Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Making a Leadership Team Personal

Leaders don’t learn the same, they don’t act the same, and they don’t lead the same. So why do we try to make cookie-cutter leadership teams? One of the greatest challenges of running a leadership team is trying to personalize it while still maintaining a team atmosphere.


Before you can personalize your team, you have to know how your students differ. Make sure you are utilizing leadership tests so that you and each of your students know how they are different from each other. Leadertreks has a fantastic set of leadership tests that will tell you everything from how each of your students lead to how they learn. This is very helpful information, and after you learn about your students, you can start to personalize your team.

Here are a couple of other ideas:

1. Make sure mentoring is part of your leadership team. One-on-One sessions with your students make sure that they get personal attention they need and that you can teach and coach with them individually.

2. Make sure your teaching includes activities that speak to different learning styles. Mix it up a bit.

3. Do activities that incorporate everyone’s areas of passion and strengths. Don’t do activities that only get you fired up.

4. Continue to sit down and learn about new things that are going on in the life of your students. Keep current with them individually and with the youth culture at large. Utilize this information to create catered leadership activities for your students.

5. Make sure you are balancing individual activities and group activities. Learning individually and learning how to play nice in a group are both very important.

Personalizing your team takes time and quite a bit of effort. Make sure that you’re not playing to your personality or one of the easier personalities on the team. Your students will notice, and they won’t grow as much as they could if you put forth the extra effort to personalize your teaching.

Training Tomorrow’s Leaders Today,

Matt

No comments:

Post a Comment