by Venchito Tampon | Last Updated on February 25, 2024
Student leadership enables students to take active roles inside and outside the campus to develop leadership skills.
The goal of every student leadership program is to instill a positive leadership culture into the hearts of these students while bringing them all together for a collaboration that will positively affect the community.
If you’re a student or an educator pursuing leadership development programs for your students, here are some principles to practice and teach to the next generation of leaders.
15 Student Leadership Principles
1. Personal Growth
The key to establishing solid student leadership is personal growth. One way for student leaders to grow is to invest in leadership training.
A leader’s growth affects their identity, self-awareness, personal power, and contribution to others.
Dr. John Maxwell coined the term “Leadership Lid”, which refers to the level of a leader’s effectiveness, primarily based on his or his personal growth journey.
As the saying goes, “You cannot give what you do not have”. It holds true, especially in student leadership.
Students may need to learn more from their educators (teachers), mentors, and coaches to enhance their leadership skills and influence. And only through this community can a student leader improve their leadership craft.
2. Self-Awareness
Leadership is more caught than taught. This means that when a student leader has personally shown exemplary leadership, it sends a non-verbal message to their team on the proper behavior and attitude.
Modeling leadership includes having a high sense of self-awareness. This is where a student must discover how to maximize strengths and minimize weaknesses to optimize his potential further.
Self-awareness allows you to see room for improvement and change any behavior that won’t help you achieve your success goals. It initiates any transition for positive change that will have a compounding positive effect on his personal and student life.
3. Vision
Vision is what you want yourself to become. It is entirely focused on tomorrow.
Student leaders need a vision to continue their leadership influence over others. The greater the vision, the more inspiration it brings to themselves and the people around them.
Visionary leaders create extraordinary impact, as their life isn’t just about them anymore. Instead, their actions point towards serving others.
Without vision, people perish, the Bible says. The same is true for any young person. If they don’t have a vision today, they won’t have a brighter future tomorrow.
4. Task Management and Priorities
To be successful as a student leader, learn the fundamentals of productivity.
Productivity refers to doing the right things within a reasonable amount of time.
For instance, if you have a school project with a deadline in two weeks, you’ll know you are productive on this task if you can complete it in 1 week with the highest quality output of content. Or with a team to help you out by applying delegative leadership principles.
Remember, this isn’t just getting things done. Productivity is getting the right things done.
Learning how to be productive is a matter of priorities. You can invest most of your time in your priorities and still achieve work-life harmony when you know your priorities.
Most productive people I know are holistic in their personal growth. They have time to spend with their family while achieving outstanding contributions at work and in their personal endeavors.
Instead of managing time, there is a more contemporary way to productivity: task management. The reason is that you cannot operate or control time. You cannot add two or four hours of your time daily. All you can do is manage controllable and practical tasks for any person.
Task management is learning to prioritize the most important and urgent things so you’ll see progress in achieving your success goals.
5. Goal Setting
Every student leader must learn how to set goals.
Goal setting helps change behavior and habits that will result in neglect and regrets. Without goals, people live their lives astray. They don’t know where to go, and their actions don’t impact their future.
Leaders with goals get inspired by their daily progress as they progress towards it. These goals may seem far-fetched, but they establish habits strong enough to achieve them.
James Clear, one of the productivity and self-help experts, says, “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.”
If you take positive actions, you vote for a growing and mature person in the future. Conversely, if you take negative steps, you are learning to become a person you wouldn’t want to become.
Set goals and build habits that will pursue the correct identity you want for yourself in the future.
6. Effective Communication
Most student leaders fail to do this. However, if they can practice better and more effective communication skills, it change the way they would influence their teams. While at the same time, have the most impactful way of sharing their message and ideas across the organization.
The advantage of being an effective communicator is learning how to deliver a message that’s truthful and powerful enough.
One way is by incorporating stories of yourself and other people to show practical tips and examples on putting an idea into action.
Effective communication helps young leaders see tangibly what they are saying and want to do in the future.
7. Emotional Intelligence
Every leader must learn how to manage their emotions. By putting emotions in the proper place, they can best serve their people, as they lean towards serving other people’s interests more than themselves.
Being emotionally intelligent is being sensitive to other people’s feelings and emotions while saying words that will encourage and provide feedback to their people.
Emotionally intelligent leaders can help create a healthy work atmosphere where young leaders want to share their ideas and suggestions to help improve either the process or the organization’s leadership team.
Young leaders must know how to increase their emotional intelligence to create solid, harmonious relationships with their peers.
8. Problem Solving
Leadership is a journey where there is a constant barrage of challenges.
When a student leader steps to the level of influence, they must learn how to solve meaningful problems in their organization.
Regardless of the industry and student context, a leader must practice problem-solving skills in every situation.
Examples are conflicts among team members, handling organizational funds, and promoting school or youth events to introduce the organization to potential new members.
9. Values and Ethics
Competence isn’t enough. Student leaders must have exemplary character to sustain their success.
Most leaders must improve when they become complacent in evaluating their core values and ethics as they make decisions for themselves and the organizations. They make unwise decisions that they later regret in life.
Values and ethics allow you to sustain your success, as people can trust you more with your wise decisions.
Trust is not static. It is compounding as more people share your credibility with others through word-of-mouth. And now, you don’t have to reinstate your name, as people vouch for your character and expertise.
If you’re an educator, start teaching values and ethics to your young leaders, as this will be their bedrock of success in the future.
10. Significance
Young leaders aim for significance, not just success.
Significance impacts other people’s lives through your contribution and service to the organization and society.
Living a significant life means not just providing resources to support the organization’s activities. Still, you’re going the extra mile in teaching, coaching, and mentoring new members in your organization to be successors in leadership.
Key Takeaways
Student leadership isn’t a walk in the park. Its importance and impact on the organization and every society is unquestionable. However, one must be open-minded in bringing leadership training programs to students so they can improve their leadership influence and elevate their leadership skills.
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