beyond Boundaries team that focuses on less resourced areas, including youth. While CCL has typically focused on higher end, corporate and executive programs, it is expanding its reach to help democratize leadership around the world.  Hopefully we'll find a way to partner on ideas of reaching a new generation to improve society and change the future.  Check them out at www.ccl.org .

Life has come full circle.  My middle son just donated his first car back to us since he's upgraded. It's great timing as our youngest heads to a private college in Santa Barbara, CA.  The 2000 Mitsubishi Gallant has a few years left in it, but the dash was cracked, so I purchased a cover.  But now that it's in place, I'm not sure what I like least, the cracks or wrinkly carpet.  The dash cover reminds me of a bad toupee.  When I interact with people who work with youth, who claim to do leadership training, I'm curious as to what they do.  When I'm allowed to observe or review the materials, I nearly always walk away with the same feeling of seeing someone with a bad toupee.  For some reason, people who work with youth tend to confuse student leadership with things such as character development, confidence building, teamwork, and inspiration.  All of these are good, but they're different from actually teaching students how to lead....

"Crowd funding" refers to a new social movement whereby people support entrepreneurial and artistic projects that would otherwise never happen due to a lack of finances.  The big kid on the block in this field is Kickstarter.  This org has approved our KiddieLead Project, to help us raise funds for our leadership training materials for ages 2-9.  Our goal is to raise $27,000 between April 15-May 30, so we can create graphics, illustrations, and materials that include 16 preschool storybooks, 4 early childhood chapter books, 8 activities training manuals, videos and release of our KiddieLead SIS (Social Influence Survey).  What a bargain!  We'd love your help in making this a possibility.  Please click on the KiddieLead Project to learn more, to donate, and/or to pass the word.  We must reach the entire goal of $27,000 in 45 days or we get nothing and no one is charged for their donations.  Plus, there are some very cool rewards for gifts ...

I'm frequently asked if our leadership training program is good for at risk students.  I think it's because people who work with at risk kids and teens are always looking for resources that help them help these students.  I applaud that.  But what this tells me is that there's a confusion about what leadership is for children and teens.  People in our culture seem to confuse leadership with other things, such as character, self-esteem, social skills, and performance. Our leadership training resources are just that, about leading.  Being "at risk" is not on our radar.  I'm not trying to be insensitive, just clear.  A leader at risk would certainly benefit from the high calliber of training provided in our curricula and could possibly experience life transformation and avoid becoming a gang leader.  But a non-leader at risk isn't going to become a leader, merely by going through our training program....

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 ...