Developing Young Leaders in Your Organization
Everyone benefits when young people are engaged and encouraged to be in leadership roles. Adults benefit by enhancing their own competencies, learning to better understand and value youth, and increasing their commitment and energy to their organizations. Building leadership and engagement in young people will create great habits that will last a lifetime. In addition, youth engagement can lead to increased academic performance and improved social-emotional well-being.
If your organization prioritizes youth engagement, here are just a few ways you can begin to develop young leaders.
Prioritize youth leadership
Budget, plan and prioritize young leaders, but most importantly, trust young people to lead from the outset. Organizations need to give young people opportunities to lead before they're in formal leadership roles. That allows them to learn some of the required skills before they have all the pressures of a formal management role.
Encourage, encourage, encourage
Let them be a significant voice in staff or team meetings, let them lead teams, let them speak and share ideas with your team, and cheer them on along the way. Allowing young people to voice their ideas and see them through is a great way to build and instill confidence. It's incredibly motivating to young leaders to know that you are in their corner, cheering them on, leading them, and celebrating them. When developing young leaders, make it a point to be their biggest cheerleader.
Mentor
Connect young leaders with other leaders, whether they're within the same organization or industry or not. Of course, not every mentoring relationship will look the same, and some will be more formal while others will be more informal, but it's vital that young leaders have mentors speaking into their lives.
Teach and support
When leading your team, give them as much information as possible. In most situations, be willing to share everything you know. Let leaders you're developing in on insider knowledge and information. Provide resource-tailored inclusive training and support to all young leaders.
Above all, compensate fairly. Compensating young people for their time and expertise is increasingly standard practice for organizations that have young leaders, maintain youth advisory councils, or, in some form, ensure that young people can contribute substantially to decision-making processes.
Allow room and grace for failure.
Let your young leaders fail. Learning is all about failing along the way. Teach young people that failing isn't always a bad thing. If you can demonstrate that they can learn from their failures, they will feel much more empowered. Encourage your young leaders to take calculated risks when appropriate.
ETR's YEN (Youth engagement network) works with organizations that prioritize youth engagement and leadership. One such organization is Restless Development. Restless Development is a nonprofit global agency supporting young leaders' collective power to create a better world. Every year they train, mentor, nurture and connect thousands of young people to use their youth power and lead change.
Their global strategy details how they guide their work with young people, partners, communities, and government and contains incredible information and resources to help organizations support youth power.
View this incredible resource at:
Restless Development Global Strategy
It will take more than pamphlets and meetings for young leaders to develop into great leaders. Something — many things have to happen for young leaders to realize their potential. But these steps and resources are a great place to start.
Additional Resources
Visit https://www.etr.org/yen/resources/ for more resources on Youth Engagement and more.
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