My Students Aren’t Ready for Leadership

By Doug Franklin December 2, 2010

The other day a youth pastor stopped me and told me how excited he was about LeaderTreks and the work we were doing to help youth workers develop students leaders. He also told me that his students were getting closer to being ready for leadership development. I asked him, “what would make them ready for leadership development?” He wasn’t sure so I pressed him, and finally he said “they need to be more responsible.” I hear this a lot and my answer is, “responsible with what?” It’s the old, chicken before the egg argument; what comes first leadership training or responsibility? I believe the answer is leadership training. If we don’t train and equip students to lead then how are they to handle responsibility? We don’t say to teachers, “teach students first then we will consider training you to teach.” So why do we say to students, “show some leadership and then we will train you to lead.” Let’s get this right by training your students to lead and then asking them to lead. Don’t wait for you don’t have that much time.