Let the youth lead in your association or club

Leadership is very much part of most people’s everyday lives. Anyone can come out to have to step into the leadership role at work, in the family and especially in associations. In associations in particular, there is a good opportunity for members to gain practical management experience in a framework where failure does not have disastrous consequences. The very safe environment of associations makes them ideal for giving young people their first experience of management, and this can be with large and small tasks, from planning a club activity and putting it into practice to running for a single feature in a school show. Read along and learn how great it is to let the youth lead in your association or club.

Why let young people lead?

In a club context, young people can engage each other in ways other than adults can. Where adults determine the overall framework for training and tent tours, young people in charge of certain training activities or parts of the settlement of the tent trip can lead by example.

Involving young people in the running of club activities also opens the door to peer-to-peer learning, i.e. learning processes where both teacher and teaching are equal. If it were a karate club, the learning could, for example, be that one of the club’s younger members takes the new one in his hand and goes through different types of battles and parades with him. It frees up time in adults, increases engagement in the young and allows the teacher to reflect.

Sharing responsibility for young people and having them try out as managers is therefore a good idea that can benefit the club, the other club members and the young managers themselves.

Useful skills for young leaders

All young people can learn to lead to a certain extent and can quickly become competent leaders when adults take the time to give them useful feedback and build their confidence. To help young people on their way, there are different skills that the club’s adults can usefully give them:

• The ability to be social with other children and adolescents; it gives itself little self-importance that it is in any case important for young people to be able to interact with peers, but it is particularly important in terms of connecting to the decisions the manager makes.
• The ability to worry about other people’s names so that the young person remembers them. Names are in many ways magical words, and you can go further with people if you know them.
• The ability to organize their ideas, e.g. with notes booklets or – if you are the creative type – with mindmaps. Young people do not have the same immediate ability to form an overview as adults and may well need to have an entire activity plotted out.

The latter include the ability to set goals and implement them. For young people, there may be a need to draw up a plan of action that specifically describes what needs to be done when and by whom.

Get them started with the little things

Once you’ve set out to teach club members to lead, where can you start? Start in the small – and for children and young people familiar – by, for example, letting the younger members handle the club’s social media and stand to create content and respond to inquiries that are not beyond the young person’s competences to answer.

Open house events are also a great opportunity to hand over the reins to the club’s younger members. How do we present the club? What activities should we have? Who will stand for them? How do we advertise the event? Can we afford meals?

By allowing young people to deal with these kinds of issues, they gain the initial experience of management, which can create a basis for them to handle more things at the club in the future.