Leadership Skills Young People Actually Need

Ask most people to name a leadership skill and you get vision, or charisma, or some version of inspiring others. Those are descriptions of leaders other people have already decided to follow. They are not much use to a seventeen year old.

The skills that actually decide things are smaller and far less romantic.

Turning up when you said you would. This sounds like a joke until you have watched a capable young person lose an opportunity because nobody could rely on them to be somewhere at nine. Reliability is the first leadership skill because everything else is built on someone believing you.

Saying the uncomfortable thing early. Most problems at work and at school are cheap to fix in week one and expensive by week six. Young people are rarely taught that raising a problem is a service rather than an admission, so they sit on things until the thing is a crisis.

Asking a real question. There is a large gap between a young person who says nothing because they do not understand and one who says which part they do not understand. The second is learnable in an afternoon and almost nobody teaches it.

Handling being wrong in public. Not gracefully, necessarily. Just without going silent for a fortnight. A young person who can absorb a correction and keep working has an advantage over someone more talented who cannot.

Finishing something boring. Most of what any job consists of is unglamorous follow-through. A young person who has finished one tedious thing they committed to knows something about themselves that no encouragement supplies.

None of these need a building or a budget. They need someone to set an expectation and then hold it, which is most of what JEPF's mentoring and leadership work is. The centre we want to build in Jamaica exists to do this continuously rather than in bursts, with people who are still there next year.