What Schools Don't Teach About Leadership

The gaps in the curriculum, and how to fill them at home. Most schools now include some form of leadership development in their offering: student government, sports captaincies, community service requirements. Some of this is genuinely valuable. But there is a significant gap between what schools teach about leadership and what leadership actually requires. Here is what is almost never in the curriculum, and what you can do about it..

How to Handle Failure

Failure is the central experience of any leader's career. Every significant leader in business, politics, science, and the arts has experienced major failure, projects that collapsed, decisions that were wrong, initiatives that didn't work. What distinguished them was not the absence of failure but the response to it: the ability to examine what went wrong without catastrophising, to learn from it, and to attempt again.

Schools, almost without exception, do not teach this. They teach children to avoid failure by getting things right. The most important leadership lesson, how to fail well, is almost entirely absent..

How to Manage Up and Across

Leadership development programmes focus almost entirely on leading people below you in a hierarchy. But most leadership challenges, especially early in a career, involve managing relationships with peers and with people who have more authority than you: persuading someone who isn't obligated to agree with you, influencing without authority, building credibility with sceptical seniors. These are among the most practically important leadership skills, and they are never taught, because schools are structured as hierarchies in which students are always at the bottom..

How to Have Difficult Conversations

The ability to have a hard conversation, to tell someone something they don't want to hear, to address a conflict directly, to give honest feedback, is one of the most important leadership capabilities there is. Poor leaders avoid these conversations. They send emails instead of speaking. They hint rather than say. They let problems fester because addressing them is uncomfortable. This pattern is almost never addressed in school.

Schools try to create environments that are safe and positive. But the result is that children grow up without practice in the conversations that matter most..

What You Can Do

You can fill these gaps at home. Have difficult conversations with your child, honestly, age-appropriately, with care. Let them see you handle failure: talk about something you tried that didn't work and what you learned from it. When they're in a conflict with a friend, coach them through having the direct conversation rather than resolving it for them. When they disagree with a teacher, help them think through how to address it respectfully and directly.

These everyday experiences are the real leadership curriculum..