What Kids Taught Me About Being a Leader

My kids taught me a lesson.

I sat my kids at their Playskool table in the kitchen. I served them lunch. My son scowled at his carrot sticks. My daughter crossed her arms against her green beans. They were making a stand.

I knew my choices. I could get mad. I could threaten to withhold a privilege. I could punish them by putting them in time-out.

Instead, I cut up fruits and vegetables and got out raisins and nuts, and I made food faces on their plates.

This surprised them. They accused me of playing with their food. Kids love to catch you breaking your own rules. But when they realized I was no longer forcing them to choke down yucky foods, they pounced on the leafy mane of a lion, plucked out the almond eyes of a dragon, snapped the carrot nose of a toucan, and chomped on the corny grin of a crocodile.

For lunch the next day, I took it a step further. I prepped all the food, put it in little metal bowls, and invited my kids to make their own food faces.

What was the lesson?

Good leaders take the blame and make a change.

My students taught me the same lesson, with a nuance. 

For eight years, I taught students in middle school and high school. I enjoyed the creative challenge of developing curricula with the other teachers, and I loved having my own classroom with my own supplies. Every week, I came up with new lessons designed to help the students build on the skills we learned the previous week. Everything fit. Everything clicked . . .

. . . except when it didn’t.

Every teacher knows these days, the days when the students ignore you and resist your instructions. So I’d model the project or lesson or speech for them, role-playing and play-acting and resorting to all the strategies teachers use to win the students back to your side.

But sometimes it wasn’t them. It was me. 

Once, I had to teach a service-learning elective in high school. I had to design a curriculum, and I’d never taught service learning on my own. We usually traveled to soup kitchens and senior centers, but for this elective, we had to stay in the classroom. It wasn’t my classroom, I didn’t have my supplies, and I wasn’t comfortable. 

The students were restless. They were used to leaving school for service learning. They had expectations, and I failed to meet them. 

So here I was again. The kids were rebelling, and I knew my choices. I could get mad. I could threaten to withhold a privilege. I couldn’t put anyone in time-out, of course, and I couldn’t take points away. The class was pass/fail. So I didn’t have much to threaten them with.

As I looked around the room, at everyone fooling around and chatting like I didn’t exist, I remembered the students were not in charge. I was. They didn’t invent school. They didn’t design the classroom. They didn’t come up with the elective. Of course, I didn’t invent school either, but it didn’t matter. I was the authority. So I took the blame.

I took the blame even though the blame wasn’t all mine.

That was the nuance to the lesson. No, I wasn’t to blame for the entire dynamic of school. But if I put my lawyer’s hat on and spent hours assigning blame to each party, I would likely make things worse, not better. 

I was frustrated, but once I took the blame, I felt relieved. I felt better. It was weird. I left the frustration behind and moved on to the fun part, the creative stuff: making a change. I was back to being a teacher, not a scold. I changed the rules. I changed the circumstances. I changed the project. 

In particular, I gave the students more choice. The more choices students made, the stronger they became. I relied on this principle in all of my lessons. 

I told the students to develop awareness campaigns to improve anything on campus that they felt needed improving. If we were stuck in school, well, then we’d improve the school.

It worked. The students wanted to improve the girls’ restroom, the parking lot, the gym, the cafeteria, the locker rooms, and more. 

Kids taught me this important lesson.

If something isn’t working, I take the blame and get to work making it better.

I know it’s not that simple in every circumstance, but the approach works for me on the scale of my individual life. If I resort to anger, threat, and violence, that means I’m too afraid to face my own failure and take the blame, no matter how much blame is technically mine. 

And if I never take responsibility, then I’ll never know if I have the imagination to make a change that improves life for others. I’ll never know because I’ll be too busy withholding privileges and issuing punishments to those who have no power to change the circumstances I put them in.

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