New leaders always face problems. Think back to your first leadership role. What kind of problems did you face? Were they pleasant? Probably not, but they did teach us a lot. Your young leaders will face these same problems and then some. As a leadership developer, you’ll be there to help them through, pick them up when they’re down, and warn them ahead of time about what they’ll face.
Here’s a few of the problems that I see our young leaders facing as we “hand-off” leadership to them…
1. Few or no people will follow them. It stands to reason that if they are brand new to leadership some people might have a problem following them. This is to be expected, and if you’ll recall you’re first forays into leadership, you probably faced the same problem.
2. Fear. I don’t know about you, but my first leadership position scared me to death. Make no mistake, as you hand off leadership to your students, they are going to have fears.
3. Generational Conflict. The new and the old have always clashed. Every generation’s new ideas have been rejected and trashed by the generations before. Honoring the old and following through with the new is a skill that they will have to learn and hone.
4. Age Discrimination. This is nothing new. Many people don’t believe that youth (teenagers) have anything to offer until they are adults (and many times teenagers don’t do much to improve this viewpoint). I think we need to keep Paul’s admonition to Timothy in 1 Timothy 4:12 in mind here.
5. Failure. Failure has such a negative connotation in today’s society. Will our young leaders fail? Yes, they will, just as we did and still do. The problem is when, instead of learning from failure, our students stop trying because of perceived humiliation or fear.
Here are five that I know my leadership students are facing. How about your list? I can pop a few others up there, but I’m more interested in hearing from you…
Training Tomorrow’s Leaders Today,
Matt
No comments:
Post a Comment