We Day arrived in Kitchener Waterloo today with all of the buzz
and excitement expected when the travelling ‘do good’ show comes to town. The
kids love it, teachers love it, social media folks swoon over it like the
latest specialty offering at Starbucks. So much praise for the event and for so
many great reasons. The day is devoted to celebrating the greatest potential in
our community youth. It is devoted to celebrating young people of leadership
and to encouraging young people to be the change the world is waiting for. We
Day is a fabulous thing!
And it has me reflecting (are you surprised?) on what
leadership is and who leaders are and what responsibilities leaders have to the
people around them.
I’ll be very honest here and admit that the attendance
process had me a little bummed and flustered, you can’t buy tickets to We Day.
You can watch it live on-line but you can’t get in unless you’ve been selected
through your school or service club or church or social ‘connections’. And
while the tickets are free, make no mistake; like any other social, brand
marketed, mainstream event, attendance to We Day is bought, by people who can
talk about it or who will be talked about.
Rule number one of marketing; if you want to reach the
greatest number of people you need to deliver your message to the people with
the greatest audience to spread it to. Makes perfect sense. There are 6,000
seats for the young leaders of today in the auditorium and many of them will be
filled by limelight leaders of our youth; student council chairs, youth group
leaders, volunteers, but I guarantee and hope that a great many will be filled not
with extraordinary examples of leadership by ‘popular demand’. For very good
reason; choirs don’t need converting.
Popularity is so easily confused with Leadership. To be very
clear they are NOT the same thing, they do however have a responsibility to one
another. We Day organizers are very cognisant of this I believe and I wish them
great success in delivering to the popular seat fillers the real message of We
Day.
Not that they are
great leaders but that they have a responsibility to become great leaders.
That, as History has proven in catastrophic proportion, your
ability to retain followers does not certify the content of your message. Our
school yards are filled with live demonstrations of this every single day;
popular kids inciting bullying and segregation, promoting exclusion and
demonstrating ‘under the line’ choices like drug use, profanity, and
disrespect. Certainly, they are leading
by virtue of personality but they are not leading anyone to a brighter
tomorrow.
…..But they could be, with a little encouragement, a little
coaching, a little accountability, a little We Day demonstration of what
positive leadership can do. Imagine the impact a socially popular student could
have on our community with their notable reach if they could learn and adopt the
leading traits of our best messengers.
Our best messengers; the quiet kids on the playground, the
invisible leaders who’s strengths are kindness, compassion and empathy; kids
who seek the odd man out and raise their hands to lend a hand, not because it
increases their exposure but because they like the way it feels to do something
nice for someone else.
These kids are great leaders too who very often go unnoticed
by their peers and teachers and grown-ups simply because they do not command
the same attention as the popular set, they do not have the same notable ‘reach’
(not yet).
One of the greatest markers of a true and exceptional leader
is their ability to generate an atmosphere others can thrive in. Our best
messengers, our quiet leaders do this every single day by simple virtue of
living by example
So today while we are celebrating our strong visual
community youth leaders and encouraging our popular kids to live up to the
responsibility of their stations I want to encourage every adult to take a moment
and thank a messenger; one of the kids in the middle who might not feel like they are
making a difference because they miss out on the loud revival message and the
fanfare.
They need our praise and encouragement because they just as
much, if not more, represent the future and the change we will see in the
world. When the kids grow up and the wheat of leadership is separated from the
chaff of popularity, the goodness of our society will depend upon leaders who
live a great message everyday, pass it along to there own children and make our world a better place.
